Reading the NPR article now. Hope that might make up for the Karma burning. Interesting graph of WoW Gold versus USD rate. I've always wondered about that. I remember when EQ first came out and EQ Plats were trading at a better rate than the Euro (or was it Franc) was at that time. I thought it was absurd... until the eBay character sales.
I once wrote "motherfucker" in one of my emails using Thunderbird (IIRC). I ran the spell check. It caught other mistakes but accepted "motherfucker". I thought that was very avantgarde of them.
In any case, I think this open dictionary (although one already exists) is a brilliant idea and really reflects how languages really behave. We don't speak the same way as the previous generations nor should we expect future generations to follow us. I remember when I was taking cognitive science and the professor was going over linguistics. He mentioned that no human spoken language is more advanced or superior to another. While some people still hold Latin in higher esteem than other languages, he mentioned that another way of looking at Latin is to called it "bastardized, proto-Italian". Languages change and evolve. Dictionaries should also reflect that.
Don't know about the rest of you but they just won themselves a new customer today because of this. I've been looking to get a new router. At least with this, I know I have the free to muck around with my router if it doesn't work as well as I like.
I deserve to be heard because I'm an idiot too so mod me up!
All I have to say is close source is better than getting branded by a hot iron. If it was a choice between close source and being branded by a hot iron, I would take close source. At least proprietary software have progressed faster than hot iron branding. Hot iron branding have progressed little since the days of cowboys. You still apply fire to a piece of metal that gets applied to the skin. Proprietary software has definitely progressed beyond that stage.
I just started Cryptonomicon recently and was persuaded to do so after reading this Wikipedia article. It's incredible. Bruce Schneier invented a crypto system based on playing cards for the novel. It's this depth that I find so fascinating with Stephenson. It may be fiction but there's a great deal of fact/truth underneath.
An insane amount of time spent in front of the computer, and a little bit of insanity for good measure.
I'm not disagreeing with you but that can be said of any champion in any field. I know a lot of us come from a background where natural talent has given us an advantage that we never really had to put any real effort into doing something, mainly in school. When you are near the top of your game though, it's usually passion and obsessive dedication that makes the difference and to me that makes the victory even more deserving than just natural talent. When asked what's the best strategy for winning a race, Eddie, "the Beast" Merckxx, a former cycling champion, answered, "Ride... lots" (probably a bad paraphrase on my part).
No, no. Geeks are obviously intelligently designed. I mean for geeks to evolve they would have to successfully pass on their genes and you know the chances of that is pretty low. Geeks are the strongest evidence of some intelligent creator with a weird sense of humor, who may very well be a geek himself. I mean who else but a geek would sit around creating automaton...
"hydrogen filling stations, which, by the way, don't yet exist. "
Not quite. BMW has been researching and promoting hydrogen cars for some time now. They installed a hydrogen refilling station in Munich in '99(IIRC) and more are on the way, some in the US. The interesting thing about the BMW hydrogen car is that it can burn either hydrogen or gasoline so you can burn hydrogen when its available but not be hampered by the current dearth of hydrogen stations. As for the source of the hydrogen, Electricity generated from solar power is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.. The range on the 750H is only 400 km right now. The other trade-off of course is that there is still combustion so it's not as clean as fuel cell cars. Nonetheless, it's a start and not a bad way to transition us into a hydrogen economy.
Conversation between me and friend:
Me: What else should I put on my resume?
Friend: Can you use grep?
Me: Yeah kind of
Friend: Bam! Instant Unix admin!
I had an interesting conversation about this last night with a friend of mine. He had a high school biology teacher who is nationally recognized and was asked to testify before this board. He, however, decided to boycott it with many other scientists. Apparently the reason is that the two sides have ALREADY submitted very lengthy arguments on paper. In other words, the hearings was just for show. The board was more or less already decided. To go and testify would give the hearing an appearance of legitamcy, as though some sort of reason was actually applied and they come to a conclusion after a fair hearing. In truth, this is hardly the case.
It is a shame who happened but the outcome was never really in doubt.
"Their onboard technology is designed to allow people to set up virtual offices anywhere around the world via high-speed broadband connections and new 3G phone technology."
Can you imagine going war-driving with THAT!?
On a more serious note, anyone know how the service is going to work? Do the users have to subscribe to the BGan service and always use the satellite or does the satellite kick in when land based connections are weak? The latter case would be very cool. Imagine a phone that can pick and choose connection methods such as WiFi, 3G, and satellite as the situation dictates and an ISP that will provide it to you.
24: They both use electricity.
25: They both have the buttons on their controllers.
WTF? The stupid article is more fortune-telling than anything else. There's nothing technical or logical about the article. It's basically looking for signs of omens. If Mars is aligned on Venus' right on the launch date, the XBox 360 is bound to succeed....
Any degree is really just a piece of paper. Yes, you could have gotten a great education at your school but people don't know that unless they see you work. Most people don't have the time nor resources to watch a candidate over a period of time. Instead they depend on the reputation of the school/organization who issued the degree, interviews, essays, etc. (until you get some real experience under your belt and on your resume). So the strength of the degree depends more or less on the credibility of the issuing school/organization, in other words reputation.
I don't know of any online schools with a strong reputation. Even online schools operated by the top universities are met with some skepticism. They're usually view as a venue for the occasional seminars or side hobbies/interests. Most people simply doesn't take online schools seriously. My personal experience with online schooling has been mediocre at best. We're simply not there yet. Everything felt clunky and forced. It was as though they traded quality for the ability to do it online.
As a side note, I personally enjoyed BEING in college and the whole atmosphere. I miss it sometimes now that I'm in the professional world. There was always this dreamy, hopeful feeling to it. It's where ideas are traded and inspirations are found. I miss academia and the pure pursue of knowledge/ideas.
I'm one year into my first job out of college and I think that I was hired partially on the reputation of the name on my degree. I have friends who are brighter than me who went to a less reputable school and friends who weren't all that bright who went to the same school as me. It's not fair, I know, but reputation matters.
The really sad thing is that this month's Inc magazine posted a list they called the "Inc 500" (wantabe Forbes here) and 180Solutions was among the top time companies (maybe #4 IIRC). They are evil but they're making a lot of money.
Developing good OSS software on Windows is like tossing out life jackets to shipwreck survivors. They're not safe yet, but at least they aren't drowning. I love Linux and running on some of my boxes but the OSS software has been the most useful to me is Firefox running on my Windows XP machine and likewise for millions of others. Everyday I'm thankful to the FF team because it saves me many many hours of frustration that I had to deal with before when using IE. There's also Thunderbird. If you're measuring success by number of hours of frustration you've saved people and value you've added to their computing time, OSS on Windows makes sense. FF has been WILDLY successful and undoubtedly the most common OSS foothold/beach head on most Windows machines. Once we've convinced the average Joe that the OSS model is sound, then other OSS programs will follow. They're not going to read the Cathedral and the Bazaar. FF is something they can see. The experience will convince them.
People at my company who have RSI usually just request a track ball mouse. They seen to help quite a bit, are fairly common, and relatively cheap. That's basically what the first one, the Perific mouse, is but with a small ball. I don't see how that's actually better than a trackball which has a much larger ball. Repetitive small movements are hard on the wrist (I know from hammering in nails in weird parts of houses for Habitat for Humanity).
I understand and agree with most of your sentiments. I actually wanted to mention in my original post that VS.Net does allow some people to get by knowing less than what they need to. Then when it goes over their heads, they ask for help. I know. I've been there. Yes, Microsoft culture does allow a higher tolerance for ignorance but that's also why they're so successful in the industry. I work in a Microsoft shop so I know first hand the advantages and disadvantages of this culture.
However, to say VS.Net forces programmer into bad habits is unfair. VS.Net is one of the few MSFT products I have quite a bit of respect for because it works. The highlighting and the comment generating are wonderful. But the one thing I love about it is that I don't feel handcuffed at all, unlike how I often feel about other MSFT products. I fire it up and a few minutes later I'm coding. Recently, I gone back to some of my earlier projects and felt embarassed. I was such a horrible coder. My style was ugly and I could see right away why it wouldn't scale very well and be difficult to maintain. Then I look at my more recent project and felt a certain amount of pride in how much better I am now (on a relative scale to myself of course). They were both made in VS.net. The only thing that's changed is me and my experience. VS.Net didn't make me a better or a worse programmer. It did its job of taking down what I wanted to write.
Sorry about your experience man. There will always be a place for talented and intelligent people. Best of luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Humor is hard to predict. Sorry, didn't mean to offend.
"RRR....PPPP.....GGGG........" -Blackhawk Down
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
Reading the NPR article now. Hope that might make up for the Karma burning. Interesting graph of WoW Gold versus USD rate. I've always wondered about that. I remember when EQ first came out and EQ Plats were trading at a better rate than the Euro (or was it Franc) was at that time. I thought it was absurd... until the eBay character sales.
In any case, I think this open dictionary (although one already exists) is a brilliant idea and really reflects how languages really behave. We don't speak the same way as the previous generations nor should we expect future generations to follow us. I remember when I was taking cognitive science and the professor was going over linguistics. He mentioned that no human spoken language is more advanced or superior to another. While some people still hold Latin in higher esteem than other languages, he mentioned that another way of looking at Latin is to called it "bastardized, proto-Italian". Languages change and evolve. Dictionaries should also reflect that.
Don't know about the rest of you but they just won themselves a new customer today because of this. I've been looking to get a new router. At least with this, I know I have the free to muck around with my router if it doesn't work as well as I like.
All I have to say is close source is better than getting branded by a hot iron. If it was a choice between close source and being branded by a hot iron, I would take close source. At least proprietary software have progressed faster than hot iron branding. Hot iron branding have progressed little since the days of cowboys. You still apply fire to a piece of metal that gets applied to the skin. Proprietary software has definitely progressed beyond that stage.
I think you meant how many LoC per fornight. You don't want to confused people with a standardized term like second.
I just started Cryptonomicon recently and was persuaded to do so after reading this Wikipedia article. It's incredible. Bruce Schneier invented a crypto system based on playing cards for the novel. It's this depth that I find so fascinating with Stephenson. It may be fiction but there's a great deal of fact/truth underneath.
I'm not disagreeing with you but that can be said of any champion in any field. I know a lot of us come from a background where natural talent has given us an advantage that we never really had to put any real effort into doing something, mainly in school. When you are near the top of your game though, it's usually passion and obsessive dedication that makes the difference and to me that makes the victory even more deserving than just natural talent. When asked what's the best strategy for winning a race, Eddie, "the Beast" Merckxx, a former cycling champion, answered, "Ride... lots" (probably a bad paraphrase on my part).
No, no. Geeks are obviously intelligently designed. I mean for geeks to evolve they would have to successfully pass on their genes and you know the chances of that is pretty low. Geeks are the strongest evidence of some intelligent creator with a weird sense of humor, who may very well be a geek himself. I mean who else but a geek would sit around creating automaton...
Not quite. BMW has been researching and promoting hydrogen cars for some time now. They installed a hydrogen refilling station in Munich in '99(IIRC) and more are on the way, some in the US. The interesting thing about the BMW hydrogen car is that it can burn either hydrogen or gasoline so you can burn hydrogen when its available but not be hampered by the current dearth of hydrogen stations. As for the source of the hydrogen, Electricity generated from solar power is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. . The range on the 750H is only 400 km right now. The other trade-off of course is that there is still combustion so it's not as clean as fuel cell cars. Nonetheless, it's a start and not a bad way to transition us into a hydrogen economy.
Well thank God they rejected it. Otherwise, poor starving children will be running a better OS than me and such travesty cannot stand!
Conversation between me and friend:
Me: What else should I put on my resume?
Friend: Can you use grep?
Me: Yeah kind of
Friend: Bam! Instant Unix admin!
It is a shame who happened but the outcome was never really in doubt.
Can you imagine going war-driving with THAT!?
On a more serious note, anyone know how the service is going to work? Do the users have to subscribe to the BGan service and always use the satellite or does the satellite kick in when land based connections are weak? The latter case would be very cool. Imagine a phone that can pick and choose connection methods such as WiFi, 3G, and satellite as the situation dictates and an ISP that will provide it to you.
WTF? The stupid article is more fortune-telling than anything else. There's nothing technical or logical about the article. It's basically looking for signs of omens. If Mars is aligned on Venus' right on the launch date, the XBox 360 is bound to succeed....
I don't know of any online schools with a strong reputation. Even online schools operated by the top universities are met with some skepticism. They're usually view as a venue for the occasional seminars or side hobbies/interests. Most people simply doesn't take online schools seriously. My personal experience with online schooling has been mediocre at best. We're simply not there yet. Everything felt clunky and forced. It was as though they traded quality for the ability to do it online.
As a side note, I personally enjoyed BEING in college and the whole atmosphere. I miss it sometimes now that I'm in the professional world. There was always this dreamy, hopeful feeling to it. It's where ideas are traded and inspirations are found. I miss academia and the pure pursue of knowledge/ideas.
I'm one year into my first job out of college and I think that I was hired partially on the reputation of the name on my degree. I have friends who are brighter than me who went to a less reputable school and friends who weren't all that bright who went to the same school as me. It's not fair, I know, but reputation matters.
In other news, Harvard cheerleaders received a large number of WiFi enabled devices from an anonymous donor.
The really sad thing is that this month's Inc magazine posted a list they called the "Inc 500" (wantabe Forbes here) and 180Solutions was among the top time companies (maybe #4 IIRC). They are evil but they're making a lot of money.
Sure but how many Libraries of Congress (or LoC) of data can it gather per fortnight is what I really want to know.
So it is true! There really are no women in IT!
I kid, I kid.
Developing good OSS software on Windows is like tossing out life jackets to shipwreck survivors. They're not safe yet, but at least they aren't drowning. I love Linux and running on some of my boxes but the OSS software has been the most useful to me is Firefox running on my Windows XP machine and likewise for millions of others. Everyday I'm thankful to the FF team because it saves me many many hours of frustration that I had to deal with before when using IE. There's also Thunderbird. If you're measuring success by number of hours of frustration you've saved people and value you've added to their computing time, OSS on Windows makes sense. FF has been WILDLY successful and undoubtedly the most common OSS foothold/beach head on most Windows machines. Once we've convinced the average Joe that the OSS model is sound, then other OSS programs will follow. They're not going to read the Cathedral and the Bazaar. FF is something they can see. The experience will convince them.
"Hey baby, want to help me fork?"
People at my company who have RSI usually just request a track ball mouse. They seen to help quite a bit, are fairly common, and relatively cheap. That's basically what the first one, the Perific mouse, is but with a small ball. I don't see how that's actually better than a trackball which has a much larger ball. Repetitive small movements are hard on the wrist (I know from hammering in nails in weird parts of houses for Habitat for Humanity).
To which the philsophy professors replied: "Data? We don't need data! We think and therefore it is!"
However, to say VS.Net forces programmer into bad habits is unfair. VS.Net is one of the few MSFT products I have quite a bit of respect for because it works. The highlighting and the comment generating are wonderful. But the one thing I love about it is that I don't feel handcuffed at all, unlike how I often feel about other MSFT products. I fire it up and a few minutes later I'm coding. Recently, I gone back to some of my earlier projects and felt embarassed. I was such a horrible coder. My style was ugly and I could see right away why it wouldn't scale very well and be difficult to maintain. Then I look at my more recent project and felt a certain amount of pride in how much better I am now (on a relative scale to myself of course). They were both made in VS.net. The only thing that's changed is me and my experience. VS.Net didn't make me a better or a worse programmer. It did its job of taking down what I wanted to write.
Sorry about your experience man. There will always be a place for talented and intelligent people. Best of luck.