As I said, I am not a hardware hacker, so I don't really know what I am talking about, but is there a reason why the ARM1176JZF-Sâ Technical Reference Manual from infocenter.arm.com (sorry, I couldn't find a way how to link to documentation for a particular chip in their system) would not be enough?
That's not history of computing. That's really a complete waste of time. No teaching method I know of will work universally for everyone, but there are some that are guaranteed to work for no one, and what you describe (memorising the specifications of old processor units) sounds like one of those.
When I was a kid, I had a number of great books about history of science and engineering. There were not about memorizing dates, names, and specifications of steam engines, they were about the adventure of discovery, and while going through the history, they tried to explain what the inventions and discoveries were, how they worked, how they derived from earlier inventions, and how they eventually influenced stuff we have today. I found them really interesting, and the only reason I did not become an engineer or scientist was because I discovered math along the way. I am definitely not saying it will work for everybody, but it is not a bad method for some students. Of course, if you have a teacher who does not understand how computers work trying to teach a computing class, you will end up with a disaster no matter which method they use. That is a story of every education reform that was tried in the last 50 or more years.
Of course, being a code monkey is no good, but as far as I tell, people with a good quality comp sci degrees, especially with good background in math or physics, are still in great demand, and end up working on some really interesting stuff.
But teaching someone programming does not necessarily mean preparing them for a career in IT. These days it is for example very good to know how to program if you are a scientist or engineer, and I thing the way I see the trend, it will be even more so in the future.
I hear that a lot from some of my colleagues. I do not really see how it is different from a situation where the answers are not available, but only one or two students in the class actually solve the problems, and everybody else copies it from them. Yes, you may occasionally be able to "catch" people doing that when the one student doing the work makes a mistake and everybody copies the same mistake, but I personally have better use for my grading and class preparation time than doing detective work to figure out who is the cheater, and then arguing with students when they claim they did not cheat, they just randomly all happen to have the same mistake. I just simply stopped grading homework, and instead base my quizzes directly on the assigned homework. Students who simply copied their homework from somebody else will likely not be able to recreate the work on the quiz. In addition, the point of homework is for student to learn by practicing, so even if somebody did somehow managed to get the homework right, but failed to actually learn it, they should not be getting the credit for it anyway.
Actually, creating such a volunteer editorial board for an open source publication may be a fairly workable idea. I think that serving on such board should definitely contribute great deal to your service, and perhaps, if the subject is actively developing, even research, record for purpose of tenure and promotion. Also, if you had such a peer review system in place, contributions to such textbook could also count for promotion and tenure, therefore creating better incentives to participate. Right now, contributing to an open source textbook is very risky, you spend a lot of time on it, and people will say "there is no peer review, it is freely available, anybody can contribute, that just simply does not count". If you use your own textbook in your class, that just seen as doing your job, perhaps with little bit extra, so unless someone else adopts your textbook, it basically does not exist.
Indeed! Also, the idea that a school can simply decide to charge more to make more money is ridiculous. I know very well that every year, our administration very carefully looks at the budget, and figures out carefully what is the smallest amount they have to increase tuition to offset rising costs and declining state funding. They are very aware of the fact that if they raise the tuition too much, we will end up loosing students.
There is also another take on rising tuition. I went to college in a country where the tuition was free. And I frequently travel to countries with free tuition for conferences, and I get to see their educational facilities pretty well. In those places, money is usually not spent on luxuries, and by luxuries I mean things like painting the hallways and bathrooms every once a while, having pretty much any selection of food in a cafeteria, having nice dorm rooms, not to even speak about athletic facilities. American students like to complain about rising tuition, but when selecting schools, one of the main decision factor seems to be the "quality of life" on campus: cafeterias, dorm rooms, student centers, athletic facilities etc. When colleges compete with each other, that's what they often concentrate on. But these things cost money, and striking the right balance between a good academic reputation, nice attractive campus and cost of tuition is hard.
I am not a professional, but I shoot a lot, it is a hobby that is seriously out of control. I have had a DSLR for a while now, and I love it, on the other hand, I would not say it is necessarily the only way. It depends a lot on your style of shooting, and your style of shooting depends a lot on your camera.
In a sense, each camera type is a compromise, 35 mm SLR is a compromise compared to a large format in some ways, but I definitely would not want to lug a large format camera on my backpacking trips, even though it would make awesome landscapes. People used to say that 35 ml SLR was the only way to go, but then look at all the amazing photos people took with stupid rangefinders!
I would say get a camera you like, you have now the advantage to get very good reviews of pros and cons of various cameras on the net. One thing I would definitely advise you: whatever camera you get, get it well in advance before going on your important trip where you want to use it, and learn it well! In my opinion the best camera is the camera you know. I made a mistake of buying my new DSLR right before a large trip, and the whole time I handled it as if it was an old film SLR, which I went through a number of in my time. After the trip, I was initially very disappointed with the camera when I was going through the pictures after my trip. Since then I learned how to use it, and now I love it nearly as much as I loved my old Exacta VX 1000 way back.
Duh! Cheaper stuff is not as good as expensive stuff (most of the time). I have an old dumb phone, that is not as good as a new powerful smartphone. Is my "experience" lower quality than it would be with a brand new i-phone or something similar? Sure it is. Am I willing to pay my phone company the money they charge for such new phone, plus data plan? Hell no! It's simply not worth to me, and I know better way to spend my money. Another example: when I go backpacking, could I spend few thousand dollars on gear that would keep me dryer, warmer, safer, etc? Sure. Would it improve my experience? Actually, no, I would be to worried about all the expensive stuff to really enjoy being in the woods. Is my old jacket, backpack, banded pot and old fire making kit as good as all the new expensive stuff? No, they are not, but they are good enough for me, I know them, I know I can rely on them, and if I happen to loose some of them in the woods, it's no big deal, I can get another one just like that very cheap.
What I am trying to say, there is use for expensive, carefully designed stuff that will give you "high-quality experience", and there is place for cheap, rugged, "inferior" stuff. The problem with tablets is, right now there is no choice, you either have the expensive stuff, or you have nothing. Creating something that will give us choice cannot be bad.
One of the advantages of systems like Android is that it makes devices like this possible, so it is perfectly right that they get counted.
I have been using fvwm for I guess almost 20 years now. During the time I tried a number of other window managers, and even several of those so called desktop environments, and I always end up returning to fvwm. You can configure it to do pretty much anything you want. I have my own vi based set of keybinding, minimal eye-candy (plain flat title bar on windows, simple frame,no 3d, no gradients). It may not be shiny and pretty, but it works.
In addition to that,I use stalonetray for tray icons, gkrellm for hardware monitoring, volume control etc, and dmenu for launching programs.
I do not use a taskbar, I tried several of them, but eventually I came to a conclusion that they just take space on the screen, and don't serve any useful need. I have fvwm show window list menu on rightclick in the root window, and also have a keybinding for that, but I very rarely use it.
That's a good point. I am one of the "fvwm plus a few custom scripts" people. Why use E17 when I can use a setup that served me well the for some 20 years (with slow but continuous improvements)?
That does not explain why none of the main distributions ships an E17 version alongside all their Gnome, KDE, XFC, LDXE whatnot versions.
I don't know if they improved during the last few years, but my experience with those was that they were not really worth the trouble. Now when I have to use a Windows machine, I simply just install VirtuaWin and TXmouse to fix the most glaring annoyances, and some basic Cygwin environment to get a decent shell and a terminal emulator window.
Lot of window managers are completely configurable. In fvwm, I can place the buttons anywhere I want, and make them do anything I want. I can have title bars completely without buttons. I can simply get rid of the title bars. Or put them on the side of the window instead of the top. Number of other window managers will let you do the same.
The reason Ctrl and Alt should not be used for window manager operations is that unix applications often use key combos with Ctrl and/or Alt for their own purposes, and if these combinations are intercepted by your window manager, the applications cannot function properly. Window managers should use the "window" key for all their keybindings, after all, that's why there is a little picture of deformed window on it.
Also, if they want to "discover programming", there's this great tool that they probably already have access to, called, hmmm, wait a minute, it's coming to me... oh, right, the Internet. And if you google for "learn how to program", the first unsponsored hit gives a realistic perspective teach yourself programming in 10 years.
I'm sorry, but that's stupid. These are for people who either don't really want to learn programming, but have to or think they have to, or for people who already are interested in programming and they want to learn more. It's about learning the proper syntax, and some basic programming concepts and tricks. Generally pretty much useless except for people who actually want to or need to program.
Robotics programming is different. It's much more about problem solving than programming. It's about interacting with environment. It's about figuring out a solution to a problem, then running it and seeing very clearly that it doesn't work, and having to figure out how to fix it.
Someone thinking the way you are thinking gave my daughter a box of expensive chocolates when she was 10. Few years later, we found it in her drawer, all spoiled and moldy. She will enjoy a box of good chocolate now when she is 17, although she will probably prefer a jar of hot sauce or spicy pickles. She has a cabinet full of unopened jewelery making kits and similar junk that people gave her as presents during the years.
Just because you would have preferred a box of chocolate or a nail painting set when you were little does not mean every girl would.
You clearly have no experience with Lego League. How does presenting kids with a problem that can be solved in hundreds, maybe thousands, of different ways and letting them figure out a solution compare to "something between a factory worker and color-by-the-number"?
One task where Word is still better than OO or LO is the equation editor. The old equation editor in Word was a horrible abomination bordering on completely unusable, but the new one is actually relatively decent as far as equation editors go. It is not as good as the one in LyX or as the TeXmacs solution, but it is much better than the old one, and still better than the mess in LO.
Actually, this law does not remove any options. Another law does, this law introduces exceptions to the other law. So this particular law increases their options.
So if you are so much in favor of options, you should be highly supportive of this law! This law does not take away any options, on the contrary, it gives your employer an option not to pay you an overtime pay if they don't want to.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's why they awarded the prize to so many prominent anticommunist dissidents.
I see. Thanks you, that makes sense.
As I said, I am not a hardware hacker, so I don't really know what I am talking about, but is there a reason why the ARM1176JZF-Sâ Technical Reference Manual from infocenter.arm.com (sorry, I couldn't find a way how to link to documentation for a particular chip in their system) would not be enough?
I don't get it. I am not a hardware hacker, but why would you need an access to GPU to program input/output?
That's not history of computing. That's really a complete waste of time. No teaching method I know of will work universally for everyone, but there are some that are guaranteed to work for no one, and what you describe (memorising the specifications of old processor units) sounds like one of those.
When I was a kid, I had a number of great books about history of science and engineering. There were not about memorizing dates, names, and specifications of steam engines, they were about the adventure of discovery, and while going through the history, they tried to explain what the inventions and discoveries were, how they worked, how they derived from earlier inventions, and how they eventually influenced stuff we have today. I found them really interesting, and the only reason I did not become an engineer or scientist was because I discovered math along the way. I am definitely not saying it will work for everybody, but it is not a bad method for some students. Of course, if you have a teacher who does not understand how computers work trying to teach a computing class, you will end up with a disaster no matter which method they use. That is a story of every education reform that was tried in the last 50 or more years.
Of course, being a code monkey is no good, but as far as I tell, people with a good quality comp sci degrees, especially with good background in math or physics, are still in great demand, and end up working on some really interesting stuff.
But teaching someone programming does not necessarily mean preparing them for a career in IT. These days it is for example very good to know how to program if you are a scientist or engineer, and I thing the way I see the trend, it will be even more so in the future.
I hear that a lot from some of my colleagues. I do not really see how it is different from a situation where the answers are not available, but only one or two students in the class actually solve the problems, and everybody else copies it from them. Yes, you may occasionally be able to "catch" people doing that when the one student doing the work makes a mistake and everybody copies the same mistake, but I personally have better use for my grading and class preparation time than doing detective work to figure out who is the cheater, and then arguing with students when they claim they did not cheat, they just randomly all happen to have the same mistake. I just simply stopped grading homework, and instead base my quizzes directly on the assigned homework. Students who simply copied their homework from somebody else will likely not be able to recreate the work on the quiz. In addition, the point of homework is for student to learn by practicing, so even if somebody did somehow managed to get the homework right, but failed to actually learn it, they should not be getting the credit for it anyway.
Actually, creating such a volunteer editorial board for an open source publication may be a fairly workable idea. I think that serving on such board should definitely contribute great deal to your service, and perhaps, if the subject is actively developing, even research, record for purpose of tenure and promotion. Also, if you had such a peer review system in place, contributions to such textbook could also count for promotion and tenure, therefore creating better incentives to participate. Right now, contributing to an open source textbook is very risky, you spend a lot of time on it, and people will say "there is no peer review, it is freely available, anybody can contribute, that just simply does not count". If you use your own textbook in your class, that just seen as doing your job, perhaps with little bit extra, so unless someone else adopts your textbook, it basically does not exist.
Indeed! Also, the idea that a school can simply decide to charge more to make more money is ridiculous. I know very well that every year, our administration very carefully looks at the budget, and figures out carefully what is the smallest amount they have to increase tuition to offset rising costs and declining state funding. They are very aware of the fact that if they raise the tuition too much, we will end up loosing students.
There is also another take on rising tuition. I went to college in a country where the tuition was free. And I frequently travel to countries with free tuition for conferences, and I get to see their educational facilities pretty well. In those places, money is usually not spent on luxuries, and by luxuries I mean things like painting the hallways and bathrooms every once a while, having pretty much any selection of food in a cafeteria, having nice dorm rooms, not to even speak about athletic facilities. American students like to complain about rising tuition, but when selecting schools, one of the main decision factor seems to be the "quality of life" on campus: cafeterias, dorm rooms, student centers, athletic facilities etc. When colleges compete with each other, that's what they often concentrate on. But these things cost money, and striking the right balance between a good academic reputation, nice attractive campus and cost of tuition is hard.
I am not a professional, but I shoot a lot, it is a hobby that is seriously out of control. I have had a DSLR for a while now, and I love it, on the other hand, I would not say it is necessarily the only way. It depends a lot on your style of shooting, and your style of shooting depends a lot on your camera.
In a sense, each camera type is a compromise, 35 mm SLR is a compromise compared to a large format in some ways, but I definitely would not want to lug a large format camera on my backpacking trips, even though it would make awesome landscapes. People used to say that 35 ml SLR was the only way to go, but then look at all the amazing photos people took with stupid rangefinders!
I would say get a camera you like, you have now the advantage to get very good reviews of pros and cons of various cameras on the net. One thing I would definitely advise you: whatever camera you get, get it well in advance before going on your important trip where you want to use it, and learn it well! In my opinion the best camera is the camera you know. I made a mistake of buying my new DSLR right before a large trip, and the whole time I handled it as if it was an old film SLR, which I went through a number of in my time. After the trip, I was initially very disappointed with the camera when I was going through the pictures after my trip. Since then I learned how to use it, and now I love it nearly as much as I loved my old Exacta VX 1000 way back.
Duh! Cheaper stuff is not as good as expensive stuff (most of the time). I have an old dumb phone, that is not as good as a new powerful smartphone. Is my "experience" lower quality than it would be with a brand new i-phone or something similar? Sure it is. Am I willing to pay my phone company the money they charge for such new phone, plus data plan? Hell no! It's simply not worth to me, and I know better way to spend my money. Another example: when I go backpacking, could I spend few thousand dollars on gear that would keep me dryer, warmer, safer, etc? Sure. Would it improve my experience? Actually, no, I would be to worried about all the expensive stuff to really enjoy being in the woods. Is my old jacket, backpack, banded pot and old fire making kit as good as all the new expensive stuff? No, they are not, but they are good enough for me, I know them, I know I can rely on them, and if I happen to loose some of them in the woods, it's no big deal, I can get another one just like that very cheap.
What I am trying to say, there is use for expensive, carefully designed stuff that will give you "high-quality experience", and there is place for cheap, rugged, "inferior" stuff. The problem with tablets is, right now there is no choice, you either have the expensive stuff, or you have nothing. Creating something that will give us choice cannot be bad.
One of the advantages of systems like Android is that it makes devices like this possible, so it is perfectly right that they get counted.
You don't have to ditch it, just turn the fcking volume down!
I have been using fvwm for I guess almost 20 years now. During the time I tried a number of other window managers, and even several of those so called desktop environments, and I always end up returning to fvwm. You can configure it to do pretty much anything you want. I have my own vi based set of keybinding, minimal eye-candy (plain flat title bar on windows, simple frame,no 3d, no gradients). It may not be shiny and pretty, but it works.
In addition to that,I use stalonetray for tray icons, gkrellm for hardware monitoring, volume control etc, and dmenu for launching programs.
I do not use a taskbar, I tried several of them, but eventually I came to a conclusion that they just take space on the screen, and don't serve any useful need. I have fvwm show window list menu on rightclick in the root window, and also have a keybinding for that, but I very rarely use it.
That's a good point. I am one of the "fvwm plus a few custom scripts" people. Why use E17 when I can use a setup that served me well the for some 20 years (with slow but continuous improvements)?
That does not explain why none of the main distributions ships an E17 version alongside all their Gnome, KDE, XFC, LDXE whatnot versions.
I don't know if they improved during the last few years, but my experience with those was that they were not really worth the trouble. Now when I have to use a Windows machine, I simply just install VirtuaWin and TXmouse to fix the most glaring annoyances, and some basic Cygwin environment to get a decent shell and a terminal emulator window.
Lot of window managers are completely configurable. In fvwm, I can place the buttons anywhere I want, and make them do anything I want. I can have title bars completely without buttons. I can simply get rid of the title bars. Or put them on the side of the window instead of the top. Number of other window managers will let you do the same.
The reason Ctrl and Alt should not be used for window manager operations is that unix applications often use key combos with Ctrl and/or Alt for their own purposes, and if these combinations are intercepted by your window manager, the applications cannot function properly. Window managers should use the "window" key for all their keybindings, after all, that's why there is a little picture of deformed window on it.
Also, if they want to "discover programming", there's this great tool that they probably already have access to, called, hmmm, wait a minute, it's coming to me ... oh, right, the Internet. And if you google for "learn how to program", the first unsponsored hit gives a realistic perspective teach yourself programming in 10 years.
I'm sorry, but that's stupid. These are for people who either don't really want to learn programming, but have to or think they have to, or for people who already are interested in programming and they want to learn more. It's about learning the proper syntax, and some basic programming concepts and tricks. Generally pretty much useless except for people who actually want to or need to program.
Robotics programming is different. It's much more about problem solving than programming. It's about interacting with environment. It's about figuring out a solution to a problem, then running it and seeing very clearly that it doesn't work, and having to figure out how to fix it.
Someone thinking the way you are thinking gave my daughter a box of expensive chocolates when she was 10. Few years later, we found it in her drawer, all spoiled and moldy. She will enjoy a box of good chocolate now when she is 17, although she will probably prefer a jar of hot sauce or spicy pickles. She has a cabinet full of unopened jewelery making kits and similar junk that people gave her as presents during the years.
Just because you would have preferred a box of chocolate or a nail painting set when you were little does not mean every girl would.
You clearly have no experience with Lego League. How does presenting kids with a problem that can be solved in hundreds, maybe thousands, of different ways and letting them figure out a solution compare to "something between a factory worker and color-by-the-number"?
(that team used the official programming GUI to write a parser, and then wrote their commands in plain text)
Holy smokes! I am glad if I can make my team to follow a line consistently.
One task where Word is still better than OO or LO is the equation editor. The old equation editor in Word was a horrible abomination bordering on completely unusable, but the new one is actually relatively decent as far as equation editors go. It is not as good as the one in LyX or as the TeXmacs solution, but it is much better than the old one, and still better than the mess in LO.
All that, plus install VirtuaWin, TXMouse, plus half dozen other programs, depending on the intended use of the machine.
Actually, this law does not remove any options. Another law does, this law introduces exceptions to the other law. So this particular law increases their options.
So if you are so much in favor of options, you should be highly supportive of this law! This law does not take away any options, on the contrary, it gives your employer an option not to pay you an overtime pay if they don't want to.