The way the carriculum works at my school is that there's only a handful of courses every CS major has to take. Things like Algorhythem Design and some math courses and such, but the last 4 semesters or so are all desinated as "free electives". The idea is that people can individualize their carriculum to focus on networking or whatever their area of interest is. This works well for people who are willing to push themselves and take the harder and more useful courses. However, what it also means is that people can take advantage of the situation, find out which classes are the easiest to pass and take just those, and then just barely pass them. The carriculum works in theory, but it needs more safegards to keep from being taken advantage of.
One reason I believe that programming is bad these days is that the market is flooded with poor programmers. At my school, many freshmen come in with lofty goals about being computer systems engineers, or electrical engineers, or something like that, but they get their little freshmen butts kicked by the carriculum and end up dropping engineering. Most people I've seen this happen to end up switching to Computer Science or IT. Combine these people with those who came into college to do CS or IT, and you have a glut of people entering the market trying to score programming jobs. And some of these people are those who kinda just fell into it with no real interest other than to graduate college. I think CS carriculums should be more intensive so as it isn't used as a fallback major for those who can't hack it in other fields.
Comparing cable modem repairmen to computer scientists is like comparing auto machanics to mechanical engineers. They are professionals who are trained to specifically provide specialized services in a limited aspect. They may not know everything about the Knuth, or the Desiel Combustion Cycle, but the point is they know more about it than you do, and that's what you're paying them for.
Re:Expensive Electronics Cheap Scams, not taken do
on
eBay Fraud Vigilantes
·
· Score: 1
You can still get it here. The only thing is that the disc is on back order so it may take a few weeks extra, but you'll get it eventually for much cheaper than anyone on E-Bay is getting it for.
there's less motivation among young Americans to enter the applied sciences and engineering fields
I don't think that's the case at all. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute just had it's largest freshman class to date, most of them engineering majors. The interest is there for college freshmen to enter technical fields, but I know from what I've seen at RPI is that many people who come in as computer systems engineers or electrical engineers get blasted by the difficult carriculum and decide to switch their major, with computer science and IT being the two most popular drop down majors. So now combine them with the people who come into college with those majors, and you have a large glut of IT and CS majors graduating from universities while companies can't seem to find enough engineers to fill their positions; espically electrical engineers. I know only one unemployed EE graduate, and zero unemployed EE's with a masters or better.
Re:Expensive Electronics Cheap Scams, not taken do
on
eBay Fraud Vigilantes
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Often times, these people who are auctioning "information" on how to acquire products for cheap are just banking on how lazy and stupid buyers are. Recently I was looking into buying the Zelda Collector's Disc for gamecube, since I purchased my cube too late to get it for free. Doing a quick google search for it, I found that I could get the disc as a free gift if I purhcased a one year subscription to Nintendo Power Magazine. It wasn't a bad deal, but I decided to see if E-Bay could do any better. Looking at the different auctions, I eventually came to one auction that had a price of $3.00 (where other auctions were going for more than $30. Looking at the auction, I saw that the guy was simply selling information on how to buy the game for $20 with no shipping and handling. It was insane to believe that he was getting money from people just to tell them to order Nintendo Power.
More likely, the update to AIM you install will magically turn it into MSN messenger (or at least make it work with the same protocols as MSN). I wouldn't mind so much, so long as I get to keep my old screen names, which probably isn't going to be feasable with so many people using both services.
High speed internet has increased the proliferation of virii, but you have to take the good and the bad. Cars have gotten faster since they were invented, and as such we've had more high speed crashes and fatilities. It's just something that's inherent to speeding up the process... you speed EVERYTHING up, the good and the bad. And for the most part the good outweighs the bad.
Slightly offtopic, but I always wondered if it wouldn't be a better idea for virus checkers not necessarily to delete all viruses. Certainly, there are known viruses out there it could delete, but there are also files that the virus software has to make a judgement call on some file it has never seen before. Thus sometimes it ends up deleting useful files. Couldn't the software merely add a large red "WARNING - WE THINK THIS FILE IS A VIRUS. DON'T OPEN IT UNLESS YOU KNOW ARE EXPECTING THIS FILE AND KNOW WHAT IT IS" at the beginning of the E-Mail text so you know that something out there wants to make sure that you're being careful about this file?
Asteriods, like any other weapon or natural disaster, has many zones of devistation. There's an immediate zone of mass obliteration; they're the lucky ones. Outside that zone is the secondary kill zone where the massive pressure wave that develops at impact moves outward and anyone viewing this cloud has about enough time to crap their pants before being blasted. Then there's zones where things are buried under mountains of dust and beyond all salvaging. And so forth as you head outwards. If an asteriod lands in China, I doubt that the US will suffer any immediate casualties (unless the asteriod totally shatters the planet, which is not the usual destruction senario) until the atmosphere gets clogged with dust and soot and we enter an ice age. Crops die, animals migrate away, thinks generally suck afterwards. Unfortunately, most people who would die from an asteriod strike would be from the aftermath rather than the initial strike. It would be a long, drawn out, painful death.
Skylab was made of tempered materials meant to withstand harsh conditions. You would figure that it would be able to hold up to an atmospheric re-entry burning better than your average brittle space rock.
Cold does have a unusual property of sometimes slowing down a person's normal metabolic and physiological functions to the point where it's hard to even detect it. There have been documented cases of people frozen stiff but having heartrates of less than 10/min. EMT's are trained to check the pulse of a person who's been frozen for a good minute to detect things like that, otherwise it's easy to assume that the guy is dead. Granted, it's not all that common, but it does happen enough that resusitation efforts are made on all patients who are suffering from cold induced injuries. They aren't dead until they're warm and dead.
We incorporated the concept of software-definable, task specific panel layout into our controls because Mike (Okuda) thought it a logical way of simplifying designs that would otherwise have been nightmarishly complex. The basic idea is that the panels automatically reconfigure themselves to suit the specific task at hand. A side benefit we discovered is this gave our actors much more freedom in hitting controls to accomplish various tasks. Even though out case tries to get things right, there are numerous occasions when a particular shot will require an actor to hit a button on a specific area of a panel, which may not reflect out original design for that panel. Variable layout control panels mean that the button that fires phasers this week is not necessarily the same button that fires them next week.
It's true that drug companies will test hundreds of thousands of drugs, but don't confuse that with them having some huge lab with several million test tubes testing all these compounds with rat serum or whatever. The compounds are all run through a computer simulation first to test their theoretical interaction with whatever molecules or cells you're interested in. After running the simulations, that's when you do wet tests of the top 500 or so compounds which had the most promising theoretical interactions.
I have a question about the recent litigation by the RIAA against a handful of university students for running supposedly illegal P2P services. I'm a student at Rensselaer, so I'm more familiar with the service that was being run there, but as far as I figure it was the same deal at all the other universities as well. At RPI, the Phynd server searched all the computers that were sharing files on the network and indexed them so you could do a keyword search for files, similar to the way google works. From what I read of the case, the major point in the case was that the RIAA said that the service provided illegal access to copyrighted material because you could use the service to directly download material, via a hyperlink in the search results window; even though the service and the files were restricted only to students at Rensselaer. My question is how would their case have changed if all the service returned was just the address of the computer hosting the files? Thus after a person ran a search and decided on his own to manually type the address of the hosting computer to access it, would the owners of the phynd server have been held accountable since it would have been the miscosoft transfer protocols transfering the files. This seemed to be the big point in going after the students that it was their program that was directly facilitating the illegal downloads, and it seems like if the service merely indexed the files without providing direct access the case would have been significantly weakened.
It's about characters.
on
Retro Vision
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· Score: 1
Thinking about the shows we have today it's hard to think which will have any kind of staying power so that it will be remembered 20 years for now. What's left these days after your remove the reality TV and the situational dramas (like CSI, CSI Miami, CSI etc). All these retro shows that everone remembers is about characters everyone liked, not about which jerk was voted off the island, or which no talent hack had their self esteem ripped to shreds by a british goon. We have the Simpsons, and Friends and a few others who fit this catagory, but we're quickly losing this genre of television. And what shows we do have are being brutally supressed. These past few weeks NBC pre-empted Scrubs (a genuinely funny and quirky show about doctors) for a two part special on Princess Diana. Her death was tragic yes, but it was 5 freaking years ago; get over it already. I may get flamed for that comment, but plenty of people die who don't get nearly as much publicity as her. Mother Teresa died at the same time, and nobody gave a damn. It's just a testament to the shallowness of the TV media.
It's only spelled backwards in English. If you can come up with a relationship between their native representations, then you'll have soemthing. If there is a reason for the coincidences between those two names, it'll likely be because of an intentional change by the conquering spaniards to break the sprits of the Incans.
I don't know how much demand for physicians where would be in a draft. The Army, Navy, and Air Force all have scholarship programs for people in med school. They pay the full tuition cost, books, fees, and give a stipend for living expenses. Then after you finish your residency you owe X number of years of active service (The number of years depends on how long your residency was). After that, some people leave but a fair number sign on for another tour. Getting into this program is pretty competitive as well, with more applicants than positions every year. So I would think for the most part the branches of the military would be pretty set on the physicians they need.
Well, the article just says that the baby brains are bigger than normal and the neurons seem to be firing faster, but there hasn't been any testing as to whether these guys are any smarter than the average bear (or rat). It does look interesting, but last I checked, in humans there hasn't been any correlation between hat size and IQ. Elephants and blue whales have the biggest brains on the planet, but nobody's calling them the most intellegent creatures in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we need something nerdier and more useless, like the biggest prime number ever.
I thought most games were developed in Japan to begin with. So having these games developed in a foreign country shouldn't be a new thing to anyone.
The way the carriculum works at my school is that there's only a handful of courses every CS major has to take. Things like Algorhythem Design and some math courses and such, but the last 4 semesters or so are all desinated as "free electives". The idea is that people can individualize their carriculum to focus on networking or whatever their area of interest is. This works well for people who are willing to push themselves and take the harder and more useful courses. However, what it also means is that people can take advantage of the situation, find out which classes are the easiest to pass and take just those, and then just barely pass them. The carriculum works in theory, but it needs more safegards to keep from being taken advantage of.
One reason I believe that programming is bad these days is that the market is flooded with poor programmers. At my school, many freshmen come in with lofty goals about being computer systems engineers, or electrical engineers, or something like that, but they get their little freshmen butts kicked by the carriculum and end up dropping engineering. Most people I've seen this happen to end up switching to Computer Science or IT. Combine these people with those who came into college to do CS or IT, and you have a glut of people entering the market trying to score programming jobs. And some of these people are those who kinda just fell into it with no real interest other than to graduate college. I think CS carriculums should be more intensive so as it isn't used as a fallback major for those who can't hack it in other fields.
Comparing cable modem repairmen to computer scientists is like comparing auto machanics to mechanical engineers. They are professionals who are trained to specifically provide specialized services in a limited aspect. They may not know everything about the Knuth, or the Desiel Combustion Cycle, but the point is they know more about it than you do, and that's what you're paying them for.
You can still get it here. The only thing is that the disc is on back order so it may take a few weeks extra, but you'll get it eventually for much cheaper than anyone on E-Bay is getting it for.
there's less motivation among young Americans to enter the applied sciences and engineering fields
I don't think that's the case at all. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute just had it's largest freshman class to date, most of them engineering majors. The interest is there for college freshmen to enter technical fields, but I know from what I've seen at RPI is that many people who come in as computer systems engineers or electrical engineers get blasted by the difficult carriculum and decide to switch their major, with computer science and IT being the two most popular drop down majors. So now combine them with the people who come into college with those majors, and you have a large glut of IT and CS majors graduating from universities while companies can't seem to find enough engineers to fill their positions; espically electrical engineers. I know only one unemployed EE graduate, and zero unemployed EE's with a masters or better.
Often times, these people who are auctioning "information" on how to acquire products for cheap are just banking on how lazy and stupid buyers are. Recently I was looking into buying the Zelda Collector's Disc for gamecube, since I purchased my cube too late to get it for free. Doing a quick google search for it, I found that I could get the disc as a free gift if I purhcased a one year subscription to Nintendo Power Magazine. It wasn't a bad deal, but I decided to see if E-Bay could do any better. Looking at the different auctions, I eventually came to one auction that had a price of $3.00 (where other auctions were going for more than $30. Looking at the auction, I saw that the guy was simply selling information on how to buy the game for $20 with no shipping and handling. It was insane to believe that he was getting money from people just to tell them to order Nintendo Power.
Voyager could be represented by some northernly migrating turtle dragging a sign saying "1/16 scale representation of Voyager".
The editor reminds me of Simon on American Idol...
... Crap ... Double Crap ... Out of Focus ... Janet's Boob ... Overpaid Hack ... Crap ... Crap ... William Hung ...
Crap
And so on
More likely, the update to AIM you install will magically turn it into MSN messenger (or at least make it work with the same protocols as MSN). I wouldn't mind so much, so long as I get to keep my old screen names, which probably isn't going to be feasable with so many people using both services.
High speed internet has increased the proliferation of virii, but you have to take the good and the bad. Cars have gotten faster since they were invented, and as such we've had more high speed crashes and fatilities. It's just something that's inherent to speeding up the process ... you speed EVERYTHING up, the good and the bad. And for the most part the good outweighs the bad.
Slightly offtopic, but I always wondered if it wouldn't be a better idea for virus checkers not necessarily to delete all viruses. Certainly, there are known viruses out there it could delete, but there are also files that the virus software has to make a judgement call on some file it has never seen before. Thus sometimes it ends up deleting useful files. Couldn't the software merely add a large red "WARNING - WE THINK THIS FILE IS A VIRUS. DON'T OPEN IT UNLESS YOU KNOW ARE EXPECTING THIS FILE AND KNOW WHAT IT IS" at the beginning of the E-Mail text so you know that something out there wants to make sure that you're being careful about this file?
Asteriods, like any other weapon or natural disaster, has many zones of devistation. There's an immediate zone of mass obliteration; they're the lucky ones. Outside that zone is the secondary kill zone where the massive pressure wave that develops at impact moves outward and anyone viewing this cloud has about enough time to crap their pants before being blasted. Then there's zones where things are buried under mountains of dust and beyond all salvaging. And so forth as you head outwards. If an asteriod lands in China, I doubt that the US will suffer any immediate casualties (unless the asteriod totally shatters the planet, which is not the usual destruction senario) until the atmosphere gets clogged with dust and soot and we enter an ice age. Crops die, animals migrate away, thinks generally suck afterwards. Unfortunately, most people who would die from an asteriod strike would be from the aftermath rather than the initial strike. It would be a long, drawn out, painful death.
Skylab was made of tempered materials meant to withstand harsh conditions. You would figure that it would be able to hold up to an atmospheric re-entry burning better than your average brittle space rock.
Cold does have a unusual property of sometimes slowing down a person's normal metabolic and physiological functions to the point where it's hard to even detect it. There have been documented cases of people frozen stiff but having heartrates of less than 10/min. EMT's are trained to check the pulse of a person who's been frozen for a good minute to detect things like that, otherwise it's easy to assume that the guy is dead. Granted, it's not all that common, but it does happen enough that resusitation efforts are made on all patients who are suffering from cold induced injuries. They aren't dead until they're warm and dead.
I just hope it turns out better than being a Mac Gamer. (Complements of the Red vs. Blue guys)
. mov
http://webdev.o1.com/rvb/movies/switch/RvB_switch
From the Star Trek Technical Manual - Page 34
We incorporated the concept of software-definable, task specific panel layout into our controls because Mike (Okuda) thought it a logical way of simplifying designs that would otherwise have been nightmarishly complex. The basic idea is that the panels automatically reconfigure themselves to suit the specific task at hand. A side benefit we discovered is this gave our actors much more freedom in hitting controls to accomplish various tasks. Even though out case tries to get things right, there are numerous occasions when a particular shot will require an actor to hit a button on a specific area of a panel, which may not reflect out original design for that panel. Variable layout control panels mean that the button that fires phasers this week is not necessarily the same button that fires them next week.
It's true that drug companies will test hundreds of thousands of drugs, but don't confuse that with them having some huge lab with several million test tubes testing all these compounds with rat serum or whatever. The compounds are all run through a computer simulation first to test their theoretical interaction with whatever molecules or cells you're interested in. After running the simulations, that's when you do wet tests of the top 500 or so compounds which had the most promising theoretical interactions.
I have a question about the recent litigation by the RIAA against a handful of university students for running supposedly illegal P2P services. I'm a student at Rensselaer, so I'm more familiar with the service that was being run there, but as far as I figure it was the same deal at all the other universities as well. At RPI, the Phynd server searched all the computers that were sharing files on the network and indexed them so you could do a keyword search for files, similar to the way google works. From what I read of the case, the major point in the case was that the RIAA said that the service provided illegal access to copyrighted material because you could use the service to directly download material, via a hyperlink in the search results window; even though the service and the files were restricted only to students at Rensselaer. My question is how would their case have changed if all the service returned was just the address of the computer hosting the files? Thus after a person ran a search and decided on his own to manually type the address of the hosting computer to access it, would the owners of the phynd server have been held accountable since it would have been the miscosoft transfer protocols transfering the files. This seemed to be the big point in going after the students that it was their program that was directly facilitating the illegal downloads, and it seems like if the service merely indexed the files without providing direct access the case would have been significantly weakened.
Thinking about the shows we have today it's hard to think which will have any kind of staying power so that it will be remembered 20 years for now. What's left these days after your remove the reality TV and the situational dramas (like CSI, CSI Miami, CSI etc). All these retro shows that everone remembers is about characters everyone liked, not about which jerk was voted off the island, or which no talent hack had their self esteem ripped to shreds by a british goon. We have the Simpsons, and Friends and a few others who fit this catagory, but we're quickly losing this genre of television. And what shows we do have are being brutally supressed. These past few weeks NBC pre-empted Scrubs (a genuinely funny and quirky show about doctors) for a two part special on Princess Diana. Her death was tragic yes, but it was 5 freaking years ago; get over it already. I may get flamed for that comment, but plenty of people die who don't get nearly as much publicity as her. Mother Teresa died at the same time, and nobody gave a damn. It's just a testament to the shallowness of the TV media.
Bilbo's big music number - I am eleventy one, going on eleventy two...
It's only spelled backwards in English. If you can come up with a relationship between their native representations, then you'll have soemthing. If there is a reason for the coincidences between those two names, it'll likely be because of an intentional change by the conquering spaniards to break the sprits of the Incans.
I don't know how much demand for physicians where would be in a draft. The Army, Navy, and Air Force all have scholarship programs for people in med school. They pay the full tuition cost, books, fees, and give a stipend for living expenses. Then after you finish your residency you owe X number of years of active service (The number of years depends on how long your residency was). After that, some people leave but a fair number sign on for another tour. Getting into this program is pretty competitive as well, with more applicants than positions every year. So I would think for the most part the branches of the military would be pretty set on the physicians they need.
Well, the article just says that the baby brains are bigger than normal and the neurons seem to be firing faster, but there hasn't been any testing as to whether these guys are any smarter than the average bear (or rat). It does look interesting, but last I checked, in humans there hasn't been any correlation between hat size and IQ. Elephants and blue whales have the biggest brains on the planet, but nobody's calling them the most intellegent creatures in the world.