Not only that, but suppose that humans DID have the capability to alter the Earth's atmosphere. Should they? I don't think so. Earth has been doing just fine for the past billion or so years. Is pollution bad, yes. Should it be reduced? Sure. Is it the main cause of global warming and cooling? I don't think so. I haven't seen enough (thorough, unbiased, non-political) evidence to convince me otherwise.
That is, of course, the other problem with this whole Global Warming issue. It is no longer a scientific one; It's a political one. It's hard to trust any information anymore because so many people DO have some sort of agenda.
Something you may want to try is Pandora./. had an article on it a while ago, so I checked it out and I am hooked. It is a great way to find artists that you didn't know exist, since Pandora selects music based on the qualities of each piece, not a large, broad category. I have a paid account, but I think there is a free version as well that is advertisement supported. Everyone I know who has tried it loves it.
Granted, you can't download the music (it is provided through a Flash-based player, and downloading really wouldn't work well for what the service provides), but it should be able to keep you entertained.
I was an avid Werewolf player for quite some time; I still would be, if I had people to play with. (o:
When many people run Werewolf games, they concentrate on the blood and guts; Sure, rending the baddies apart can be fun, but it gets boring after a while. When I run my games I often try to concentrate more on the cultural, political, and spiritual issues that the Garou have.
If you have a good group of role players*, you can end up having story arcs that people will remember for a long time. It's possible to take something simple like "prevent this forest area from being bought and turned into apartments" and turn it into a multi-session game that people will remember for years.
I have rarely found computer RPGs to be very interesting. You are forced into a fairly linear story line. Pen and paper gaming gives you all of the flexibility your imagination can give you.
Sure, some games claim to be 'open' like, say, Morrowind; But is it really? There is the main storyline, and if you are not following that, then there's just little "fetch me the foo" and "kill the bar" quests which get repetitive quickly. The rest of the time you're still just walking around playing "munchkin", grabbing gold and xp.
Computers are finite machines; They give us only a limited number of options in a game. The human mind has no such limitation.
*Role Player vs. Roll Player, and, hate to say it, but you LARP guys scare the hell outta me... The middle ground is best. (o:
The parent comment brings up a good point. It really depends on what the programmer wants to accomplish. If all you want is to automate some simple tasks or write something simple and quickly without wanting to get into the complexity of other languages, then I would say that VB would be okay.
If the point of learning a programming language is to learn how computers function, then VB is not a good choice. Personally, I started my real programming education with C/C++. This was great; I learned a lot about how computers do things on the lower levels, things that are hidden from you when you use languages like C#/Java/VB.
Starting with C#/Java or some other OO language isn't terrible, but it does leave out some experiences; Managing your own memory, for instance (Although you CAN write un-managed code with C#), and not using objects at all. Personally I like OO code, but I realize that a LOT of code out there is just a bunch of functions. Then you have functional languages like ML; I did a bit of ML in college and loved it, it was very different from anything I had done and it stretched my brain in new directions.
Ideally, it would be best to learn several languages, not just one. Different languages are best suited for different things; C is great for low level stuff; Java/C#.Net is great for large systems; PHP is great for web development; Perl is great for masochists and whackos everywhere.
So the answer to your question, as is often the case with technology, is "it depends."
This is exactly why I stopped playing online games. I'm sick of joining a server and immediately getting pummeled with profanity and, in games that allow it (Half-Life), obscene sprays.
At least in my gaming experience, there always had been a bit of profanity around but for the most part the server admins kept it under control. Then CounterStrike became popular and the problem exploded. Noone seemed to care anymore, and it was a rare find to join a server with rules regarding profanity that were actually ENFORCED.
These days, I've become a hermit. I don't need to be called a faggot or a nigger every time I kill someone or capture the flag or whatever. That kind of treatment really ruins the fun and tends to make the games more aggravating than anything else. Whatever happened to good sportsmanship?
I work as a web application developer and my manager wants to move everything over from PHP to C#. Why? "Well," he tells us, "it's easier to find good programmers and writing good code is easier in C# than in PHP. You'll have less bugs!"
This is coming from the guy who wraps all his functions in a giant try/catch block so that he can return false if something broke and true if everything executed correctly. But he is an MSCD so he MUST be a good programmer! Right?
The truth of the matter is that it is possible to write good code in just about any language (except, perhaps, BrainFuck) as long as you have a good, solid design before you start writing code.
The NY Times is a very biased source. They have a record of intentionallymisrepresenting the facts , and that is just one case of many (a truly horrible case, at that). I find it difficult to believe what they print, as it is very obvious that the paper has a very strong bias and is willing to print lies and half-truths in order to promote an agenda. I'm disappointed whenever SlashDot links to that rag.
I suppose that this will also mean the end of using AIBOs in the 4 Legged League of the RoboCup. I was involved in this when I was in college; My senior project involved programming AIBOs to play soccer according to the RoboCup rules. It was an experimental thing for the school, and we never planned to compete in the official competition, but it was an amazing learning experience overall.
Team Gimpy Forever!
Every month or so, my managers ask me if I would be interested in a Team Lead position as well, and every time I turn it down. The reason they want me to lead a group of programmers on projects? Because I'm good at writing code.
What they fail to see is what I see every day: I do not work well with others. I hate being interrupted with phone calls, emails, people dropping by, and I don't like being responsible for what other people do. I generally don't like people at all, to tell you the truth. They're annoying. I'm also very disorganized, and my train of thought can be very difficult for other people to follow - excessive free association combined with inability to express ideas in an easy to follow format, at least when speaking.
To be an effective manager/leader, you need to be able to deal with people and you need to be organized. For some reason, they see Programming Manager as the Next Step above writing code, when, in fact, they should be looking at people in project management. They have the skills necessary and the experience.
I've told my management this many times; Yes, thank you, I appreciate the fact that you think so highly of me, but I would be a complete disaster. Here is why... Here are some other people who might be better suited...
But, they never seem to listen. I don't want to become one of those people who exemplify the Peter Principle. I don't want to make an ass out of myself. I don't want to screw over my fellow coders (They may be annoying but they're nice people).
Ideas? I don't want to be rude about it, but I do want to get it through their thick Pointy Haired Skulls that I Would Be A Crappy Manager.
I must be missing the point.
on
Hacking the Xbox
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I really think I must be. Microsoft put in some security measures on their console, and not all of them were top notch. Okay, that's a flaw in the design, but come on... This is a GAME CONSOLE. It plays games. These things aren't used to store credit card numbers.
"Netscape 8 is based on Firefox, but lets users switch between both the Firefox and IE browser engines."
I hate to say this, but if you're just going to wrap some pretty pictures and a few extra features around the IE rendering engine, what's the point? It's still IE under the hood. Hopefully the Firefox engine will be on by default. If the use becomes more widespread then maybe web developers will try to be a little more standards compliant and reduce the use of IE-specific technologies.
I tried searching for "Boulder, Colorado" and Yahoo gave me 6,150,000 matches. I was determined to see the very last link. So, I went as far as Yahoo would let me... And stopped at link 1000. I tried a few others ("Cleveland, Ohio", "Madison, Wisconsin") and it always stopped at 1000. They also omitted results with a little link to search again including the omissions.
So, it's really quite difficult to say how many pages match exactly. This is probably why they were discarding record sets returning over 1000 matches.
To be fair, Google limited the search results to 750 when searching for Boulder, Colorado, but went to 992 when I included "omitted results".
It would be very interesting if someone were to be given access to Google's and Yahoo's machines to run queries that matched as many pages as possible, just to see how accurate those estimations are.
Can someone please explain to me why they want to do this in the first place? As far as I know, there haven't been any real issues so far. I feel like this is wasted effort and money; Why fix it if it isn't broken? I read through the article and I briefed through the report itself, and I didn't see any mention of serious issues that this would solve.
I seem to enjoy this more than NetHack or Moria. Not sure why, just one of those things I suppose. It beat out HL2 for attention many times - especially after I had beaten HL2.
RLGs are great. Different game every time.
http://www.adom.de/
I work as a PHP developer right now, working on the internal company website and several websites for customers. I did take some web classes in college, but there are things that they taught me that weren't useful and some things that I wish they had taught.
What They Didn't Tell Me But Should Have:
Design / Usability. What layouts work? What don't? Which are best suited for a particular need? How can I determine if my site is usable by people? How can I make it easier to use? What practices should be avoided?
Serving Paradigms. One Page Serves All vs. Each Page Serves Itself. What are the benefits and drawbacks of each approach?
Overview of old and currently available technologies. What is out there right now? What is being phased out of use, and why?
Templating. There are some nice templating engines out there for just about every langauge... Why was this NEVER MENTIONED in school?
Load Balancing / Server Farms.
JavaScript / ActiveX. When is client side technology appropriate and how can it be USEFUL instead of HARMFUL?
What I Wish They Would Have Stayed Away From: GIF vs JPEG. Come on... Deprecation of the BLINK tag. Are you serious? HTML. Do you really need to spend time teaching CS folk HTML? If they can't learn it on their own they deserve to fail... JavaScript (the language). See comment about HTML.
ie - Teach me theory, stay away from implementation. Heck, leave all implementation details up to them if you can. They should be able to use whatever technology they want (PHP/mySQL, Ruby/Postgres, ASP/Access with an ODBC connection to an Excel Spreadsheet, Perl/flat files, Assembler/Vulcan Mind Meld, etc) as long as they can show you they they understand the theory.
I can't believe that I wasted my time in a class entitled "Advanced Dynamic Websites" to be talked at about HTML and GIF vs JPEG.
Am I the only one who is getting very turned off by anything political-related on slashdot? On an issue like Social Security, where we should be talking about economics, forumlas, possible scenarios, and other related paths, it turns into a cesspoll of Right vs. Left with horribly biased moderation and long, long strings of off topics posts.
Social Security shouldn't be a Right vs. Left issue. It should be a 'This would be a better solution because (insert data and theories here)' issue.
Oh well. In any case, I find it easier and less intrusive to dump something in a LJ post every once in a while then mail out lots of people... Especially when there is the danger of "Why didn't you tell ME when you told everyone else?" situations happening.
Steam is far more than just a server browser; It's a content delivery system. Yes, it has had problems in the past, but they're all ironed out now (I don't know anyone personally that still has issues with it, at least), and automatic updates takes away the annoying process of finding out about a patch and finding a place to download it. Steam takes care of all that automatically. Faster updated also means exploits are around for much less time before being fixed... A huge boon to online gaming. Cheaters suck.
Also note that the year 2003 had one of the highest amounts of sun spot activity in recent history. High sun spot activity has significant effects on the global climate. As the end of this article says, "There's more to global climate change than just carbon dioxide."
Where I work, we design our sites to work with IE; Not my decision, but a decision none the less. One of the things that I really missed about having to use IE over FireFox is the tabs.
Enter FlashPeaks' Slimbrowser; It is simply a browser that puts IE into tabs and has the ability to use XML-based toolbars (of limited use, but still not bad). It is a good space saver on my taskbar. There are a few minor issues but they're nothing horrible.
I would imagine that AOL's IE-based browser would be more of the same, with the addition of a bunch of garbage that they usually throw in their products (Look at what happened to ICQ as an example).
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but suppose that humans DID have the capability to alter the Earth's atmosphere. Should they? I don't think so. Earth has been doing just fine for the past billion or so years. Is pollution bad, yes. Should it be reduced? Sure. Is it the main cause of global warming and cooling? I don't think so. I haven't seen enough (thorough, unbiased, non-political) evidence to convince me otherwise.
That is, of course, the other problem with this whole Global Warming issue. It is no longer a scientific one; It's a political one. It's hard to trust any information anymore because so many people DO have some sort of agenda.
Something you may want to try is Pandora. /. had an article on it a while ago, so I checked it out and I am hooked. It is a great way to find artists that you didn't know exist, since Pandora selects music based on the qualities of each piece, not a large, broad category. I have a paid account, but I think there is a free version as well that is advertisement supported. Everyone I know who has tried it loves it.
Granted, you can't download the music (it is provided through a Flash-based player, and downloading really wouldn't work well for what the service provides), but it should be able to keep you entertained.
I was an avid Werewolf player for quite some time; I still would be, if I had people to play with. (o: When many people run Werewolf games, they concentrate on the blood and guts; Sure, rending the baddies apart can be fun, but it gets boring after a while. When I run my games I often try to concentrate more on the cultural, political, and spiritual issues that the Garou have. If you have a good group of role players*, you can end up having story arcs that people will remember for a long time. It's possible to take something simple like "prevent this forest area from being bought and turned into apartments" and turn it into a multi-session game that people will remember for years. I have rarely found computer RPGs to be very interesting. You are forced into a fairly linear story line. Pen and paper gaming gives you all of the flexibility your imagination can give you. Sure, some games claim to be 'open' like, say, Morrowind; But is it really? There is the main storyline, and if you are not following that, then there's just little "fetch me the foo" and "kill the bar" quests which get repetitive quickly. The rest of the time you're still just walking around playing "munchkin", grabbing gold and xp. Computers are finite machines; They give us only a limited number of options in a game. The human mind has no such limitation. *Role Player vs. Roll Player, and, hate to say it, but you LARP guys scare the hell outta me... The middle ground is best. (o:
The parent comment brings up a good point. It really depends on what the programmer wants to accomplish. If all you want is to automate some simple tasks or write something simple and quickly without wanting to get into the complexity of other languages, then I would say that VB would be okay.
If the point of learning a programming language is to learn how computers function, then VB is not a good choice. Personally, I started my real programming education with C/C++. This was great; I learned a lot about how computers do things on the lower levels, things that are hidden from you when you use languages like C#/Java/VB.
Starting with C#/Java or some other OO language isn't terrible, but it does leave out some experiences; Managing your own memory, for instance (Although you CAN write un-managed code with C#), and not using objects at all. Personally I like OO code, but I realize that a LOT of code out there is just a bunch of functions. Then you have functional languages like ML; I did a bit of ML in college and loved it, it was very different from anything I had done and it stretched my brain in new directions.
Ideally, it would be best to learn several languages, not just one. Different languages are best suited for different things; C is great for low level stuff; Java/C#.Net is great for large systems; PHP is great for web development; Perl is great for masochists and whackos everywhere.
So the answer to your question, as is often the case with technology, is "it depends."
This is exactly why I stopped playing online games. I'm sick of joining a server and immediately getting pummeled with profanity and, in games that allow it (Half-Life), obscene sprays.
At least in my gaming experience, there always had been a bit of profanity around but for the most part the server admins kept it under control. Then CounterStrike became popular and the problem exploded. Noone seemed to care anymore, and it was a rare find to join a server with rules regarding profanity that were actually ENFORCED.
These days, I've become a hermit. I don't need to be called a faggot or a nigger every time I kill someone or capture the flag or whatever. That kind of treatment really ruins the fun and tends to make the games more aggravating than anything else. Whatever happened to good sportsmanship?
Oh so true.
I work as a web application developer and my manager wants to move everything over from PHP to C#. Why? "Well," he tells us, "it's easier to find good programmers and writing good code is easier in C# than in PHP. You'll have less bugs!"
This is coming from the guy who wraps all his functions in a giant try/catch block so that he can return false if something broke and true if everything executed correctly. But he is an MSCD so he MUST be a good programmer! Right?
The truth of the matter is that it is possible to write good code in just about any language (except, perhaps, BrainFuck) as long as you have a good, solid design before you start writing code.
There is nothing special or unique about Quake3.
It's just like the original Quake, except it has fancier graphics and an unimaginative single player game (ie, maps with bots).
ADOM is addictive. I've been playing for five years and have yet to win, though... *Sigh* http://www.adom.de/
The NY Times is a very biased source. They have a record of intentionally misrepresenting the facts , and that is just one case of many (a truly horrible case, at that). I find it difficult to believe what they print, as it is very obvious that the paper has a very strong bias and is willing to print lies and half-truths in order to promote an agenda. I'm disappointed whenever SlashDot links to that rag.
I suppose that this will also mean the end of using AIBOs in the 4 Legged League of the RoboCup. I was involved in this when I was in college; My senior project involved programming AIBOs to play soccer according to the RoboCup rules. It was an experimental thing for the school, and we never planned to compete in the official competition, but it was an amazing learning experience overall.
Team Gimpy Forever!
Every month or so, my managers ask me if I would be interested in a Team Lead position as well, and every time I turn it down. The reason they want me to lead a group of programmers on projects? Because I'm good at writing code.
What they fail to see is what I see every day: I do not work well with others. I hate being interrupted with phone calls, emails, people dropping by, and I don't like being responsible for what other people do. I generally don't like people at all, to tell you the truth. They're annoying. I'm also very disorganized, and my train of thought can be very difficult for other people to follow - excessive free association combined with inability to express ideas in an easy to follow format, at least when speaking.
To be an effective manager/leader, you need to be able to deal with people and you need to be organized. For some reason, they see Programming Manager as the Next Step above writing code, when, in fact, they should be looking at people in project management. They have the skills necessary and the experience.
I've told my management this many times; Yes, thank you, I appreciate the fact that you think so highly of me, but I would be a complete disaster. Here is why... Here are some other people who might be better suited...
But, they never seem to listen. I don't want to become one of those people who exemplify the Peter Principle. I don't want to make an ass out of myself. I don't want to screw over my fellow coders (They may be annoying but they're nice people).
Ideas? I don't want to be rude about it, but I do want to get it through their thick Pointy Haired Skulls that I Would Be A Crappy Manager.
I really think I must be. Microsoft put in some security measures on their console, and not all of them were top notch. Okay, that's a flaw in the design, but come on... This is a GAME CONSOLE. It plays games. These things aren't used to store credit card numbers.
Now my company can't annoy the hell out of me when I'm at home! Freedom!
From the Article:
"Netscape 8 is based on Firefox, but lets users switch between both the Firefox and IE browser engines."
I hate to say this, but if you're just going to wrap some pretty pictures and a few extra features around the IE rendering engine, what's the point? It's still IE under the hood. Hopefully the Firefox engine will be on by default. If the use becomes more widespread then maybe web developers will try to be a little more standards compliant and reduce the use of IE-specific technologies.
Actually, the unemployment rate has been pretty good lately. You've been hearing wrong - an indication that you've been listening to all the wrong sources. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9172417/ http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/51/09-02-2005/8ee1000 5800e6936.html
I tried searching for "Boulder, Colorado" and Yahoo gave me 6,150,000 matches. I was determined to see the very last link. So, I went as far as Yahoo would let me... And stopped at link 1000. I tried a few others ("Cleveland, Ohio", "Madison, Wisconsin") and it always stopped at 1000. They also omitted results with a little link to search again including the omissions. So, it's really quite difficult to say how many pages match exactly. This is probably why they were discarding record sets returning over 1000 matches. To be fair, Google limited the search results to 750 when searching for Boulder, Colorado, but went to 992 when I included "omitted results". It would be very interesting if someone were to be given access to Google's and Yahoo's machines to run queries that matched as many pages as possible, just to see how accurate those estimations are.
Actually, that wouldn't be negative information at all... You would be gaining the knowledge that nothing exists in that location.
Can someone please explain to me why they want to do this in the first place? As far as I know, there haven't been any real issues so far. I feel like this is wasted effort and money; Why fix it if it isn't broken? I read through the article and I briefed through the report itself, and I didn't see any mention of serious issues that this would solve.
I seem to enjoy this more than NetHack or Moria. Not sure why, just one of those things I suppose. It beat out HL2 for attention many times - especially after I had beaten HL2. RLGs are great. Different game every time. http://www.adom.de/
I work as a PHP developer right now, working on the internal company website and several websites for customers. I did take some web classes in college, but there are things that they taught me that weren't useful and some things that I wish they had taught.
What They Didn't Tell Me But Should Have:
Design / Usability. What layouts work? What don't? Which are best suited for a particular need?
How can I determine if my site is usable by people? How can I make it easier to use? What practices should be avoided?
Serving Paradigms. One Page Serves All vs. Each Page Serves Itself. What are the benefits and drawbacks of each approach?
Overview of old and currently available technologies. What is out there right now? What is being phased out of use, and why?
Templating. There are some nice templating engines out there for just about every langauge... Why was this NEVER MENTIONED in school?
Load Balancing / Server Farms.
JavaScript / ActiveX. When is client side technology appropriate and how can it be USEFUL instead of HARMFUL?
What I Wish They Would Have Stayed Away From:
GIF vs JPEG. Come on...
Deprecation of the BLINK tag. Are you serious?
HTML. Do you really need to spend time teaching CS folk HTML? If they can't learn it on their own they deserve to fail...
JavaScript (the language). See comment about HTML.
ie - Teach me theory, stay away from implementation. Heck, leave all implementation details up to them if you can. They should be able to use whatever technology they want (PHP/mySQL, Ruby/Postgres, ASP/Access with an ODBC connection to an Excel Spreadsheet, Perl/flat files, Assembler/Vulcan Mind Meld, etc) as long as they can show you they they understand the theory.
I can't believe that I wasted my time in a class entitled "Advanced Dynamic Websites" to be talked at about HTML and GIF vs JPEG.
Social Security shouldn't be a Right vs. Left issue. It should be a 'This would be a better solution because (insert data and theories here)' issue.
"Check me out on http://www.livejournal.com"
Oh well. In any case, I find it easier and less intrusive to dump something in a LJ post every once in a while then mail out lots of people... Especially when there is the danger of "Why didn't you tell ME when you told everyone else?" situations happening.
Steam is far more than just a server browser; It's a content delivery system. Yes, it has had problems in the past, but they're all ironed out now (I don't know anyone personally that still has issues with it, at least), and automatic updates takes away the annoying process of finding out about a patch and finding a place to download it. Steam takes care of all that automatically. Faster updated also means exploits are around for much less time before being fixed... A huge boon to online gaming. Cheaters suck.
Also note that the year 2003 had one of the highest amounts of sun spot activity in recent history. High sun spot activity has significant effects on the global climate. As the end of this article says, "There's more to global climate change than just carbon dioxide."
Where I work, we design our sites to work with IE; Not my decision, but a decision none the less. One of the things that I really missed about having to use IE over FireFox is the tabs.
Enter FlashPeaks' Slimbrowser; It is simply a browser that puts IE into tabs and has the ability to use XML-based toolbars (of limited use, but still not bad). It is a good space saver on my taskbar. There are a few minor issues but they're nothing horrible.
I would imagine that AOL's IE-based browser would be more of the same, with the addition of a bunch of garbage that they usually throw in their products (Look at what happened to ICQ as an example).