Well, I guess maybe the problem was just me. Let me tell you something about myself. Maybe you can help:
In high school, when I was at home and bored, I wrote code to get objects to move around in 3D space on the screen. I figured out how to make smooth curves with cubic equations. I toyed with fractals because they looked cool. I made eclectic music by playing with trig functions.
The same year I was writing 3D transforms I was sent back a grade from trig back to algebra because I couldn't keep up. The teacher thought I was wasting my time on these programs until I had a solid foundation. To this day I want to go back and kick her ass. Despite years writing 3D games I barely squeaked though linear algebra in college. If only somebody had explained to me that those equations I used were based on 3x3 and 4x4 matrix multiplications I might have done better. Maybe I wouldn't have failed Calc if someone pointed out that the smooth curve functions that I wrote were based on the principle of keeping the derivitive of the curve continuous.
This is why I want applied math. All my life I solved math problems, learned new math myself, and applied it. All while my teachers couldn't even connect what I was doing to the theory they taught.
Call it applied math. Call it pure math. Whatever. Here's my request: Just don't let another student go through what I did.
You know I would say that too many teachers don't teach pure mathematics, so the joy of exploration and discovery and logical thought is lost.
Fact: 98% of students don't enjoy pure mathematics. It's not concrete enough, and it doesn't work. The problem is that what the teacher enjoys isn't what the average human being enjoys. I know it gives you great pleasure, and the joy of solving an equation is a high. I know that feeling. I've had it before. But it is easy to teach those people. So this approach doesn't work. To teach, you have to learn how OTHER people think and feel.
The focus is on teaching kids the applications of math and they never get to understand how to think about math, how to think logically, how to explore the structure of our own mental creations/
That's what applications of math are: a chance to understand, think logically, and explore. It's not teaching formulas!
Applied mathematics means problem solving. It means making them derive the "pure math" by giving them a reason to do it. If you tell an Algebra student to derive the quadratic equation they will fall asleep. But if you tell them there is a secret formula that can solve any ballistics equation without factoring, and they will be intrigued.
Tell them to figure out how to compute the volume of a solid of rotation and they are miserable. Tell them to compute the volume of Mrs. StinkyTeacher, given the equation for her gut. Now they get it.
I had computer games in the classroom when I was in 1st grade in 1984. Perhaps the perception of games has changed? I rather enjoyed playing verb lift, and getting to shoot aliens every time I correctly answered some math problem. Maybe now the problem is that kids get to destroy demons and rescue princesses too young. Is the magic and motivational factor is gone by the time they are ready to learn?
I worry about someone who would play Grand Theft Auto for ten hours a day. It's a masturbatory activity, and it would be better if people put down the controller and went outside.'"
He's kinda right on this one. This isn't the case fo all video gamers, but it probably is for the ones who do play 10 hours a day. Especially now that video games <==> marketing. A certain amount of video gaming has become like mainstream reality TV. Boorish, unintelligent, and laden with ads. Jack's problem is that he can't distinguish those from the artistic intelligent games played by more moderate gamers.
Too many teachers don't teach applied mathematics, so math becomes boring and hard. Every single forumla you learn from Algebra I to Multivariable calculus and beyond can be used to solve a problem in the very room the student sits. Teachers need to show the students how to calculate the position of satellites, the amount of power flowing into the room, how far they can throw a ball, or how hard I could bury my fist into the jerk sitting next to me.
As a programmer, I found that I was using maths beyond my grade level and didn't even know it. But my teachers weren't supportive of my applied uses of math. They actually scorned me for using a computer to solve problems. It was only "learning" if I did all the work by hand. They missed whole the point of education.
No, 3 years ago was the year for HTPCs. Back when a good CPU was 35 watts. When a Micro ATX case had a 150 watt power supply. Back when a single 80mm fan was good enough. Look at the rigs they are promoting now: a 430 watt power supply (a DVD player is probably 100 watts). Two 120mm fans. A full-size desktop case. Integrated LCD displays (none of my home theater equipment has or needs an LCD display). These things don't look or act at all like "home theater" devices. They are more like high-end gaming PCs.
The year of the HTPC will return when I see reasonable-priced PCs that are 2" tall, use 100 watts, and work with my existing universal remote control.
1) Even if they do have FAT pre-installed, that doesn't matter. A patent applies to the device that is using the FAT system (camera, computer, etc.), not the media it is on. (For example: A patent woudl apply to a printing press, but not to the book that is printed by the press.) 2) His point is that they don't have to have it pre-installed anyway. The device you put it in can do the formatting easily enough.
Also, just because something is modded-up that you think is wrong, doesn't mean that the moderation system is bad. You may be modded down merely for the comment.
Good point. How would one go about determining that? Wouldn't Novell have already done this research? Patents aren't secret. Wouldn't they have had to submit those patents to the ECMA when they agreed to RAND? And why would they have have agreed to RAND on patents they don't have? I really wish I was sure about this stuff. Maybe it's time to email Miguel.
News Bulletin: Scientists have now accurately determined the mass of Pluto, further proving that Pluto is not actually a God, but a planet. This adds one more nail into the coffin of Greek and Roman mythology.
WTF??? Why did the article even see a need to comment about the impact on this psuedoscience theory. The researchers looking into bee flight weren't doing it to disprove ID. It sounds like some pissed-off researcher, or perhaps a news reporter with an agenda, decided to throw in an off-hand comment about ID. It cheapens the research.
The Wikipedia article is wrong. I think I'm going to update it unless someone can tell me why I'm wrong. It says:
Mono and Microsoft's Patents: The problematic parts are not the core technologies submitted to the ECMA or the Unix/Gnome-specific parts. The problematic parts are technologies developed by Microsoft on top of the.NET Framework, such as ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows Forms.
I believe the above statement is false. The core technologies are patented. By submitting the core technologies to the ECMA, Microsoft agrees to "reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND)" licensing. RAND does not mean free. That means that, worst case, Microsoft can charge you a per-copy license for using Mono. I consider that problematic, and I think most OSS developers would too.
Actually it is quite easy because of one crucial difference. It's not the implementation that matters, it is the interface. And.NET provides a good interface.
Even if Microsoft implemented the.NET APIs as wrappers around Windows APIs, the fact is that the APIs are clean and they are well documented. They follow the rules of encapsulation well. That makes it possible to re-implement them in a straightforward fashion. The problem with WINE is that the Windows API does not follow good design and rules of encapsulation, so the implementation is often exposed. WINE is not an implementation of an API as much as it is a reverse-engineering of one. But that problem goes away with.NET.
Mono today works stunningly well today. The only issue is Windows Forms, because it isn't as well encapsulated as the rest of the API.
I'm sorry for all the nay-saying Slashdot Geeks: But consumers just don't care about DRM. Everyone I know who buys music from an online music service is getting secure WMA or FairPlay music files, copying them to their MP3 players, and whistling with happiness. I have yet to hear one of them go "Oh My Gosh! You mean, I can't copy those files to another MP3 player? Or to my friend's MP3 player"
Now, maybe in 3 years when they go to buy new MP3 players they will complain that their music collection is useless. But more likely, they will burn those music files to CD, then MP3 them again and be fine with it. I can hear the screams of anguish from the audiophiles talking about the loss of quality from the MP3->CD->MP3 conversions. It won't matter since most of those MP3 players come with cheezy earbuds anyway.
Right now, DRM is winning. This is really bad news for those of us who don't want to hack their BIOSs to install Linux in a few years...
I wonder if C++ will remain the language for video games for a long time. It is one of those places where OO + efficiency are important. I believe there are engines written in C, but seldom entire games any more. Business systems care more about readability and scalability than efficiency, and languages like C#/Java offer a better balance there.
Now, pharmaceutical companies can rest assured they won't lose profits to a domestic market, and India is suddenly a profitable location for performing the expensive tests required for Food and Drug Administration clearance of any drug.
This is a very interesting statement. One part of patent theory is that commercial organizations won't invest in developing new products unless they have a guarantee that someone else can't just copy their product and sell it. It will be interesting to see if abiding by drug patents promotes drug manufacturing and research to move to India, or if it means that they can't afford the patent costs and nobody can afford drugs there anymore.
However... isn't this energy that would just be wasted, anyway?
No. It slows down your car when you drive over it, so it isn't energy that would just be wasted. Sorry to steal your thunder, your heart was in the right place.
(Aside: Assuming the device is 100% efficient, which is impossible, then the extra gas used by driving over it is exactly equal to the energy the device would gain. So nobody is saving anything. Since the device cannot be 100% efficient, it is actually better to power it from the a gas engine directory, or from the power grid, or solar, or anything else.)
1) Lots of things want access to various areas in HKLM or HKCR. They might only read the areas, but the program asks for read/write/delete/create access since it was coded poorly. You can grant the software such rights, but that is a serious change. I want a new access level called "lie" which tells the program that it has write access, but then only fails when it actually tries to write.
2) Some of them just don't work anyway. I've used regmon+filemon on some games, given them everything, but they still refuse to run. Usually those are the ones that fail in a random way (like Tron 2.0 -- the "launch game" button is disabled unless you are in the Administrator group. It doesn't actually ever need Administrator access though.)
Just to clarify: Companies aren't convicted of being monopolies. It isn't a crime to be a monopoly. It IS a crime to abuse monopoly powers or engage in anti-competitive behavior. That's what Microsoft was convicted of.
Q: What makes a bad font? A: One that requires XHTML + CSS + Javascript + Flash to display.
Is there some font fetish that I just don't get? Unless I am printing a nifty banner for a 6-year old's birthday, or a logo which should be an image anyway, then it just doesn't matter. As far as I care, there are three fonts: Serif, and Sans-Serif, and Fixed width.
Technically, this is an interesting hack, but please don't try to it on my computer. I have Flash block in place because Flash is constantly abused like this. Please don't make it worse. If people really really really cared that much about their fonts then we would have a standard mechanism for download fonts, and better font renderers. But frankly, for 99% of the population, the fonts are just fine.
...even though it's better than it used to be, file corruption is still the number one blame for any unexplained mishap.
This goes for installation failures, database bugs, downloads that didn't seem to work, etc. No amount of compression, checksums, CRCs, digital signatures, or backups can ever prevent this magical "corruption." And as proof that it must be corruption, no tool is ever adequate enough to fix it.
This is true especially if you are dealing with someone old-skool. If you hear "...must have been a bad checksum during the transfer. I remember back when I used XMODEM..." then it is time to put on your luddite-retardent gear.
1) Aspect ratio Am I the only one who thinks it is ridiculous to have to look at the signal, determine if it looks kinda squished, then hit the aspect ratio button? It would not have been the hard to embed an aspect ratio signal into the broadcast. It's even sillier on wired signals like component video. Only DVI/HDMI sends this information. That's dumb. My TV should be told if the image is wide or not. And for cases where an image is 4:3 letterboxed, it isn't THAT hard to write an algorithm to check if the signal has black bars on all sides and re-scale the image to fit the screen.
2) Resolution Half the channels are compressed so badly HD looks no better than SD. Couple that with the fact that many HDTVs will de-interlace SD images, but not HD images, and you are actually getting a worse signal.
(Don't believe me on that last point? My Panasonic HDTV does this: It deinterlaces 480i-->480p, but 1080i is displayed as 1080i. So the 1080i looks waaay worse than the 480i. I would rather it downscale the image than display it all flickery and wonky).
Common sense and a bit of understanding are for more important. I've never, in my 15 years of computing, had a virus. They really aren't THAT hard to get. Most mom&pops don't get viruses, they get adware trojan horses, and virus protection doesn't really help there. Most systems don't have that many open ports, and lots of people have a NAT type firewall even if they don't know it.
I really hope that these tools are band-aids that go away in a few years once systems like IE don't have so many vulnerabilities, and once the most popular OSs...windows... don't run as administrator all the time. Then it will become mostly moot.
Who started the Crusades? People with Christian values.
Jesus no! (pun intended) * The people who started the crusades may have called themselves Christians. * You may even decide to call them Christians. * They may even have been Christians. * But they certainly did not have Christian values!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I guess maybe the problem was just me. Let me tell you something about myself. Maybe you can help:
In high school, when I was at home and bored, I wrote code to get objects to move around in 3D space on the screen. I figured out how to make smooth curves with cubic equations. I toyed with fractals because they looked cool. I made eclectic music by playing with trig functions.
The same year I was writing 3D transforms I was sent back a grade from trig back to algebra because I couldn't keep up. The teacher thought I was wasting my time on these programs until I had a solid foundation. To this day I want to go back and kick her ass. Despite years writing 3D games I barely squeaked though linear algebra in college. If only somebody had explained to me that those equations I used were based on 3x3 and 4x4 matrix multiplications I might have done better. Maybe I wouldn't have failed Calc if someone pointed out that the smooth curve functions that I wrote were based on the principle of keeping the derivitive of the curve continuous.
This is why I want applied math. All my life I solved math problems, learned new math myself, and applied it. All while my teachers couldn't even connect what I was doing to the theory they taught.
Call it applied math. Call it pure math. Whatever. Here's my request: Just don't let another student go through what I did.
Applied mathematics means problem solving. It means making them derive the "pure math" by giving them a reason to do it. If you tell an Algebra student to derive the quadratic equation they will fall asleep. But if you tell them there is a secret formula that can solve any ballistics equation without factoring, and they will be intrigued.
Tell them to figure out how to compute the volume of a solid of rotation and they are miserable. Tell them to compute the volume of Mrs. StinkyTeacher, given the equation for her gut. Now they get it.
I had computer games in the classroom when I was in 1st grade in 1984. Perhaps the perception of games has changed? I rather enjoyed playing verb lift, and getting to shoot aliens every time I correctly answered some math problem. Maybe now the problem is that kids get to destroy demons and rescue princesses too young. Is the magic and motivational factor is gone by the time they are ready to learn?
Too many teachers don't teach applied mathematics, so math becomes boring and hard. Every single forumla you learn from Algebra I to Multivariable calculus and beyond can be used to solve a problem in the very room the student sits. Teachers need to show the students how to calculate the position of satellites, the amount of power flowing into the room, how far they can throw a ball, or how hard I could bury my fist into the jerk sitting next to me.
As a programmer, I found that I was using maths beyond my grade level and didn't even know it. But my teachers weren't supportive of my applied uses of math. They actually scorned me for using a computer to solve problems. It was only "learning" if I did all the work by hand. They missed whole the point of education.
No, 3 years ago was the year for HTPCs. Back when a good CPU was 35 watts. When a Micro ATX case had a 150 watt power supply. Back when a single 80mm fan was good enough. Look at the rigs they are promoting now: a 430 watt power supply (a DVD player is probably 100 watts). Two 120mm fans. A full-size desktop case. Integrated LCD displays (none of my home theater equipment has or needs an LCD display). These things don't look or act at all like "home theater" devices. They are more like high-end gaming PCs.
The year of the HTPC will return when I see reasonable-priced PCs that are 2" tall, use 100 watts, and work with my existing universal remote control.
The grandparent posted is correct.
1) Even if they do have FAT pre-installed, that doesn't matter. A patent applies to the device that is using the FAT system (camera, computer, etc.), not the media it is on. (For example: A patent woudl apply to a printing press, but not to the book that is printed by the press.)
2) His point is that they don't have to have it pre-installed anyway. The device you put it in can do the formatting easily enough.
Also, just because something is modded-up that you think is wrong, doesn't mean that the moderation system is bad. You may be modded down merely for the comment.
Good point. How would one go about determining that? Wouldn't Novell have already done this research? Patents aren't secret. Wouldn't they have had to submit those patents to the ECMA when they agreed to RAND? And why would they have have agreed to RAND on patents they don't have? I really wish I was sure about this stuff. Maybe it's time to email Miguel.
News Bulletin: Scientists have now accurately determined the mass of Pluto, further proving that Pluto is not actually a God, but a planet. This adds one more nail into the coffin of Greek and Roman mythology.
WTF??? Why did the article even see a need to comment about the impact on this psuedoscience theory. The researchers looking into bee flight weren't doing it to disprove ID. It sounds like some pissed-off researcher, or perhaps a news reporter with an agenda, decided to throw in an off-hand comment about ID. It cheapens the research.
Actually it is quite easy because of one crucial difference. It's not the implementation that matters, it is the interface. And .NET provides a good interface.
.NET APIs as wrappers around Windows APIs, the fact is that the APIs are clean and they are well documented. They follow the rules of encapsulation well. That makes it possible to re-implement them in a straightforward fashion. The problem with WINE is that the Windows API does not follow good design and rules of encapsulation, so the implementation is often exposed. WINE is not an implementation of an API as much as it is a reverse-engineering of one. But that problem goes away with .NET.
Even if Microsoft implemented the
Mono today works stunningly well today. The only issue is Windows Forms, because it isn't as well encapsulated as the rest of the API.
I'm sorry for all the nay-saying Slashdot Geeks: But consumers just don't care about DRM. Everyone I know who buys music from an online music service is getting secure WMA or FairPlay music files, copying them to their MP3 players, and whistling with happiness. I have yet to hear one of them go "Oh My Gosh! You mean, I can't copy those files to another MP3 player? Or to my friend's MP3 player"
Now, maybe in 3 years when they go to buy new MP3 players they will complain that their music collection is useless. But more likely, they will burn those music files to CD, then MP3 them again and be fine with it. I can hear the screams of anguish from the audiophiles talking about the loss of quality from the MP3->CD->MP3 conversions. It won't matter since most of those MP3 players come with cheezy earbuds anyway.
Right now, DRM is winning. This is really bad news for those of us who don't want to hack their BIOSs to install Linux in a few years...
I wonder if C++ will remain the language for video games for a long time. It is one of those places where OO + efficiency are important. I believe there are engines written in C, but seldom entire games any more. Business systems care more about readability and scalability than efficiency, and languages like C#/Java offer a better balance there.
I don't have cable TV anymore - do they still show BattleBots? Is that type of stuff profitable?
Do retailers ever refuse to buy back or sell used stuff based on EULAs? Just curious if anyone has an example.
This is a very interesting statement. One part of patent theory is that commercial organizations won't invest in developing new products unless they have a guarantee that someone else can't just copy their product and sell it. It will be interesting to see if abiding by drug patents promotes drug manufacturing and research to move to India, or if it means that they can't afford the patent costs and nobody can afford drugs there anymore.
(Aside: Assuming the device is 100% efficient, which is impossible, then the extra gas used by driving over it is exactly equal to the energy the device would gain. So nobody is saving anything. Since the device cannot be 100% efficient, it is actually better to power it from the a gas engine directory, or from the power grid, or solar, or anything else.)
I do that but it doesn't always work:
1) Lots of things want access to various areas in HKLM or HKCR. They might only read the areas, but the program asks for read/write/delete/create access since it was coded poorly. You can grant the software such rights, but that is a serious change. I want a new access level called "lie" which tells the program that it has write access, but then only fails when it actually tries to write.
2) Some of them just don't work anyway. I've used regmon+filemon on some games, given them everything, but they still refuse to run. Usually those are the ones that fail in a random way (like Tron 2.0 -- the "launch game" button is disabled unless you are in the Administrator group. It doesn't actually ever need Administrator access though.)
Just to clarify: Companies aren't convicted of being monopolies. It isn't a crime to be a monopoly. It IS a crime to abuse monopoly powers or engage in anti-competitive behavior. That's what Microsoft was convicted of.
Q: What makes a bad font?
A: One that requires XHTML + CSS + Javascript + Flash to display.
Is there some font fetish that I just don't get? Unless I am printing a nifty banner for a 6-year old's birthday, or a logo which should be an image anyway, then it just doesn't matter. As far as I care, there are three fonts: Serif, and Sans-Serif, and Fixed width.
Technically, this is an interesting hack, but please don't try to it on my computer. I have Flash block in place because Flash is constantly abused like this. Please don't make it worse. If people really really really cared that much about their fonts then we would have a standard mechanism for download fonts, and better font renderers. But frankly, for 99% of the population, the fonts are just fine.
...even though it's better than it used to be, file corruption is still the number one blame for any unexplained mishap.
This goes for installation failures, database bugs, downloads that didn't seem to work, etc. No amount of compression, checksums, CRCs, digital signatures, or backups can ever prevent this magical "corruption." And as proof that it must be corruption, no tool is ever adequate enough to fix it.
This is true especially if you are dealing with someone old-skool. If you hear "...must have been a bad checksum during the transfer. I remember back when I used XMODEM..." then it is time to put on your luddite-retardent gear.
It's the video formats.
1) Aspect ratio
Am I the only one who thinks it is ridiculous to have to look at the signal, determine if it looks kinda squished, then hit the aspect ratio button? It would not have been the hard to embed an aspect ratio signal into the broadcast. It's even sillier on wired signals like component video. Only DVI/HDMI sends this information. That's dumb. My TV should be told if the image is wide or not. And for cases where an image is 4:3 letterboxed, it isn't THAT hard to write an algorithm to check if the signal has black bars on all sides and re-scale the image to fit the screen.
2) Resolution
Half the channels are compressed so badly HD looks no better than SD. Couple that with the fact that many HDTVs will de-interlace SD images, but not HD images, and you are actually getting a worse signal.
(Don't believe me on that last point? My Panasonic HDTV does this: It deinterlaces 480i-->480p, but 1080i is displayed as 1080i. So the 1080i looks waaay worse than the 480i. I would rather it downscale the image than display it all flickery and wonky).
Common sense and a bit of understanding are for more important. I've never, in my 15 years of computing, had a virus. They really aren't THAT hard to get. Most mom&pops don't get viruses, they get adware trojan horses, and virus protection doesn't really help there. Most systems don't have that many open ports, and lots of people have a NAT type firewall even if they don't know it.
...windows... don't run as administrator all the time. Then it will become mostly moot.
I really hope that these tools are band-aids that go away in a few years once systems like IE don't have so many vulnerabilities, and once the most popular OSs
(I used the word "most" a lot in there)
* The people who started the crusades may have called themselves Christians.
* You may even decide to call them Christians.
* They may even have been Christians.
* But they certainly did not have Christian values!