I couldn't agree more. I recall my freshman year in a similar situation of sorts. They had gone the Java route as well, though I had never cared much for the language. I followed the traditional assembly, C, C++ path many years prior to attending.
The class was incredibly easy for myself, but I couldn't help but notice how much the other students struggled to grasp the most basic aspects. As far as I could tell, these kids had no clue how a computer actually worked. Memory layouts, binary math, logical operations, all of these were completely foreign to them.
One interesting in-class problem in particular stands out in my memory. We were posed the problem of taking a numerical grade in as input and printing out the correct letter grade. My solution involved a simple integer division and a switch block. Even the professor seemed a bit mystified. It was a sad day for me.
I kind of felt bad for them, but at the same time, the professor slowed the class down to accommodate them, leaving me to get virtually nothing out of the class except learning a couple of minor differences between java and C++ syntax.
I didn't even need to turn it off, as apparently it doesn't work for me for whatever reason. However, if it did, I would turn it off from what I've heard about it. I type relatively fast and generally know exactly what I intend to type before the page even loads, so it's a fairly useless feature. Let me know when they allow verbatim searches. I'm really tired of it mangling my quoted strings to offer more results that have nothing to do with what I searched for.
I see a few cheaters in Left 4 Dead from time to time, and it's always fun to mess with them. After verifying it (such as a speed hack, which is extremely obvious), I watch them for a bit to see how they play and how they use whatever cheat(s) they're using. Then I come up with workarounds and torture them until they get frustrated and leave the server.
The most recent involved someone using a speed hack. When playing as the survivors, he would just rush along to the safe room, leaving his team behind. So, I would get a hunter and take a couple shortcuts and cut him off, leaving him dead and with nothing to do for the rest of the round. As infected, he liked to spawn far away and run up to our team incredibly fast to perform an attack. Unfortunately for him, he always followed the same pattern of offsetting his position when he ran back out of range to prepare for another attack. With a bit of work, I could predict when he'd show up, and smash his face in with a shotgun before he could attack. After a few rounds spend either dead or not able to pull off a single attack, he was gone and the rest of us were able to enjoy the game.
You're right about "PC" encompassing Mac as well. My main point is that the description should have been "for Mac OS and Windows" in the way most people seem to have taken it, or "for PC" to be more general and accurate. Whatever happened to using the correct terminology to describe things? "PC" is not an operating system. If "PC" is synonymous with "Windows", then would you consider IBM's PC-DOS to be an early version of Windows?
I don't know why they would specify "Mac or PC" with a Flash game. It ran on my Linux system just fine. They had me thinking it wouldn't work under Linux for some reason (and I do know of some Flash apps that crap out under Linux!)
It's no good being absolutely brilliant but without means of communicating your brilliant discoveries to the outside world.
I've never understood this extreme method of thinking when it comes to communication skills. Just because someone isn't a professional essay writer doesn't mean they are incapable of expressing themselves. I could quite easily write a 500 word essay with very little effort. All that's required is a basic understanding of the language in which you're writing. In fact, I did write a 500 word essay for one of the standardized tests I took before starting college. I wrote it in about 20 minutes by hand and turned it in. Oddly, my score in writing was my highest of the bunch measured, one point ahead of math.
This is the same amount of effort I would have expended on an essay if my college had required one as part of the application process, with the possible exception that it would be typed instead of hand written. I'm currently sitting on a 4.0 GPA and I still consider essays on arbitrary topics to be useless.
I say; if you can't write a 500 word essay, you won't succeed in a scientific field.
This I can agree with. I think there would have to be something mentally deficient about a person to be unable to write a 500 word essay.
Re:What's the Difference Between a Computer Salesm
on
Bad PC Sales Staff Exposed
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Several years ago, I was working in computer repair at a locally owned business "competing" with the Geek Squad and a few others. And by "competing", I mean we were the place people came to get their computers fixed after the Geek Squad fucked them up even more.
During my time working there, I had written several custom diagnostic tools, and eventually a handy front end for them so we could have a single disc with most of what we used daily on it. The front end was configurable to some degree, so we could add new tools without having to recompile the front end as well. Unfortunately, as tends to happen, periodically some of these discs would get left in a CD-ROM drive when a computer went back out.
A few months after I originally created it, we got a computer in from someone who had recently taken it to the Geek Squad. In their CD-ROM drive was a utility disc from there. Upon further investigation, it was a CD running my front end that had been slightly modified to make it look like their own software. In one part of the program that doesn't get used frequently, it even still had the name of the company I worked for. So, as many others have said, they really are thieves.
I have a similar dislike of advertising. My line of thinking is that if I want to buy something, I'll find it myself when I go to the store. If some company wants me to buy their product, they should make sure it's in the appropriate aisle. If there's something they consider to be special about it, put it on the label/box/bag/whatever. Anything beyond that is unacceptable to me. It's a shame it's not really feasible to stop buying products from or patronizing companies whom I'm "forced" to see an advertisement for. Eventually, I'd run out of things I actually could buy.
You might find this article a good read. Particularly the part that says:
The phrase that a person is innocent until proven guilty refers to legal as opposed to factual guilt. In every case, the defendant either committed the offense or they did not; a fact that will remain true regardless of whether the jury acquits or convicts the defendant. The phrase means simply that a person is not legally guilty until a jury returns a verdict of guilty--which is little more than a tautology.
Obviously just anecdotal, but my cat certainly appears to be very intelligent.
He'll lay next to me and watch TV/anime with me (his head actually follows the characters on screen, and he remains focused on it for the duration of the show). He knows when I go to bed each night and will actually stop whatever he's doing a few minutes before hand and rush to the bed to lay down. He's learned my habits so well that he can generally predict where I'm going throughout the evening and when I get up to go somewhere he'll rush off to meet me at my intended destination more often than not.
I've seen him flip on light switches in the middle of the night. One night, I forgot to check the food dish before I went to bed. The next morning, I found him opening the kitchen cabinet that his food is stored in. He hasn't quite mastered the doorknobs here yet (they're the round kind), but when I took him with me while visiting my grandparents, he could open any door in their house, as they have the handle-type knobs. One of his newer tricks is that he likes to stand up alongside the chair at my main computer and reach up and press keys on the keyboard (probably imitating me).
You would have a very, very difficult time convincing me (or any of my friends who've seen my cat for any extended period of time) that he's not intelligent. Sure, he doesn't do tricks on command, but he'll come to me when I call him, that's really all the obedience I need from him.
Who should we blame when other children around the world have better second language skills in English than our childrens' first language skills?
Are you sure about this one? I work in an office of about a 50/50 mix of US workers and English as a second language workers. Most all of us are 20-40 years old and to a person, every single one of us raised in the US write more effectively. In fact, I have to rewrite most of the ESL papers before submitting them to clients due to the vast amount of simple grammatical mistakes. (Most due to verb tense (we work on instead of we worked on), if anyone was wondering.)
Does this count as irony? The not-stupid college guy above your reply made the same mistake. The original question included "when", as in this particular situation has not yet occurred, but the poster seems to believe it is inevitable.
I used to work at a PC repair shop several years ago. We were, in my opinion, one of those fairly priced and honest shops, for the most part. There's just nothing like selling USB cables for around $6 and having people refuse to buy them because "there must be something wrong with them" since Best Buy has them for $35-50 for the same lengths.
As far as the article goes, we had a policy of doing a quick check of the system before even filling out any paperwork for it, assuming it was possible (the exception being if we were so swamped with waiting customers that we didn't actually have 5 minutes to spare). The memory problem would have been fixed right there, the customer charged maybe $5-10 for labor and sent on their way.
I tried that a few years ago. After a few months of having sex 2+ times a day it just gets really boring and monotonous. There's only so many ways you can have sex with someone, and it just doesn't really seem to be worth the effort after a while.
I'm using 3.0.11 right now with 9 tabs open across 2 windows and Firefox is sitting happily at 170 MB of memory and 0% cpu usage. I've also never had a problem with it being slow or unresponsive, even when I've had 30-50 tabs open, including Flash/JavaScript pages, etc. I can't imagine how some people are managing to get the usage to 1 GB+ and such that I've seen in other posts.
I agree. Most of my friends and myself already own PS3s, so the console's price is a non-issue for us. We're just waiting on the games.
Some of them have given in and purchased Xboxes, but I've been standing my ground in hopes that one day the PS3 will have a library of games comparable to that of the PS2. I'm kind of annoyed that I wasn't able to play the new Star Ocean (seriously, why is it not on a Sony console like most of the others in the series?), but I'll live. I've tried out the other available systems, and was largely unimpressed. The Wii, while neat, didn't hold my interest for very long at all and I sold it shortly thereafter. I refuse to own an Xbox of any sort for various reasons. I suspect that once (if?) the PS3's game library expands a bit, sales will start going up at a much more desirable rate.
Infamous was a great start, we just need a few more exclusives to draw in the crowds. I'm generally opposed to exclusive games (one of the reasons I refuse to own an Xbox), but if that's what it takes to get developers on the bandwagon, then so be it.
P.S. Please don't hurt me Xbox owners. I would imagine that using those cinder blocks you guys call controllers for extended periods of time would beef someone up enough to do some real damage.
The site has come as a surprise to the archaeologists who had thought that the area had been studied in such depth that few discoveries of such magnitude remained.
If they believed a few remained, why are they so surprised to find one of them?
There's a UI? I accidentally ended up on Bing yesterday from clicking a link on a page, and with NoScript active, the page was almost entirely blank, save for a logo image and a couple of quick links. If they can't do something as simple as a search engine without Flash/JavaScript/whatever, I have no interest in using it.
I have this problem a lot, too. I've emailed their suggestion box before, but one thing I think they critically need is a way to perform verbatim searches. This seems like it should be one of the absolute basics in search engines (as in, start here, build up to what they have now). I can't recall the exact term, but a few months ago, I searched for the acronym of a company name or something along those lines, and Google decided I mispelled a common word (like "and", or "the" or something to that effect), then proceeded to discard it entirely, rendering my search query effectively empty.
That pretty well describes my experience when I was still in school. By the age of 6, I was already writing BASIC programs, reading encyclopedias for fun, and watching The Learning Channel and Discovery instead of cartoons. When I finally did start school, they of course started with absolutely primitive things that no longer interested me, so I didn't bother trying. Anything that was given to me during the class to work on I would finish and do excellently just because I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. It probably didn't help that in first grade they thought I was retarded and were about to move me to a special class, but then later found out that I was just about blind and needed glasses.
I continued this route throughout the rest of my K-12 schooling, finding everything exceptionally boring. Another major factor is that, being quite a nerd/geek, I was essentially ostracized by my peers whenever I actually did well in class. And even now, many years after having finished all of that, I don't regret it one bit, because the vast majority of what they were teaching has proven to be useless anyway. I think schools would be more successful and useful if they focused on teaching kids how to learn things themselves and where to research topics and whatnot, rather than general education that is all over the place.
For people who use these plug-ins, do you ever whitelist ads for sites you use a lot for free, or do you block everything? If the latter, can you give me the dime tour of your justification for doing so? I'm not trying to start a flame-war; I'm really trying to understand the motivation.
I fall into the "block everything" category for one simple reason: I dislike advertising of every type and in every medium. I don't want to see advertisements on websites, I make it a point to ignore billboards, and I've even stopped watching television shows before if I felt there were too many commercial breaks. As others have said as well, bandwidth becomes an issue at times. Where I live, the fastest I can get is 512Kbps down. While being a huge step above dial-up, on newer, image-heavy websites, it bogs down quite quickly, and graphical advertising only makes it take longer, resulting in the website being even less attractive to me.
I don't stick to it as much as I used to, but several years ago, I purposely stopped purchasing things that I happened to have seen an advertisement for. Unfortunately, this limited entirely too much what I was able to purchase, due to the prolific use of advertising.
I don't white-list sites, and I don't feel bad for blocking them, and if the sites decide to go pay-only or something to that effect, I likely won't bother paying as they're generally not worth any actual money anyway, with a very, very small number of exceptions. The way I feel, if there's something I want, I'll find it myself. I don't need people throwing their products in my face. I consider myself pretty much the antithesis of an impulse shopper.
By the way, one of my favorite ways to pass the time when a commercial break comes on during one of the few shows I still watch is to pay attention to the actual wording of the advertisement and find ways that it may be ambiguous and possibly misleading. Of course, this also reinforces my lack of desire to purchase that particular product or service, too.
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I couldn't agree more. I recall my freshman year in a similar situation of sorts. They had gone the Java route as well, though I had never cared much for the language. I followed the traditional assembly, C, C++ path many years prior to attending.
The class was incredibly easy for myself, but I couldn't help but notice how much the other students struggled to grasp the most basic aspects. As far as I could tell, these kids had no clue how a computer actually worked. Memory layouts, binary math, logical operations, all of these were completely foreign to them.
One interesting in-class problem in particular stands out in my memory. We were posed the problem of taking a numerical grade in as input and printing out the correct letter grade. My solution involved a simple integer division and a switch block. Even the professor seemed a bit mystified. It was a sad day for me.
I kind of felt bad for them, but at the same time, the professor slowed the class down to accommodate them, leaving me to get virtually nothing out of the class except learning a couple of minor differences between java and C++ syntax.
Eh. I don't own a cell phone either, but for a much different reason. People tended to call me when I used to have one, and I didn't like that at all.
No kidding. The song in the video is actually quite pleasant to listen to. I don't think "good" means what the summary writer thinks it means.
I didn't even need to turn it off, as apparently it doesn't work for me for whatever reason. However, if it did, I would turn it off from what I've heard about it. I type relatively fast and generally know exactly what I intend to type before the page even loads, so it's a fairly useless feature. Let me know when they allow verbatim searches. I'm really tired of it mangling my quoted strings to offer more results that have nothing to do with what I searched for.
I see a few cheaters in Left 4 Dead from time to time, and it's always fun to mess with them. After verifying it (such as a speed hack, which is extremely obvious), I watch them for a bit to see how they play and how they use whatever cheat(s) they're using. Then I come up with workarounds and torture them until they get frustrated and leave the server.
The most recent involved someone using a speed hack. When playing as the survivors, he would just rush along to the safe room, leaving his team behind. So, I would get a hunter and take a couple shortcuts and cut him off, leaving him dead and with nothing to do for the rest of the round. As infected, he liked to spawn far away and run up to our team incredibly fast to perform an attack. Unfortunately for him, he always followed the same pattern of offsetting his position when he ran back out of range to prepare for another attack. With a bit of work, I could predict when he'd show up, and smash his face in with a shotgun before he could attack. After a few rounds spend either dead or not able to pull off a single attack, he was gone and the rest of us were able to enjoy the game.
It seems to be a common trend lately. This name is almost as bad as Farmers Feed US.
You're right about "PC" encompassing Mac as well. My main point is that the description should have been "for Mac OS and Windows" in the way most people seem to have taken it, or "for PC" to be more general and accurate. Whatever happened to using the correct terminology to describe things? "PC" is not an operating system. If "PC" is synonymous with "Windows", then would you consider IBM's PC-DOS to be an early version of Windows?
You seem to be confusing "PC" with "Windows".
I've never understood this extreme method of thinking when it comes to communication skills. Just because someone isn't a professional essay writer doesn't mean they are incapable of expressing themselves. I could quite easily write a 500 word essay with very little effort. All that's required is a basic understanding of the language in which you're writing. In fact, I did write a 500 word essay for one of the standardized tests I took before starting college. I wrote it in about 20 minutes by hand and turned it in. Oddly, my score in writing was my highest of the bunch measured, one point ahead of math.
This is the same amount of effort I would have expended on an essay if my college had required one as part of the application process, with the possible exception that it would be typed instead of hand written. I'm currently sitting on a 4.0 GPA and I still consider essays on arbitrary topics to be useless.
This I can agree with. I think there would have to be something mentally deficient about a person to be unable to write a 500 word essay.
Several years ago, I was working in computer repair at a locally owned business "competing" with the Geek Squad and a few others. And by "competing", I mean we were the place people came to get their computers fixed after the Geek Squad fucked them up even more.
During my time working there, I had written several custom diagnostic tools, and eventually a handy front end for them so we could have a single disc with most of what we used daily on it. The front end was configurable to some degree, so we could add new tools without having to recompile the front end as well. Unfortunately, as tends to happen, periodically some of these discs would get left in a CD-ROM drive when a computer went back out.
A few months after I originally created it, we got a computer in from someone who had recently taken it to the Geek Squad. In their CD-ROM drive was a utility disc from there. Upon further investigation, it was a CD running my front end that had been slightly modified to make it look like their own software. In one part of the program that doesn't get used frequently, it even still had the name of the company I worked for. So, as many others have said, they really are thieves.
I have a similar dislike of advertising. My line of thinking is that if I want to buy something, I'll find it myself when I go to the store. If some company wants me to buy their product, they should make sure it's in the appropriate aisle. If there's something they consider to be special about it, put it on the label/box/bag/whatever. Anything beyond that is unacceptable to me. It's a shame it's not really feasible to stop buying products from or patronizing companies whom I'm "forced" to see an advertisement for. Eventually, I'd run out of things I actually could buy.
Obviously just anecdotal, but my cat certainly appears to be very intelligent.
He'll lay next to me and watch TV/anime with me (his head actually follows the characters on screen, and he remains focused on it for the duration of the show). He knows when I go to bed each night and will actually stop whatever he's doing a few minutes before hand and rush to the bed to lay down. He's learned my habits so well that he can generally predict where I'm going throughout the evening and when I get up to go somewhere he'll rush off to meet me at my intended destination more often than not.
I've seen him flip on light switches in the middle of the night. One night, I forgot to check the food dish before I went to bed. The next morning, I found him opening the kitchen cabinet that his food is stored in. He hasn't quite mastered the doorknobs here yet (they're the round kind), but when I took him with me while visiting my grandparents, he could open any door in their house, as they have the handle-type knobs. One of his newer tricks is that he likes to stand up alongside the chair at my main computer and reach up and press keys on the keyboard (probably imitating me).
You would have a very, very difficult time convincing me (or any of my friends who've seen my cat for any extended period of time) that he's not intelligent. Sure, he doesn't do tricks on command, but he'll come to me when I call him, that's really all the obedience I need from him.
Does this count as irony? The not-stupid college guy above your reply made the same mistake. The original question included "when", as in this particular situation has not yet occurred, but the poster seems to believe it is inevitable.
I used to work at a PC repair shop several years ago. We were, in my opinion, one of those fairly priced and honest shops, for the most part. There's just nothing like selling USB cables for around $6 and having people refuse to buy them because "there must be something wrong with them" since Best Buy has them for $35-50 for the same lengths.
As far as the article goes, we had a policy of doing a quick check of the system before even filling out any paperwork for it, assuming it was possible (the exception being if we were so swamped with waiting customers that we didn't actually have 5 minutes to spare). The memory problem would have been fixed right there, the customer charged maybe $5-10 for labor and sent on their way.
I tried that a few years ago. After a few months of having sex 2+ times a day it just gets really boring and monotonous. There's only so many ways you can have sex with someone, and it just doesn't really seem to be worth the effort after a while.
I'm using 3.0.11 right now with 9 tabs open across 2 windows and Firefox is sitting happily at 170 MB of memory and 0% cpu usage. I've also never had a problem with it being slow or unresponsive, even when I've had 30-50 tabs open, including Flash/JavaScript pages, etc. I can't imagine how some people are managing to get the usage to 1 GB+ and such that I've seen in other posts.
I agree. Most of my friends and myself already own PS3s, so the console's price is a non-issue for us. We're just waiting on the games.
Some of them have given in and purchased Xboxes, but I've been standing my ground in hopes that one day the PS3 will have a library of games comparable to that of the PS2. I'm kind of annoyed that I wasn't able to play the new Star Ocean (seriously, why is it not on a Sony console like most of the others in the series?), but I'll live. I've tried out the other available systems, and was largely unimpressed. The Wii, while neat, didn't hold my interest for very long at all and I sold it shortly thereafter. I refuse to own an Xbox of any sort for various reasons. I suspect that once (if?) the PS3's game library expands a bit, sales will start going up at a much more desirable rate.
Infamous was a great start, we just need a few more exclusives to draw in the crowds. I'm generally opposed to exclusive games (one of the reasons I refuse to own an Xbox), but if that's what it takes to get developers on the bandwagon, then so be it.
P.S. Please don't hurt me Xbox owners. I would imagine that using those cinder blocks you guys call controllers for extended periods of time would beef someone up enough to do some real damage.
If they believed a few remained, why are they so surprised to find one of them?
There's a UI? I accidentally ended up on Bing yesterday from clicking a link on a page, and with NoScript active, the page was almost entirely blank, save for a logo image and a couple of quick links. If they can't do something as simple as a search engine without Flash/JavaScript/whatever, I have no interest in using it.
I have this problem a lot, too. I've emailed their suggestion box before, but one thing I think they critically need is a way to perform verbatim searches. This seems like it should be one of the absolute basics in search engines (as in, start here, build up to what they have now). I can't recall the exact term, but a few months ago, I searched for the acronym of a company name or something along those lines, and Google decided I mispelled a common word (like "and", or "the" or something to that effect), then proceeded to discard it entirely, rendering my search query effectively empty.
That pretty well describes my experience when I was still in school. By the age of 6, I was already writing BASIC programs, reading encyclopedias for fun, and watching The Learning Channel and Discovery instead of cartoons. When I finally did start school, they of course started with absolutely primitive things that no longer interested me, so I didn't bother trying. Anything that was given to me during the class to work on I would finish and do excellently just because I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. It probably didn't help that in first grade they thought I was retarded and were about to move me to a special class, but then later found out that I was just about blind and needed glasses.
I continued this route throughout the rest of my K-12 schooling, finding everything exceptionally boring. Another major factor is that, being quite a nerd/geek, I was essentially ostracized by my peers whenever I actually did well in class. And even now, many years after having finished all of that, I don't regret it one bit, because the vast majority of what they were teaching has proven to be useless anyway. I think schools would be more successful and useful if they focused on teaching kids how to learn things themselves and where to research topics and whatnot, rather than general education that is all over the place.
But, if the kids play outside, they might be picked up by child molesters or terrorists!
I fall into the "block everything" category for one simple reason: I dislike advertising of every type and in every medium. I don't want to see advertisements on websites, I make it a point to ignore billboards, and I've even stopped watching television shows before if I felt there were too many commercial breaks. As others have said as well, bandwidth becomes an issue at times. Where I live, the fastest I can get is 512Kbps down. While being a huge step above dial-up, on newer, image-heavy websites, it bogs down quite quickly, and graphical advertising only makes it take longer, resulting in the website being even less attractive to me.
I don't stick to it as much as I used to, but several years ago, I purposely stopped purchasing things that I happened to have seen an advertisement for. Unfortunately, this limited entirely too much what I was able to purchase, due to the prolific use of advertising.
I don't white-list sites, and I don't feel bad for blocking them, and if the sites decide to go pay-only or something to that effect, I likely won't bother paying as they're generally not worth any actual money anyway, with a very, very small number of exceptions. The way I feel, if there's something I want, I'll find it myself. I don't need people throwing their products in my face. I consider myself pretty much the antithesis of an impulse shopper.
By the way, one of my favorite ways to pass the time when a commercial break comes on during one of the few shows I still watch is to pay attention to the actual wording of the advertisement and find ways that it may be ambiguous and possibly misleading. Of course, this also reinforces my lack of desire to purchase that particular product or service, too.
I'm sorry, your questions need to be in the form of a question.