As a student I can honestly say even when theyre all scanned and everything theyre still rubbish. My advice is to take those hundred dollars and get someone to type them for you..or do it yourself..once you get to know latex its pretty quick for laying out equations and stuff, only scan in diagrams etc and include them in your latex document in eps format.
Seriously the last thing the students need is for their professor to thing he's fulfilled the task of putting the course notes on the web when all that up is some scans of barely legible scrawls
For $5/hour I'd happily translate some notes into latex maybe you could approach the students on the course to see if they'd be willing to do the donkey work.
What is it with you pussy americans. Over here in goot old Brit-land we drink this stuff with vodka.
A typical night out at a club might be 9/10 double vodka and redbulls. Each of those has a tin of redbull in it.
In fact tesco (a big 'ol grocery store) has started selling their own brand called kick which comes in a 1 litre bottle for a mere 99p. It is very popular with students like me and running up to exams (like now) a can drink 2 or 3 of these a day.
The cool thing about these drinks is they do keep you awake a bit, and even better they dont mince your bowels like drinking 10+ cups of superstrength espresso does.
Im going to get flamed by all the MS hating bearded linux evangelists who still live in their parents bedroom but...
I think IE6 is a better browser..sure it has some bugs but have any of you actually bothered trying to lay out complicated pages using CSS in mozilla?? Its a freaking nightmare, it implements the css standars yes but if you do something a little weird rather than degrade gracefully and do what you intended all along it will generally just refuse to render the element at all.
At the moment IE is the ONLY web browser which is remotely usable in terms of performance, ease of use and quantity of web pages which are actually rendered correctly. Mozilla for me doesnt even render slashdot correctly about 1 time in 5, quite why it is rendered non-deterministically is also slightly beyond me.
Instead what i would rather see happen is IE's standards opened up so that the other browsers can implement IE's formally proprietary DOM. This way most of the battle is allready done since IE is compliant 99% of peeps are viewing through a compliant browser.
Basically what needs to be done is stop thinking of the self appointed W3C as the standards body but rather the company which actually implements the most succesful browser as having allready set the standard.
And no it doesnt mean we need to return to the bad old days of IE/Netscape 3. Theses days browsers are written by very professional teams who are good enough to ensure that that kind of divergent craziness doesnt happen any more.
actually the semantic web is a topic of considerable study right now. Im still waiting to hear if my phD proposal on "Inference on the smeantic web" is going to be accepted at the university of Bristol.
I dont really think this has anything to do with the sort of training you receive in the workplace. These are abstract problems which are a prime candidate for testing an applicants knowledge of fundamental algorithms and how to select the best datastructure for the job.
Looking at the sample set of problems the tiling problem and the dependancy problem should be able to be solved optimally (in terms of time complexity) fairly easily since they are both simplifications of well known problems in CS.
The smiley face problem is quite interesting and i agree that this one could expose some really good creatinve thinking.
All in all based on the sample problems I think this competition would be ideally suited to strong computer science students or recent graduates. Most people in the work place have totally forgotten all of the necesary kind of skills since in the real world they don't work quite so well
To be honest it makes a change to have a situation that favours students over those with experience in the industry. Slashdot all too often slams graduates fresh out of uni simply because they make mistakes due to lack of experience in the field.
I cant beleive this rubbish, this guy has nothing but a lurking suspicion that this JBoss faking thing is going on and certainly not a shred of evidence that is is a policy of the JBoss organisation.
This reeks to me like an attempt to use slashdot to drive traffic to the submitters personal blog.
I see that teaching a course where the output is a complete game is valuable but why do it for a NES emulater and why in a dialect of basic?? Students will learn a lot more being able to produce sightly more unfinished demo's using more relevant technology.
For example which is more useful to a potential game designer, being able to write and understand algorithms to manipulate the pallete to get more apparent colours or learning how to use Direct Input (or some other modern API, like OpenGL)??
I was actually thinking more of things like the Crusades and stuff like that where most of the population certainly of this country (UK) beleived actively in the righteousness of the cause.
But anyhow these particular events aren't that important to my point. It kind of responds to your previous point that only one point of view can be right.
Basically an event happens. Lets say the WTC attack. There is no way we can measure the evillness of this act. The act itself isn't evil by fundamental properties. The universe has no concept of evil. Rather we interpret the act as evil. Some islamic fringe groups may interpret the act as good. That certainly doesnt mean i support the act. Is my interpretation of the act as evil more correct? Well the only real way to measure that is by social concensus. By most of the worlds standards i think my interpretation of the act as evil is valid. But what about dogs? Do they interpret the WTC attack as evil, probably not but they are a lower form of intelligence. Perhaps we appear like a lower form of intelligence to an extra-terrestrial civilisation. Lets say this civilisation also thinks genocide is a good thing, they could justify their decision in the same way.
Of course since good and evil are just interpretations there is no absolute correct answer. We are just arrogant enough to beleive that our moral views are fundamental natural laws. They aren't.
Your right, i was perhaps a little over-strong. You are prefectly correct that any kind of scripture can't be read as a scientific text. But that is why i think they are often perceived to be in conflict.
When reading a religious text there are two common ways to interpret it. These days most modern practitioners dont take the text itself at face value but rather interpret the stories/ parables etc as lessons teaching a better way to live. These people are very rarely in conflict with science since they don't beleive absolutely in for example the whole creationist story (ie 7 days etc). In fact many notable scientists fall into this category, Einstein for example saw God's handiwork through the elegant structure of the universe. This is a perfect example of how he has interpreted the religion but not relied on it at face value.
The real conflict usually occurs with those who DO practice their religion with unquestioning acceptance. This was a lot more common in the past and it is really with this area of religion that science is in conflict with.
But your only applying judgement based on our societies views. Yes i and i should imagine most of the world beleive that genocide/murder/torture etc are morally reprehensible but this wasn't always the case.
Its not really a question of religion solely either but religion often proscribes a certain morality.
Also Im not saying any of these acts are OK or even that if somebody commits acts like these beleiving they are RIGHT or JUST is OK. Rather I am saying that good and evil are terms which are totally open for interpretation. What one person calls EVIL somebody else could call GOOD. They are just words which describe opposite ends of a scale of morality. What that actual scale is will vary from society to society and is likely to vary immensly in the case of extra-terrestrial life.
The other problem you seem to have is that you think that this means that people with a different code of conduct are justified in practicing acts we hold as evil. This isnt the case. They justify something to themselves but their justification will be totally invalid for people with other more normal social sensibilies.
I think the reason that they are often at odds with each other is more to do with methodology. A scientist must question everything whereas religion requires unconditional acceptance.
Also that and there is so many obvious fallacies written in the holy texts that they must be viewed by any OBJECTIVE scientist as having at least some flaws.
Or perhaps more likely an alens concept of good and evil would be totally different to our. Just look at the variation throughout our own history. In plenty of cultures in the past animal or human sacrifice have been considered holy (good) acts whereas by todays moral compass they are obviously heinous acts.
Good and evil is a relative term defined entirely by social contract. What is the chance extra-terrestrial beings would have the same morality as we do?
This kind of seems like an attempt to encourage a fork or code branch..wouldnt this decrease the quality.
Seems like MS wants firefox to concentrate on Longhorn only features and my guess is they're hoping the linux branch suffers because of it thus securing longhorn domination in the web browser stakes.
A pretty sneaky tactic but hopfully the firefox team will keep everything cross platform
Part of the problem about using AI is that it is kind of an umbrella term which covers everything from expert systems, neural nets, adaptive computing, machine vision.
Also AI techniques aren't always the best way to approach large engineering type tasks like space missions. While getting neural nets to perform intelligent behavious is helping our understanding what intelligence is and how it works most of these technologies just aren't ready for prime time yet
Slashdot Mirror
As a student I can honestly say even when theyre all scanned and everything theyre still rubbish. My advice is to take those hundred dollars and get someone to type them for you..or do it yourself..once you get to know latex its pretty quick for laying out equations and stuff, only scan in diagrams etc and include them in your latex document in eps format.
/hour I'd happily translate some notes into latex maybe you could approach the students on the course to see if they'd be willing to do the donkey work.
Seriously the last thing the students need is for their professor to thing he's fulfilled the task of putting the course notes on the web when all that up is some scans of barely legible scrawls
For $5
What is it with you pussy americans. Over here in goot old Brit-land we drink this stuff with vodka.
A typical night out at a club might be 9/10 double vodka and redbulls. Each of those has a tin of redbull in it.
In fact tesco (a big 'ol grocery store) has started selling their own brand called kick which comes in a 1 litre bottle for a mere 99p. It is very popular with students like me and running up to exams (like now) a can drink 2 or 3 of these a day.
The cool thing about these drinks is they do keep you awake a bit, and even better they dont mince your bowels like drinking 10+ cups of superstrength espresso does.
meh..i would have thought that they are one of the few people who stand to lose out from linux becoming more usable
Im going to get flamed by all the MS hating bearded linux evangelists who still live in their parents bedroom but...
I think IE6 is a better browser..sure it has some bugs but have any of you actually bothered trying to lay out complicated pages using CSS in mozilla?? Its a freaking nightmare, it implements the css standars yes but if you do something a little weird rather than degrade gracefully and do what you intended all along it will generally just refuse to render the element at all.
At the moment IE is the ONLY web browser which is remotely usable in terms of performance, ease of use and quantity of web pages which are actually rendered correctly. Mozilla for me doesnt even render slashdot correctly about 1 time in 5, quite why it is rendered non-deterministically is also slightly beyond me.
Instead what i would rather see happen is IE's standards opened up so that the other browsers can implement IE's formally proprietary DOM. This way most of the battle is allready done since IE is compliant 99% of peeps are viewing through a compliant browser.
Basically what needs to be done is stop thinking of the self appointed W3C as the standards body but rather the company which actually implements the most succesful browser as having allready set the standard.
And no it doesnt mean we need to return to the bad old days of IE/Netscape 3. Theses days browsers are written by very professional teams who are good enough to ensure that that kind of divergent craziness doesnt happen any more.
In conclusion you all suck
actually the semantic web is a topic of considerable study right now. Im still waiting to hear if my phD proposal on "Inference on the smeantic web" is going to be accepted at the university of Bristol.
I dont really think this has anything to do with the sort of training you receive in the workplace. These are abstract problems which are a prime candidate for testing an applicants knowledge of fundamental algorithms and how to select the best datastructure for the job.
Looking at the sample set of problems the tiling problem and the dependancy problem should be able to be solved optimally (in terms of time complexity) fairly easily since they are both simplifications of well known problems in CS.
The smiley face problem is quite interesting and i agree that this one could expose some really good creatinve thinking.
All in all based on the sample problems I think this competition would be ideally suited to strong computer science students or recent graduates. Most people in the work place have totally forgotten all of the necesary kind of skills since in the real world they don't work quite so well
To be honest it makes a change to have a situation that favours students over those with experience in the industry. Slashdot all too often slams graduates fresh out of uni simply because they make mistakes due to lack of experience in the field.
I cant beleive this rubbish, this guy has nothing but a lurking suspicion that this JBoss faking thing is going on and certainly not a shred of evidence that is is a policy of the JBoss organisation.
This reeks to me like an attempt to use slashdot to drive traffic to the submitters personal blog.
I see that teaching a course where the output is a complete game is valuable but why do it for a NES emulater and why in a dialect of basic?? Students will learn a lot more being able to produce sightly more unfinished demo's using more relevant technology. For example which is more useful to a potential game designer, being able to write and understand algorithms to manipulate the pallete to get more apparent colours or learning how to use Direct Input (or some other modern API, like OpenGL)??
haha so it doesnt..but then neither does the "arrow" button
thats the infinite health cheat for halo in the ps2 isnt it? Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right Back Arrow Square????
I was actually thinking more of things like the Crusades and stuff like that where most of the population certainly of this country (UK) beleived actively in the righteousness of the cause.
But anyhow these particular events aren't that important to my point. It kind of responds to your previous point that only one point of view can be right.
Basically an event happens. Lets say the WTC attack. There is no way we can measure the evillness of this act. The act itself isn't evil by fundamental properties. The universe has no concept of evil. Rather we interpret the act as evil. Some islamic fringe groups may interpret the act as good. That certainly doesnt mean i support the act. Is my interpretation of the act as evil more correct? Well the only real way to measure that is by social concensus. By most of the worlds standards i think my interpretation of the act as evil is valid. But what about dogs? Do they interpret the WTC attack as evil, probably not but they are a lower form of intelligence. Perhaps we appear like a lower form of intelligence to an extra-terrestrial civilisation. Lets say this civilisation also thinks genocide is a good thing, they could justify their decision in the same way.
Of course since good and evil are just interpretations there is no absolute correct answer. We are just arrogant enough to beleive that our moral views are fundamental natural laws. They aren't.
Your right, i was perhaps a little over-strong. You are prefectly correct that any kind of scripture can't be read as a scientific text. But that is why i think they are often perceived to be in conflict. When reading a religious text there are two common ways to interpret it. These days most modern practitioners dont take the text itself at face value but rather interpret the stories/ parables etc as lessons teaching a better way to live. These people are very rarely in conflict with science since they don't beleive absolutely in for example the whole creationist story (ie 7 days etc). In fact many notable scientists fall into this category, Einstein for example saw God's handiwork through the elegant structure of the universe. This is a perfect example of how he has interpreted the religion but not relied on it at face value.
The real conflict usually occurs with those who DO practice their religion with unquestioning acceptance. This was a lot more common in the past and it is really with this area of religion that science is in conflict with.
But your only applying judgement based on our societies views. Yes i and i should imagine most of the world beleive that genocide/murder/torture etc are morally reprehensible but this wasn't always the case.
Its not really a question of religion solely either but religion often proscribes a certain morality.
Also Im not saying any of these acts are OK or even that if somebody commits acts like these beleiving they are RIGHT or JUST is OK. Rather I am saying that good and evil are terms which are totally open for interpretation. What one person calls EVIL somebody else could call GOOD. They are just words which describe opposite ends of a scale of morality. What that actual scale is will vary from society to society and is likely to vary immensly in the case of extra-terrestrial life.
The other problem you seem to have is that you think that this means that people with a different code of conduct are justified in practicing acts we hold as evil. This isnt the case. They justify something to themselves but their justification will be totally invalid for people with other more normal social sensibilies.
I think the reason that they are often at odds with each other is more to do with methodology. A scientist must question everything whereas religion requires unconditional acceptance.
Also that and there is so many obvious fallacies written in the holy texts that they must be viewed by any OBJECTIVE scientist as having at least some flaws.
Or perhaps more likely an alens concept of good and evil would be totally different to our. Just look at the variation throughout our own history. In plenty of cultures in the past animal or human sacrifice have been considered holy (good) acts whereas by todays moral compass they are obviously heinous acts. Good and evil is a relative term defined entirely by social contract. What is the chance extra-terrestrial beings would have the same morality as we do?
This kind of seems like an attempt to encourage a fork or code branch..wouldnt this decrease the quality. Seems like MS wants firefox to concentrate on Longhorn only features and my guess is they're hoping the linux branch suffers because of it thus securing longhorn domination in the web browser stakes. A pretty sneaky tactic but hopfully the firefox team will keep everything cross platform
You must be confused... Its VALUEware not spyware
Genociding cockatrices helps..i still cant finish it though :(
its rock hard
Part of the problem about using AI is that it is kind of an umbrella term which covers everything from expert systems, neural nets, adaptive computing, machine vision. Also AI techniques aren't always the best way to approach large engineering type tasks like space missions. While getting neural nets to perform intelligent behavious is helping our understanding what intelligence is and how it works most of these technologies just aren't ready for prime time yet