Writing here because stupid webpage doesn't let me comment.
Banning laptops is the old way of thinking: The student sits, and accepts everything the teacher spits. But we live in the information age. When we go visit a website, we're not just reading the information. Heck, i came from slashdot to comment in here. Questioning is part of the learning process. Using laptops to gather new information or to store the class info is mandatory. Later the student can organize his notes.
Heck, why doesn't the teacher give the students some study material and dedicate the class for Q&A? But no, the teacher must feel important and above the students so that they listen to all his babbling. Perhaps we should go back to the ancient Greece and realize that the old geniuses didn't put their students in a classroom to sit down and jot down everything he said. The teachers asked their student questions and made them think.
Now about games: Sometimes the class is being too tedious. If the student is bored, is it the student's fault? No, it's the teacher's fault. Why not let the student refresh his mind a little so he can feel better and then improve his learning? When a student starts doodling in the the notebooks, the teacher should take note and try to make his class more amusing. Obviously he's not making the students THINK and UNDERSTAND. Their mind is getting tired, and their brains are screaming "GET ME OUT OF HERE!". So they resort to doodling.
The traditional education system SUCKS. Feynman said it years ago and showed us clear examples to justify his statements. Stop making the students memorize a bunch of facts and start making them THINK. Then you won't "need" to ban laptops.
It's so curious how today's education system turns kids into sheep: "Obey. Sit down. Listen. Do not question. You're nobody to question the professors. Get a job. Go up in the corporate ladder. That's the way things should be". And yet, it is people who question the system and do things THEIR way that are often above others and end up becoming millionaires. Like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Mark Zuckerberg, or Kevin Rose. Did they became rich because they obeyed their professors and did things the way they were supposed to be done? No. They questioned. They innovated. They found new ways to do things.
I remember the anecdote where Gauss didn't pay attention to one class when in school, and the teacher made him do the sum of 1 + 2 +.... 100 and couldn't go home before finishing. Well, he thought about it (100 + 1 + 99 + 2 +... etc) and came up with the formula: (N*N+1)/2. In 5 minutes he finished the "punishment" and told the teacher that if he wanted to confirm it, it was his (the teacher's) job. So the teacher ended up doing the punishment, while the kid was free to go home and play with his friends.
The world is always ran by the smarter people, those who know how not to get swayed by others' opinions and learn to move other people in their favor. If the students complain about the laptop situation but do nothing to solve it, they've already given away their freedom to the people "in charge". So, maybe the teachers will scare you into expelling you from school. SO FUCKING WHAT? You don't need school to get rich. Most of the people who became rich didn't do so because of school (starting with the school loans, by the way). You just need to think about a good business model (and even the old corporate dinosaurs like the RIAA fail at this) and put it into action.
Remember, the teachers are not the bosses, and you're not supposed to be the employee. For instance, the teachers are paid to give YOU a service. If their service is defective, it is THEM, not YOU, who should be replaced.
Seriously. In the 90's, in the era where free webpages were hosted at Xoom, Angelfire and Geocities, the trend was static content (php pages for free, huh? Yeah, right), and there was a ton of webpages dedicated to a myriad of topics. People had to maintain their webpages by adding articles which were available through a series of navigational menus.
Then, everything changed. Webpages were replaced with disorganized blogs where people just complained about their lives. But some people got the right idea and began making specialized blogs about topics. Then the trend switched to news and editorials instead of static content, and wikis took the place traditional webpages used to occupy.
As of today, there are no personal webpages anymore. Everything's conglomerated in social networks, forums, wikis and specialized blogs. The era of webpages is now gone.
Since I learned about harmony, chords and progressions, I knew that there would be a way where music could be parametrized and be written by a computer without need for a composer. Just fill in the rules, add some transitions here and there, and use these instruments. Ta-da!
Music is a mathematical concept (I learned that since watching Donald Duck in the Mathmagic land when I was 8). It's only natural that computers can do something that is by its nature, mathematical.
However, just because music can be written by a machine, doesn't make the machine superior. After all, musical genres are born and some new twists to old classics are done. This requires something called creativity - and that's a quality that machines cannot have. Certainly, I can listen to a beautiful sonata or (insert your favorite music kind here) with randomly-generated sequences. However, can a machine write a song about how I felt the time I watched a full moon over the sea while the sun was just rising?
Well maybe a machine could do that in the future... when androids are able to dream with electric sheep.
You mean the part where Hitler starts yelling at his officers for listening to internet Shock Jocks and complaining about how much money he lost on this scandal? I bet it should be up in youtube by now.
Yes, because Linux has no local privilege escalation vulnerabilities, right? This sane OS of yours, does it come with rainbow pooping unicorns too?
In a SANE OS, hackers NEED to escalate privileges to gain administrator privileges for their rogue processes. In Windows, you ALREADY have administrator privileges! Right from the start!
And *THIS* is the reason why automatic updates should be disabled. We've come to the point where viruses are more benign than the same friggin' company that designed the OS.
Yeah, viruses send SPAM. Yeah, viruses keep stealing data. But do they disable your computer completely? The last virus that did this, IIRC, was the "stoned" virus.
And now you can't even trust Microsoft. Who knows what will break with tomorrow's automatic update?
Thankfully, I use Linux at home now. I update what I want, when I want, and there's no greedy company spying on what I do.
If the only reason is that nobody has bothered to write a good one, then that's not sad.
Oh gee. Have you ever heard any programmer say "I'm bothering to write a BAD video editor"? All of them want them to be good. But most projects have failed miserably, and *THAT* is sad. There's one last project which seems promising: OpenShot video editor (which appeared on slashdot a few weeks ago). But I haven't got the time to test it yet. I wonder if it's able to do the amazing stuff that Final Cut Pro does. If it does, drop me a call so I can rejoice.
1. Profit! 2. Try to exterminate competition 3. Realize it doesn't work against Google 4. Throw chairs 5. Litigate 6. Realize other products like Firefox are eating your market share, DESPITES your efforts to monopolize the market 7. Patent troll 8. Realize people aren't buying your FUD 9. Realize you have to GPL some of your products because they found out you plagiarized some code 10. Throw more chairs 11. Realize how the media are turning against you 12. Get back in the bandwagon 13. Fire Ballmer 14. Buy chairproof shields for your buildings 15. Innovate
That's what difficult levels are for: Feeling that you could achieve what many couldn't.
One of my personal favorites, is "Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow". You have the normal mode, and the hard mode. But my favorite part is battling with Julius. There are numerous youtube videos of fighting with Julius in restricted circumstances: i.e. no armor/weapons, all abilities disabled, no healing potions, etc. Of course, the Boss Rush mode is a must.
Supermetroid also manages to do this, in the form of Speed Runs. The reward pics of Samus add a lot of replayability, like, defeat the game with less than 10% items, or with 100% items under a time limit, and so on.
Winning the game may be easy or difficult, but the ability to play the game under restrictions, AND obtaining a unique reward for it (even if it's just a praise in youtube calling you "awesome"), is invaluable.
Please allow me to quote Howard Wolowitz from the Big Bang Theory: "But a better way to look at this is that I'm getting sex and you're not, and that's delightful!"
is the GPL and dual-license. When MySQL was LGPL, nobody had a problem with it. But then came greediness, the switch to GPL and the MySQL-AB demands for people to pay for just linking to the MySQL client (to date there's still no concensus on whether linking to the client is a GPL violation or not, but scaring small businesses into paying is really profitable).
Frankly, I don't give a dime if Monty goes to jail, loses all his money or what not. What's really important is the ability for small businesses to use MySQL. With the Oracle-Sun deal, I really don't know what will happen.
If we wanted to fork we'd have to use the 4.0 base which was LGPL. Any volunteers to re-fix who-knows-how-many bugs?
I think you're overgeneralizing. Not all IDEs separate the code in menus and popdown lists. Unfortunately, some of Microsoft's tools don't give you access to the full source code and it's a royal pain in the ass to refactor code.
This is the problem that perhaps the article is talking about: When the source code is tied to the IDE, everything becomes impossible to maintain.
I've worked with.NET from the beginning. I can't recall ever seeing a "broken '.Net framework'" install. I can't recall ever having to reload Windows to fix a.NET problem.
Perhaps not reloading Windows, but pretty close: Try installing SQL Server 2005 one of these days. The.NET framework 2.0 conflicts with.NET 3.51,.NET 2.01 and refuses to install. You need to uninstall ALL your current versions of.NET, install SQL Server 2005, reinstall them and pray that everything goes fine.
Recently I've joined a gigantic project involving Classic ASP and SQL Server.
Te lead developer only knows to program using Dreamweaver.
When I looked at the code, this is what I saw:
Tons of replicated files using dreamweaver templates.
All the javascript for more than 400 asp files (I'm not kidding!) is stored in only three different.js files.
All the asp files are in the same friggin' directory.
The javascript validations included which file to submit the form to (yes, they changed the action attribute!)
No sign of OOP or even modular programming.
The code for validating roman numerals using regexps used a different regexp like "([X]|[I]|[V]|[L]|[C]|[D]|[M])" for length-1 strings, "([X]|[I]|[V]|[L]|[C]|[D]|[M])([X]|[I]|[V]|[L]|[C]|[D]|[M])" for length-2, "([X]|[I]|[V]|[L]|[C]|[D]|[M])([X]|[I]|[V]|[L]|[C]|[D]|[M])([X]|[I]|[V]|[L]|[C]|[D]|[M])" for length 3, and so on. The whole code took over 30 lines of javascript code
Javascript comments in the.js files started with <!-- and SOMETIMES closed with --> (other times they're not closed at all! Imagine my dismay when the app broke after I searched-replaced them with decent/* and */ comments.
I tried to make an automated dependency table on their giant blob monster attempt of a project by using grep and a graph-visualizing tool, but there were dozens of orphan files and isolated clusters which lead to absolutely nowhere (it was by analyzing them by hand that I realized lots of validation functions were in one same javascript file).
When I asked the lead developer why he stored all the javascript in a single file instead of putting it in the same asps (they were all spaghetti anyway. It would've been much better to not mix them up with the.js files) he almost called me an idiot for not being able to "click" on the button on dreamweaver, read the function name, open the javascript and pressing ctrl-f for searching the function.
The only reason I didn't lecture him on multi-tier programming and advanced grep tools was because he's the manager's star developer, and since the company hired our company for consulting, they're still above us in hierarchy and these matters need to be handled with tweezers. Had I been hired before, I'd have recommended my boss to ask twice the money.
Anyway - If you want my opinion on automated GUI tools (at least for web projects), they only procreate idiots and promote short-term productivity. Of course, when something breaks, it won't be the idiot's fault. It'll be the guy in turn who happened to write perfectly-well-designed code that somehow triggered a hidden bug in the sacred-cow spaghetti code.
BTW, if you want to know the idiot's name, his name is Josh. I won't mention his surname to protect the "innocent" (rofl), but at least his name will be preserved for posterity:)
Whoever said Sci-Fi ran out of steam should watch all the Ghost in the Shell movies and series. I've never seen a series address technology ethics in such an elaborate way.
Times are changing. Science fiction should just adapt with the current trends and start from it. What dangers await society? What opportunities? In the cyberpunk era, we didn't even imagine open source gaining power. What about SPAM? What about the degeneration of society? What about the growth of social networking? What about the fight between freedom of speech and the copyright police? (We've read 1984, but where are the media companies?)
As you can see, there's a lot of material to work on. It only takes some imagination and connecting the dots.
Please don't call it the "God particle". This unfortunate nickname was coined as a marketing ploy and is not apt. Physicists do not call it the God particle. Reporters call it the God particle. And the main result is that people become confused, frightened, or angry.
(sighs) Only in America...
Here are a few criticisms...
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Bite down on your tongue. It tastes painful.
That joke had such a.... (sunglasses) good taste.
Writing here because stupid webpage doesn't let me comment.
Banning laptops is the old way of thinking: The student sits, and accepts everything the teacher spits. But we live in the information age. When we go visit a website, we're not just reading the information. Heck, i came from slashdot to comment in here. Questioning is part of the learning process. Using laptops to gather new information or to store the class info is mandatory. Later the student can organize his notes.
Heck, why doesn't the teacher give the students some study material and dedicate the class for Q&A? But no, the teacher must feel important and above the students so that they listen to all his babbling. Perhaps we should go back to the ancient Greece and realize that the old geniuses didn't put their students in a classroom to sit down and jot down everything he said. The teachers asked their student questions and made them think.
Now about games: Sometimes the class is being too tedious. If the student is bored, is it the student's fault? No, it's the teacher's fault. Why not let the student refresh his mind a little so he can feel better and then improve his learning? When a student starts doodling in the the notebooks, the teacher should take note and try to make his class more amusing. Obviously he's not making the students THINK and UNDERSTAND. Their mind is getting tired, and their brains are screaming "GET ME OUT OF HERE!". So they resort to doodling.
The traditional education system SUCKS. Feynman said it years ago and showed us clear examples to justify his statements. Stop making the students memorize a bunch of facts and start making them THINK. Then you won't "need" to ban laptops.
It's so curious how today's education system turns kids into sheep: "Obey. Sit down. Listen. Do not question. You're nobody to question the professors. Get a job. Go up in the corporate ladder. That's the way things should be". And yet, it is people who question the system and do things THEIR way that are often above others and end up becoming millionaires. Like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Mark Zuckerberg, or Kevin Rose. Did they became rich because they obeyed their professors and did things the way they were supposed to be done? No. They questioned. They innovated. They found new ways to do things.
I remember the anecdote where Gauss didn't pay attention to one class when in school, and the teacher made him do the sum of 1 + 2 + .... 100 and couldn't go home before finishing. Well, he thought about it (100 + 1 + 99 + 2 + ... etc) and came up with the formula: (N*N+1)/2. In 5 minutes he finished the "punishment" and told the teacher that if he wanted to confirm it, it was his (the teacher's) job. So the teacher ended up doing the punishment, while the kid was free to go home and play with his friends.
The world is always ran by the smarter people, those who know how not to get swayed by others' opinions and learn to move other people in their favor. If the students complain about the laptop situation but do nothing to solve it, they've already given away their freedom to the people "in charge". So, maybe the teachers will scare you into expelling you from school. SO FUCKING WHAT? You don't need school to get rich. Most of the people who became rich didn't do so because of school (starting with the school loans, by the way). You just need to think about a good business model (and even the old corporate dinosaurs like the RIAA fail at this) and put it into action.
Remember, the teachers are not the bosses, and you're not supposed to be the employee. For instance, the teachers are paid to give YOU a service. If their service is defective, it is THEM, not YOU, who should be replaced.
Seriously. In the 90's, in the era where free webpages were hosted at Xoom, Angelfire and Geocities, the trend was static content (php pages for free, huh? Yeah, right), and there was a ton of webpages dedicated to a myriad of topics. People had to maintain their webpages by adding articles which were available through a series of navigational menus.
Then, everything changed. Webpages were replaced with disorganized blogs where people just complained about their lives. But some people got the right idea and began making specialized blogs about topics. Then the trend switched to news and editorials instead of static content, and wikis took the place traditional webpages used to occupy.
As of today, there are no personal webpages anymore. Everything's conglomerated in social networks, forums, wikis and specialized blogs. The era of webpages is now gone.
Since I learned about harmony, chords and progressions, I knew that there would be a way where music could be parametrized and be written by a computer without need for a composer. Just fill in the rules, add some transitions here and there, and use these instruments. Ta-da!
Music is a mathematical concept (I learned that since watching Donald Duck in the Mathmagic land when I was 8). It's only natural that computers can do something that is by its nature, mathematical.
However, just because music can be written by a machine, doesn't make the machine superior. After all, musical genres are born and some new twists to old classics are done. This requires something called creativity - and that's a quality that machines cannot have. Certainly, I can listen to a beautiful sonata or (insert your favorite music kind here) with randomly-generated sequences. However, can a machine write a song about how I felt the time I watched a full moon over the sea while the sun was just rising?
Well maybe a machine could do that in the future... when androids are able to dream with electric sheep.
Where's the "downfall" part?
You mean the part where Hitler starts yelling at his officers for listening to internet Shock Jocks and complaining about how much money he lost on this scandal? I bet it should be up in youtube by now.
If there really is a secret force out there influencing events to preserve civilization I'm counting on them to prevent this.
You mean you still don't know yet?
Slashdot is Terminus. So far our Encyclopaedia Technologica has been doing pretty well... just as planned.
Yes, because Linux has no local privilege escalation vulnerabilities, right? This sane OS of yours, does it come with rainbow pooping unicorns too?
In a SANE OS, hackers NEED to escalate privileges to gain administrator privileges for their rogue processes.
In Windows, you ALREADY have administrator privileges! Right from the start!
from "Not Necessarily the News":
Fly Wars, from RAID
And *THIS* is the reason why automatic updates should be disabled. We've come to the point where viruses are more benign than the same friggin' company that designed the OS.
Yeah, viruses send SPAM. Yeah, viruses keep stealing data. But do they disable your computer completely? The last virus that did this, IIRC, was the "stoned" virus.
And now you can't even trust Microsoft. Who knows what will break with tomorrow's automatic update?
Thankfully, I use Linux at home now. I update what I want, when I want, and there's no greedy company spying on what I do.
If the only reason is that nobody has bothered to write a good one, then that's not sad.
Oh gee. Have you ever heard any programmer say "I'm bothering to write a BAD video editor"? All of them want them to be good. But most projects have failed miserably, and *THAT* is sad. There's one last project which seems promising: OpenShot video editor (which appeared on slashdot a few weeks ago). But I haven't got the time to test it yet. I wonder if it's able to do the amazing stuff that Final Cut Pro does. If it does, drop me a call so I can rejoice.
Right now, Google Chat is blocked. Google Voice is blocked. YouTube is blocked. Google Docs is blocked.
Your boss' brain is blocked.
Actually, it's more like this...
1. Profit!
2. Try to exterminate competition
3. Realize it doesn't work against Google
4. Throw chairs
5. Litigate
6. Realize other products like Firefox are eating your market share, DESPITES your efforts to monopolize the market
7. Patent troll
8. Realize people aren't buying your FUD
9. Realize you have to GPL some of your products because they found out you plagiarized some code
10. Throw more chairs
11. Realize how the media are turning against you
12. Get back in the bandwagon
13. Fire Ballmer
14. Buy chairproof shields for your buildings
15. Innovate
or...
13b. Invest more in the XBOX dept.
16. Profit!
That's what difficult levels are for: Feeling that you could achieve what many couldn't.
One of my personal favorites, is "Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow". You have the normal mode, and the hard mode. But my favorite part is battling with Julius. There are numerous youtube videos of fighting with Julius in restricted circumstances: i.e. no armor/weapons, all abilities disabled, no healing potions, etc. Of course, the Boss Rush mode is a must.
Supermetroid also manages to do this, in the form of Speed Runs. The reward pics of Samus add a lot of replayability, like, defeat the game with less than 10% items, or with 100% items under a time limit, and so on.
Winning the game may be easy or difficult, but the ability to play the game under restrictions, AND obtaining a unique reward for it (even if it's just a praise in youtube calling you "awesome"), is invaluable.
Would this basically be like creating a tiny star?
Yes. Just remember to shield your robotic arms, you never know what can happen :)
Ah! How I missed these martian breaking news! Sadly, no one can reach TripMasterMonkey's humourous wit on that. Still, it was refreshing. Congrats!
Good for him, but not very good for his theory...
Please allow me to quote Howard Wolowitz from the Big Bang Theory:
"But a better way to look at this is that I'm getting sex and you're not, and that's delightful!"
is the GPL and dual-license. When MySQL was LGPL, nobody had a problem with it. But then came greediness, the switch to GPL and the MySQL-AB demands for people to pay for just linking to the MySQL client (to date there's still no concensus on whether linking to the client is a GPL violation or not, but scaring small businesses into paying is really profitable).
Frankly, I don't give a dime if Monty goes to jail, loses all his money or what not. What's really important is the ability for small businesses to use MySQL. With the Oracle-Sun deal, I really don't know what will happen.
If we wanted to fork we'd have to use the 4.0 base which was LGPL. Any volunteers to re-fix who-knows-how-many bugs?
Is there a citeable example of MS infringing copyright and then acting "wrong"?
Windows 1.0.
Any questions?
If ONLY the tool was "Internet Explorer"... sigh...
I think you're overgeneralizing. Not all IDEs separate the code in menus and popdown lists. Unfortunately, some of Microsoft's tools don't give you access to the full source code and it's a royal pain in the ass to refactor code.
This is the problem that perhaps the article is talking about: When the source code is tied to the IDE, everything becomes impossible to maintain.
I've worked with .NET from the beginning. I can't recall ever seeing a "broken '.Net framework'" install. I can't recall ever having to reload Windows to fix a .NET problem.
Perhaps not reloading Windows, but pretty close: Try installing SQL Server 2005 one of these days. The .NET framework 2.0 conflicts with .NET 3.51, .NET 2.01 and refuses to install. You need to uninstall ALL your current versions of .NET, install SQL Server 2005, reinstall them and pray that everything goes fine.
Recently I've joined a gigantic project involving Classic ASP and SQL Server.
Te lead developer only knows to program using Dreamweaver.
When I looked at the code, this is what I saw:
I tried to make an automated dependency table on their giant blob monster attempt of a project by using grep and a graph-visualizing tool, but there were dozens of orphan files and isolated clusters which lead to absolutely nowhere (it was by analyzing them by hand that I realized lots of validation functions were in one same javascript file).
When I asked the lead developer why he stored all the javascript in a single file instead of putting it in the same asps (they were all spaghetti anyway. It would've been much better to not mix them up with the .js files) he almost called me an idiot for not being able to "click" on the button on dreamweaver, read the function name, open the javascript and pressing ctrl-f for searching the function.
The only reason I didn't lecture him on multi-tier programming and advanced grep tools was because he's the manager's star developer, and since the company hired our company for consulting, they're still above us in hierarchy and these matters need to be handled with tweezers. Had I been hired before, I'd have recommended my boss to ask twice the money.
Anyway - If you want my opinion on automated GUI tools (at least for web projects), they only procreate idiots and promote short-term productivity. Of course, when something breaks, it won't be the idiot's fault. It'll be the guy in turn who happened to write perfectly-well-designed code that somehow triggered a hidden bug in the sacred-cow spaghetti code.
BTW, if you want to know the idiot's name, his name is Josh. I won't mention his surname to protect the "innocent" (rofl), but at least his name will be preserved for posterity :)
Whoever said Sci-Fi ran out of steam should watch all the Ghost in the Shell movies and series. I've never seen a series address technology ethics in such an elaborate way.
Times are changing. Science fiction should just adapt with the current trends and start from it. What dangers await society? What opportunities? In the cyberpunk era, we didn't even imagine open source gaining power. What about SPAM? What about the degeneration of society? What about the growth of social networking? What about the fight between freedom of speech and the copyright police? (We've read 1984, but where are the media companies?)
As you can see, there's a lot of material to work on. It only takes some imagination and connecting the dots.
Oh, and I must rant:
Please don't call it the "God particle". This unfortunate nickname was coined as a marketing ploy and is not apt. Physicists do not call it the God particle. Reporters call it the God particle. And the main result is that people become confused, frightened, or angry.
(sighs) Only in America...
of agile software development.
http://www.softwarereality.com/lifecycle/xp/case_against_xp.jsp
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html