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User: Jaime2

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  1. Re:Average SD article containing TM unclear ABR in on Average HS Student Given Little Chance of AP CS Success · · Score: 1

    He's mostly right in practice. If you take an entire semester worth of AP credits and graduate early, then you save money. However, most schools have a full-time rate that applies for any amount of credit hours over twelve. Going from 21 hours down to 13 your freshman year isn't going to save you anything. Going from 21 to 5 will save money by allowing you to register as a part-time student, but that my effect room and board arrangements. Trying to graduate a semester early is a possibility, but some classes are very difficult to take in the other semester from the one their "supposed" to be taken in, plus you'll have to make up the remained of the credits that you didn't AP out of to add up to an entire semester. If you only took one AP, that's almost the same work as just doing a four year degree in three and a half, so the savings is mostly attributed to your hard work, not the AP.

    I took AP calc when I was in high school and I got a four an the exam. I just took it again in college for the easy A, that was a bigger benefit for me than skipping it since it wouldn't have saved any money. An A thrown into my GPA was worth more to me than a few hours of down time in the middle of the day.

  2. Selection on Physical Media: Down, But Maybe Not Out · · Score: 1

    More than half of all movies currently can't be streamed. How can a delivery format go away if content providers won't move most of the content to alternate media?

  3. Article/Summary on Toyota Investigating Hovercars · · Score: 1

    Article: The car won't so much be hovering in free space as "a little bit away" from the road. This is more likely to mean microns than inches...

    Summary: We aren't talking Jetson's flying car, more like a car that merely hovers "a little bit away" from the road. Probably a few inches...

    To me hovering a few microns sounds like hydroplaning on purpose. Sounds like a great idea if you never want to turn or stop.

  4. Re:hard-wired can be a computer on ISEE-3 Satellite Is Back Under Control · · Score: 1

    It doesn't really matter. I was responding to a statement that said that if something receives signals and fires thrusters, then it must be a computer. Any definition that broad would be indistinguishable from "circuit" and would make the word "computer" redundant. I hate it when language evolves to a point where it's hard to express thoughts accurately.

    This is the same problem I have with people accepting the phrase "I could care less" as meaning "I don't care". It makes language much harder to use. Imagine trying to explain the meaning of that phrase to someone learning English, they would come away thinking that each collection of words has some fungible meaning that is totally separate from the meanings of the individual word and the rules or grammar.

  5. Re:hard-wired can be a computer on ISEE-3 Satellite Is Back Under Control · · Score: 1

    Right. It has no integrated circuits. There's no way it doesn't have a computer. It couldn't receive signals and fire its thrusters otherwise.

    A collection of discreet electronic components hardly qualifies as a computer. Receiving radio signals was something done long before the first computer was invented.

  6. Re:You Have To Enforce It on Fixing the Pain of Programming · · Score: 1

    Which leads to the summary's statement of "They have to install dependencies, compile code, start servers and open ports. At each step the errors are difficult to diagnose and time-consuming to fix." Visual Studio runs the servers and opens ports for you based on what type of program the project says it is.

  7. You Have To Enforce It on Fixing the Pain of Programming · · Score: 1

    One of my rules at work is: "If I check it out in Visual Studio and press 'Start', it better compile and run". It's not acceptable to make the next guy figure out how to run a program. Everyone I work with thinks I'm overreacting at first, but when they go to fix an issue in four-year-old code they've never seen before, they suddenly get it. Bonus points for starting the test suite by default instead of the actual program.

  8. Re:Help! Help! on Did the Ignition Key Just Die? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    On my former Dodge, you popped the button off and stuck the key in the recess. The key is inductively powered by the car in this mode. On my current Mazda, you walk.

  9. Re:I don't like the control it takes away from you on Did the Ignition Key Just Die? · · Score: 5, Informative

    What if you want to switch it to position 2 and push-start a manual transmission car?

    ... then you push the button twice without your foot on the brake. It goes to run mode just like the second detent of a traditional key. Pressing once goes to accessory mode. More presses simply cycles between accessory...run...off.

  10. Re:Been a long time since I cared on AMD Designing All-New CPU Cores For ARMv8, X86 · · Score: 1

    But that's only because Intel let the marketing department make engineering decisions and kept making chips with higher and higher clock frequency. As soon as they regained their sanity, they once again dominated the benchmarks.

    I do love how AMD brilliantly capitalized on the blunder. By labeling their chips according to the clock speed of the performance equivalent Intel chip - every time Intel put insane engineering effort into ratcheting the clock up 10% and only getting 1% better performance, AMD simply made their chips a tiny bit faster and labelled theirs the same as Intel's.

  11. Re:Lease? on Really, Why Are Smartphones Still Tied To Contracts? · · Score: 1

    It's pretty much a win/win situation. You have a much lower payment over the length of the lease; and then you can buy and keep the car if you like it, or return it if you don't.

    In essence - say you are interested in a $50K car. For a purchase, you make payments on a $50K loan. For a lease, you make payments on a $25K loan, and at then end you either buy the car for $25K, or return it.

    It's not win-win. If you lease a $50K car, pay 25K over three years and buy out for $25K (with a three year term), you are essentially getting a six year loan, but paying extra lease acquisition fees up front. If you don't buy out, then you lose by paying disposal fees (or the manufacturer uses that as a lever to get you into one of their cars next, reducing your ability to make the best deal). The only cases where you win are if it has some tax advantage for you, or if the market changes and the residual is way higher than you could ever get without the contract.

  12. Re:Not merely 'not completely perfect'. on Designer Creates a Water Bottle That You Can Eat · · Score: 1

    Also, the process only works if the water is frozen. That takes about 120 Watt-hours per liter of water. If the entire bottled water industry were converted to this process, that's about 3.6 billion kilowatt-hours used to produce bottles, or about 5% of the total world electricity usage.

    I'd say this process needs some improvement before it will make the world a better place.

  13. Not Surprising on Intuit, Maker of Turbotax, Lobbies Against Simplified Tax Filings · · Score: 1

    I once read that a third of all tax credit dollars earmarked for the poor go to H&R Block. This must be where another third goes. This is no different from the record companies fighting tooth and nail to prevent their old business model from dying. It's no surprise that it's happening - it's sad that it's working.

  14. Marketplace Is Broken on The Best Parking Apps You've Never Heard Of and Why You Haven't · · Score: 1

    Almost all marketplaces are broken. Getting eyes on your website, users to download your app, people to watch your commercial, etc. are all not meritocracies. That's why there are whole categories of professions to handle them (advertising, SEO, etc.). Everyone that makes products knows that if you want to make a ton of money, don't put your money into making a better product, put your money into advertising your currently crappy product.

    I got ripped apart a few days ago for making the comment that programming is currently at the equivalent maturity to medicine back in the blood-letting days. This is more proof that we haven't created adequate solutions for common problems like search yet. Sure Google was better than everyone before them and there has been a lot of advancement, but we have a very long way to go yet.

  15. Re:Why not? on GM Names Names, Suspends Two Engineers Over Ignition-Switch Safety · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's why software developers shouldn't insist on using the title Engineer. This kind of accountability is expected of an engineer, it's not an anomaly. When programming matures to the point where bugs are rare, then we will deserve the title.

    I write software for a living and I'm well aware that if we were to compare computer science to medical science, the current era is roughly equivalent to the blood letting and leeches era. I can't wait for our penicillin to come around.

  16. Re:Good for devs. on The New 'One Microsoft' Is Finally Poised For the Future · · Score: 1

    I don't see devs being hurt by this at all. Sure, Microsoft has changed what it is pushing, but their support of deprecated technology is still excellent. Not only is WCF still supported, but their SOAP stuff still continues to work just fine (and to be fully supported by Visual Studio), even though it hasn't been pushed for over ten years.

    As for Silverlight - anyone that thought that was going to work wasn't paying attention. The fact is, there are still two markets for Windows apps; corporate stuff that has no reason to adopt Metro, so will continue to be WinForms and WPF for a long time; and consumer stuff, which is served well by apps delivered through app stores. In order to execute the current app store model without creating a virus epidemic, some protections need to be in place. That was always going to be based on the protections already in place with existing web technologies. Anyone who's surprised that app store apps adopted HTML5 and Javascript wasn't paying attention.

    Also, the other technology supported for app store apps is XAML with a limited subset of the API. That's essentially what Silverlight was without the stupid browser plugin concept. So, Silverlight developers weren't left in the cold - 95% of their skillset is still useful for app store development.

  17. Re:Matter-Antimatter Explosions on Why Are We Made of Matter? · · Score: 1

    No.

  18. Re:Equal amounts? on Why Are We Made of Matter? · · Score: 1

    The matter came from somewhere. The antimatter also.

    Matter and antimatter both spontaneously come from energy. We've seen it happen in supercollider experiments. Current big bang physics posits that all matter spontaneously formed from nothing but energy in processes known as leptogenesis and baryogenesis. The big mystery is that according to the physics we've observed, the matter and antimatter should have mostly turned back into energy. However, none of our experiments come close to the energy levels of leptogenesis and baryogenesis, so nothing has been disproven yet.

    On the other hand, the universe coming into being with matter already in it, or matter somehow being moved into it, both would be huge deviations from the current scientific thinking. More importantly, we have a pretty good explanation for how things are without resorting to external forces, there are just a few gaps to fill (like the one that is the topic of this thread). There's no good reason to open the Pandora's Box of outside interference, as it makes meaningful discussion almost impossible.

    If we stick to the current research path of assuming the universe is a closed system - we'll eventually find out if it's true or not. But, if we start with an assumption that the universe isn't a closed system, then it becomes impossible to get answers to the hard questions. Any question where there isn't an answer readily available (like "Why is there matter and not antimatter")" will simply be dismissed with "It was there all along" and no one will really learn anything.

  19. Re:Matter-Antimatter Explosions on Why Are We Made of Matter? · · Score: 1

    Read the article. You weren't the first person to think of this.

  20. Re:Equal amounts? on Why Are We Made of Matter? · · Score: 1

    Theorizing the state of things before the big bang is for philosophers. Besides, if there was matter in the space our universe occupies before the big bang, it wouldn't have survived intact through the first few milliseconds due to the incredibly high energy density, not to mention surviving whatever process caused the big bang in the first place.

  21. Re:Equal amounts? on Why Are We Made of Matter? · · Score: 2

    If it didn't, then we would simply change the question to "why did it start with unequal amounts". Since that question would involve forces outside our universe or before the big-bang, it would be much harder to answer. So, scientists try to answer the this question first. If they disprove all of the theories that come up, they will start to consider that there may not be an in-universe explanation. But, it's much better to not jump to the unanswerable question prematurely, or science will become religion.

  22. Re:Matter-Antimatter Explosions on Why Are We Made of Matter? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Read the article. It explains that if there were anti-matter regions, we should be able to detect gamma rays from the explosions. The number of gamma rays we detect are far too few for there to be large regions of antimatter.

  23. Re:Watch out on Malaysian Flight Disappearance 'Deliberate' · · Score: 1

    That went right over your head. His point was that although most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. We obviously have a history of not attacking the country where the bombers are from.

  24. Incidents dropped by 50%, I wonder why? on Cameras On Cops: Coming To a Town Near You · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So, when cops have cameras, reported incidents of police using force dropped by half. I believe that means that 50% of uses of force were unwarranted or unnecessary, otherwise why would they have stopped?

    This sound like pretty clear evidence that police think they can get away with bending the law as long as no one (except the victim) sees them.

  25. Many Eyes on Ask Slashdot: Reviewing 3rd Party Libraries? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Good security comes from a lot of people's testing and input. If you look investigate a product, you will only be able to categorize it into two categories: "utterly craptastic" and "probably utterly craptastic". The only way to be assured of good quality is to use libraries that a lot of people use and have had success with. Don't bother looking at the binary, look at the reputation.