Google needs to buck up and become a man, whining doesn't get you much of anywhere. Just like Firefox and Opera you can change [IE's] default search engine.
Netscape needs to buck up and become a man, whining doesn't get you much of anywhere. Just like Solaris and Irix you can change Windows' default browser.
Apparently, [Bush's] SATs correspond to an IQ test score of around 130 (I forgot the exact numbers), which is approximately two sigma above the mean. In other words, your comment is entirely accurate, but nonetheless a serious lightning rod for politically-charged flames.
Lightning rod Bush may be, but it's hard to come up with a suitably universal example of this level of intelligence. Now I'm the first to admit that his public words and actions suggest someone much closer to (or even slightly below) the mean. But taken at face value, the test scores do indicate exactly the type of person in question.
In fact, Bush's seeming disdain for "book smarts" typifies the result we both expect from a poor educational system (though I'm under no illusion that he ever attended public school).
Gifted students are being dragged down to the level of everyone else, and normal classes are slowed down to accomodate for slower learners
Nah the gifted students will be fine. They'll always find an outlet somewhere to exercise their brain, be it in school or out. Once they get to college, they find plenty of challenges in fields they didn't even know existed. The gifted ones always find a way to shine through. Having graduated high school in the early 90s and spent the better part of the last decade in post-secondary schooling, I've seen it happen time and again.
It's the group of students right below the gifted ones who will suffer most. The ones who lack intellectual curiosity or just aren't driven by it. 12 years of primary/secondary education drills into their heads that school sucks and learning is boring. These are the people we should be worrying about: those roughly 1-2 standard deviations above the mean. Not the Einsteins of the world but the George Bushes.
We're trying to address this to a certain extent with the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions, but it's a tough problem.
That strikes me as hilarious. No disrespect, I know you guys mean well. I just can't picture kids diving right into a professional environment and language as complex as C# (or god forbid C++). It's not that they can't start with the basics, it's that the basics don't let them do anything interesting. You have to learn a huge number of syntax rules and complicated APIs to get anywhere. Last time I looked (which admittedly was quite a while ago) even the VS gui builder, which takes a lot of the pain out of making interfaces, still requires you to at least partially understand some fairly sophisticated concepts (event handling, VC of MVC model, etc).
I see more hope in a language like Python. Simple, clear syntax and a powerful library that's pretty easy to use. You can get off the ground running a lot quicker, making useful programs your first day. It's that kind of positive feedback that encourages people to explore. Just like back in the day, when a few lines of basic were enough to make a useful program. As machines have gotten more sophisticated, the bar defining "useful" has risen a lot higher too.
But hey, more power to you guys at MS. I applaud your efforts and wish you luck. Just please don't tell me VB(.net) is your answer to python...
Most people train to exhale before aiming and not take another breath until the shot is taken (minimizes movement).
Then those people are training wrong. One of my friends went to army sniper school in the 80s. He said holding your breath when you shoot is one of the worst things you can do. Holding your breath clenches your abdominal muscles, creating a slight tremor that disrupts your hand and eye. At 300+ yards it makes a noticeable difference in your shot.
Instead what you do is regulate your breathing into a controlled rhythm that you work into your aim (not a fixed point), then fire as you exhale. This produces more predictable results than the herky-jerky of holding your breath.
My point still stands: the effort required for everyone to setup their own proxy is much greater than for/. to do it once.
That much is certainly true. But if you're like me, you read more than one website. Doing it yourself is easier than getting dozens of site admins to do it for you.
Besides, how hard is it to 'apt-get install privoxy'?;)
How can I make firefox use a custom style sheet on a per-site basis? How about IE? How about Opera? How can I then tie all three browsers to a single set of style sheets so I don't have to deal with it?
I do it with an http proxy between my browser and the web which adds a custom stylesheet (based on domain name) to the end of each page's header. Simple, cross-platform, cross-browser, and more control in my hands. I get to decide what my style options are, not the site designers. And it doesn't rely on admins to change their sites (an uphill battle if ever there was one).
Then how can I make it mobile so that if I log in at a cyber cafe or a public computing lab then my custom style sheets are there waiting for me?
If you can run your proxy from a public ip and secure it, no problem. Personally I do most of my browsing from one machine.
Taco: Could you explain your model, young man? Anonymous Coward: What's to explain? He's an idiot! Mods: Pipe down! Eddeye: Well basically, I just copied the plant we have now. Taco: Mm-hmm. Eddeye: Then, I added some fins to lower wind resistance. And this racing stripe here I feel is pretty sharp. Taco: Agreed. First prize! Anonymous Coward: But it, it was a contest for children! Mods: Yeah. And Eddeye beat their brains out!
"...the insane levels of taxes gasolene and diesel do (this is the primary reason it costs a fortune to fill up at the pump.)"
Not really. Federal & CA taxes have changed very little in the last 7 years. The increases at the pump are almost entirely due to the price of crude. Here's the breakdown on a gallon of gas:
| April 10, 2006 | April 12, 1999 Crude Oil |$1.59 |$0.35 Refining Cost & Margin |$0.63 |$0.70 State and Federal Taxes |$0.57 |$0.48 Distribution & Marketing |$0.01 |$0.09 Price Per Gallon |$2.80 |$1.62
You went to all that trouble yet you're using rand for entropy. That's like putting a padlock on a paper bag. Try reading from urandom on linux instead, or something else suitable on other platforms.
Unfortunately, what a lot of people *want* is a graphic design medium. If you don't give it to them, then they'll hack away at it until they get something like what they want...
They already have it. Let them use pdf instead of corrupting html. I understand the pressure, but a compromise helps no one. The bastardized half-semantic, half-presentation system we have now is the worst of both worlds.
Scaling is the right approach, but it's the user (*not* the developer) who should be in control. No one else has any right (or even ability) to set pixel sizes on my display. Am I 320x200 or 1920x1440? 3" handheld or 27" plasma? How far from the monitor am I? How many arcseconds per pixel? How good is my eyesight? What colors and contrast levels do I prefer? What font faces am I most comfortable with? If you don't know for absolute sure, then stay the hell out of my settings.
Any page that says "designed for resolution X" is done by a hack. Current web designs scale ok if you stay away from absolute units. Scaling images properly is a royal pain in the ass. But turning browsers into pixel-perfect rendering devices (even by translating CSS pixels into real pixels) is not the answer. Pixel units should be abolished from the CSS spec (along with points, picas, inches, and cm). Everything should be done with em/ex. Just adding rounded corners to CSS would make a lot of image scaling problems disappear. SVG can pick up the slack.
The web is an information exchange conduit, not a graphic design medium.
Don't worry about what CNN is saying... If you're a decent programmer, you'll always have a job... If programming is something you love to do, then do it.
Not to pick on you, but this attitude is just sticking your head in the sand. Some of the best programmers I've known, with experience back to the early 80s and with every technology you can name, were hit hard by the burst in 2000-01. These were bright guys with good people skills and they couldn't find anything for a couple years.
Market forces don't care how much you love to do something or how good you are at it. My dad survived through the oil company purges of the 80s and 90s when they were laying off talented people left, right, up, down, and sideways.
If it's just something you want to do because you've heard it'll earn you "big bucks", don't.
I agree with this part though. Pick something you enjoy or you'll be miserable. And if making money is what you really want, there are much more effective ways to do so (like investment banking or financial analyst).
Learn what you're good at. And you'll be useful to somebody. Get really good at something, and you'll be useful to everybody. Almost doesn't matter what field.
Tell that to the umpteen million art history majors struggling for that one museum curatorship opening.
your primary concern is writing software and getting a job making money doing so. You want Software Engineering.
Yes and no (mostly no). First, Software Eng isn't established as a widely recognized program yet (do any schools offer it yet? i'm not counting devry). A CS degree will get you farther past the resume filters and into an actual interview. If you just meant a SoftEng specialization within CS, then fine, but you usually don't get enough electives for it to matter much.
Second, computer science programs vary by school. Some are very abstract and theoretical, others are very applied. Research individual depts to find which ones suit you.
Third, many of the theoretical aspects of computer science do help in programming. Maybe not for the day-to-day stuff, but when a weird new task comes up or strange unexplained problems occur, the mental flexibility and exposure to foreign concepts comes in handy. It can be the difference between floundering aimlessly and recognizing the correct problem domain to start searching in.
Remember that an IT degree doesn't necessarily limit you to a job in the IT field. Besides the many jobs open to anyone with a college degree, you can use your technical background to move into other fields. Combine it with biochemistry for a job in the pharmaceutical industry. A solid math background is attractive to financial companies. Physics, geology, climatology, accounting, library science -- the list is virtually endless. There will always be options available to people willing and able to use their technical background outside of IT and programming.
I went from an MS in computer science to software developer to teaching cs to law school. Law is an incredibly broad field and technical skills will serve you well in any area, not just intellectual property.
I realized that as I typed it. But the word "logic" flows better, and a "logic unit" could incorporate knowledge to deduce from (at the least you need some axioms).
So who's more pedantic, the pedant or the pedant who follows him?:)
"...which are moving water hundreds of miles under the ice."
Hundreds of miles would be through the earth's crust, surely?
ParseError: ambiguous binding detected: phrase "hundreds of miles" can apply to "moving water" or "under the ice"
Applying logic unit to disambiguate... done
Slashdot Mirror
Google needs to buck up and become a man, whining doesn't get you much of anywhere. Just like Firefox and Opera you can change [IE's] default search engine.
Netscape needs to buck up and become a man, whining doesn't get you much of anywhere. Just like Solaris and Irix you can change Windows' default browser.
Sorry, my bad, I read too much into your comment. You're right, as written it doesn't say to hold your breath.
Lightning rod Bush may be, but it's hard to come up with a suitably universal example of this level of intelligence. Now I'm the first to admit that his public words and actions suggest someone much closer to (or even slightly below) the mean. But taken at face value, the test scores do indicate exactly the type of person in question.
In fact, Bush's seeming disdain for "book smarts" typifies the result we both expect from a poor educational system (though I'm under no illusion that he ever attended public school).
Nah the gifted students will be fine. They'll always find an outlet somewhere to exercise their brain, be it in school or out. Once they get to college, they find plenty of challenges in fields they didn't even know existed. The gifted ones always find a way to shine through. Having graduated high school in the early 90s and spent the better part of the last decade in post-secondary schooling, I've seen it happen time and again.
It's the group of students right below the gifted ones who will suffer most. The ones who lack intellectual curiosity or just aren't driven by it. 12 years of primary/secondary education drills into their heads that school sucks and learning is boring. These are the people we should be worrying about: those roughly 1-2 standard deviations above the mean. Not the Einsteins of the world but the George Bushes.
That strikes me as hilarious. No disrespect, I know you guys mean well. I just can't picture kids diving right into a professional environment and language as complex as C# (or god forbid C++). It's not that they can't start with the basics, it's that the basics don't let them do anything interesting. You have to learn a huge number of syntax rules and complicated APIs to get anywhere. Last time I looked (which admittedly was quite a while ago) even the VS gui builder, which takes a lot of the pain out of making interfaces, still requires you to at least partially understand some fairly sophisticated concepts (event handling, VC of MVC model, etc).
I see more hope in a language like Python. Simple, clear syntax and a powerful library that's pretty easy to use. You can get off the ground running a lot quicker, making useful programs your first day. It's that kind of positive feedback that encourages people to explore. Just like back in the day, when a few lines of basic were enough to make a useful program. As machines have gotten more sophisticated, the bar defining "useful" has risen a lot higher too.
But hey, more power to you guys at MS. I applaud your efforts and wish you luck. Just please don't tell me VB(.net) is your answer to python...
Then those people are training wrong. One of my friends went to army sniper school in the 80s. He said holding your breath when you shoot is one of the worst things you can do. Holding your breath clenches your abdominal muscles, creating a slight tremor that disrupts your hand and eye. At 300+ yards it makes a noticeable difference in your shot.
Instead what you do is regulate your breathing into a controlled rhythm that you work into your aim (not a fixed point), then fire as you exhale. This produces more predictable results than the herky-jerky of holding your breath.
That much is certainly true. But if you're like me, you read more than one website. Doing it yourself is easier than getting dozens of site admins to do it for you.
Besides, how hard is it to 'apt-get install privoxy'? ;)
What, you mean everyone doesn't already view slashdot with custom stylesheets? ;)
I do it with an http proxy between my browser and the web which adds a custom stylesheet (based on domain name) to the end of each page's header. Simple, cross-platform, cross-browser, and more control in my hands. I get to decide what my style options are, not the site designers. And it doesn't rely on admins to change their sites (an uphill battle if ever there was one).
If you can run your proxy from a public ip and secure it, no problem. Personally I do most of my browsing from one machine.
Taco: Could you explain your model, young man?
Anonymous Coward: What's to explain? He's an idiot!
Mods: Pipe down!
Eddeye: Well basically, I just copied the plant we have now.
Taco: Mm-hmm.
Eddeye: Then, I added some fins to lower wind resistance. And this racing stripe here I feel is pretty sharp.
Taco: Agreed. First prize!
Anonymous Coward: But it, it was a contest for children!
Mods: Yeah. And Eddeye beat their brains out!
"...the insane levels of taxes gasolene and diesel do (this is the primary reason it costs a fortune to fill up at the pump.)"
Not really. Federal & CA taxes have changed very little in the last 7 years. The increases at the pump are almost entirely due to the price of crude. Here's the breakdown on a gallon of gas:
| April 10, 2006 | April 12, 1999
Crude Oil |$1.59 |$0.35
Refining Cost & Margin |$0.63 |$0.70
State and Federal Taxes |$0.57 |$0.48
Distribution & Marketing |$0.01 |$0.09
Price Per Gallon |$2.80 |$1.62
You went to all that trouble yet you're using rand for entropy. That's like putting a padlock on a paper bag. Try reading from urandom on linux instead, or something else suitable on other platforms.
Edit->Preferences->Fonts->Size. Done.
They already have it. Let them use pdf instead of corrupting html. I understand the pressure, but a compromise helps no one. The bastardized half-semantic, half-presentation system we have now is the worst of both worlds.
Scaling is the right approach, but it's the user (*not* the developer) who should be in control. No one else has any right (or even ability) to set pixel sizes on my display. Am I 320x200 or 1920x1440? 3" handheld or 27" plasma? How far from the monitor am I? How many arcseconds per pixel? How good is my eyesight? What colors and contrast levels do I prefer? What font faces am I most comfortable with? If you don't know for absolute sure, then stay the hell out of my settings.
Any page that says "designed for resolution X" is done by a hack. Current web designs scale ok if you stay away from absolute units. Scaling images properly is a royal pain in the ass. But turning browsers into pixel-perfect rendering devices (even by translating CSS pixels into real pixels) is not the answer. Pixel units should be abolished from the CSS spec (along with points, picas, inches, and cm). Everything should be done with em/ex. Just adding rounded corners to CSS would make a lot of image scaling problems disappear. SVG can pick up the slack.
The web is an information exchange conduit, not a graphic design medium.
If that were true, we'd all be pornstars.
How's that working out for the die-hard buggy whip makers?
Not to pick on you, but this attitude is just sticking your head in the sand. Some of the best programmers I've known, with experience back to the early 80s and with every technology you can name, were hit hard by the burst in 2000-01. These were bright guys with good people skills and they couldn't find anything for a couple years.
Market forces don't care how much you love to do something or how good you are at it. My dad survived through the oil company purges of the 80s and 90s when they were laying off talented people left, right, up, down, and sideways.
I agree with this part though. Pick something you enjoy or you'll be miserable. And if making money is what you really want, there are much more effective ways to do so (like investment banking or financial analyst).
Tell that to the umpteen million art history majors struggling for that one museum curatorship opening.
Yes and no (mostly no). First, Software Eng isn't established as a widely recognized program yet (do any schools offer it yet? i'm not counting devry). A CS degree will get you farther past the resume filters and into an actual interview. If you just meant a SoftEng specialization within CS, then fine, but you usually don't get enough electives for it to matter much.
Second, computer science programs vary by school. Some are very abstract and theoretical, others are very applied. Research individual depts to find which ones suit you.
Third, many of the theoretical aspects of computer science do help in programming. Maybe not for the day-to-day stuff, but when a weird new task comes up or strange unexplained problems occur, the mental flexibility and exposure to foreign concepts comes in handy. It can be the difference between floundering aimlessly and recognizing the correct problem domain to start searching in.
Remember that an IT degree doesn't necessarily limit you to a job in the IT field. Besides the many jobs open to anyone with a college degree, you can use your technical background to move into other fields. Combine it with biochemistry for a job in the pharmaceutical industry. A solid math background is attractive to financial companies. Physics, geology, climatology, accounting, library science -- the list is virtually endless. There will always be options available to people willing and able to use their technical background outside of IT and programming.
I went from an MS in computer science to software developer to teaching cs to law school. Law is an incredibly broad field and technical skills will serve you well in any area, not just intellectual property.
I realized that as I typed it. But the word "logic" flows better, and a "logic unit" could incorporate knowledge to deduce from (at the least you need some axioms).
So who's more pedantic, the pedant or the pedant who follows him? :)
Beware of the Leopard
Hundreds of miles would be through the earth's crust, surely?
ParseError: ambiguous binding detected: phrase "hundreds of miles" can apply to "moving water" or "under the ice"
Applying logic unit to disambiguate... done
Sorry, that company is long gone.
Yeah, the book called "my life" by me. Still no publisher as it's long, chaotic, and only exists in my head.