It depends on what side of the CSE you're most interested in (software or hardware). I'm more of a hardware fanatic than software, so I'm ok with the prospect of being an ueber-coder. This is good, because the first few semesters of the CS end of my ECE program aren't so hot. Intro to Programming and Algo. and Data. Structures were in, get this, *ADA95* (spew). I would have killed for some Fortran. It shapes up a bit in the 4th semester with "C as a Second Language" (the one-credit programming class from hell...meets once a week, but covers *everything*), and MIPS assembler. Right now I'm reading this string while I put off looking at my grades....Ada class can go either way (trend being 80% passed Intro, 33% passed Algorithms, where I am), and I'm going to go postal if I have to take any more of that piece of crap.
What happens when you take the time to learn and become proficient in DVORAK, then you turn around and realize that basically every other computer in the world is QWERTY. You'd have trouble if you had to use somebody elses computer, another lab, a kiosk or whatever. Sure, many DVORAK boards have a QWERTY switch for when your friends come over, but going the other way takes some doing.
.....yeah, doesn't it suck when a pioneering release of a new and pretty damn cool technology comes out, and it's not dirt cheap, doesn't talk to everything under the sun, work in every God-forsaken corner of the globe, and stand up to all of your wild, pie in the sky expectations? I mean...the rat bastards, how dare they! All initial releases of cutting edge prices must be perfect in every way, and be given out in little plastic bags burried in cereal boxes, right? Personally, I'm not going to buy it, but it's a pretty damn nice try on the part of Handspring.
Sure, it's expensive....most new technology is expensive (not like research and development costs anything, afterall). And maybe it doesn't speak bluetooth or make rice, but it does what it does in a pretty small package.
Do what I'm going to do...wait for Handspring to see how this does, and pick up the next version in a year or so. They should work out most of the kinks, and it most likely won't cost too much. Same goes for the Prism...it's nice, but it's expensive, and it has a few quirks.
I have been taking Japanese since 6th grade, and I have figured a few things out about Japanese instruction, having had a few different teachers with different methods. There are three different kinds of Japanese...Real Japanese...Anime Japanese...College Japanese Class Japanese. Real Japanese is what you hear 90% of the time in Japan. Anime Japanese is derived from Real Japanese. College Japanese Class Japanese, or CJ^2 is derived from your profs doctoral thesis. My profs dissertation must have been a dilly, because I had a hard time in that class.
I started freshman year in 003, which is lower-middle intermediate, and was pretty much review for me, with something new thrown in every now and then. I wound up with an A-, because I pretty much quit doing homework after the midterm. Anyway, What you learn in class isn't exactly what you're going to hear in Japan.
Baggage and other such things: 1. Know those things called 'particles'? 75% of the time you can forget them, and nobody will look at you crosswise. Except for the ladies in the elevator, and announcements at the train station, you're not goign to hear them. 2. If you live with a host family (and I highly suggest it), you'll use 'desu' with your host mother for the first week or so, untill you become a part of the family, and you'll never hear it again. 3. Any sentence containing more than a few words: College Japanese professors like nice, long, well structured, super-polite strings of words and particles that sound pretty, but take half an hour to get your point across. (DOn't worry, I get to anime shortly). Forget it...by the time you say "Kagaku no kurasu ato de, nani o shitai desu ka?" your friends will have made the plans and bailed on you. It's all about "Kurasu-ato-nan-suru?" said as basically one word with no clear beginning or end; your pals will reply with the usual indecicive "uun..shiranai" and you'll be off. 4. You will not ever, ever be able to understand small children...they speak Small Children Japanese. It's....strange. I've never lived in a family with small children, so I've never had a problem with that. 5. Anime Japanese is a combination of Real Japanese and Small Children Japanese (depending on what you watch, of course). It's very quick, very terse, full of slang, strange katakana-type words, and cultural references that couldnt' ever be translated.
Anime Japanese is the anti-College Japanese Class Japanese.
I meet people who say they learned Japanese from watching anime, and I tell them they have to be very careful what they say to whom, and learn some Real Japanese fast, or they'll offend the bulk of the people they talk to. Just as you learn stuff in CJ^2 that has little application in trying to speak Real Japanese, there are plenty of things in Anime Japanese that you just wont' hear a real person say.
In my opinion, and that of my friends from middle and high school who have done this: The best way to be able to watch anime in the origonal Japanese (assuming that's your intent...I just follow the story and not get too hung up on the strange verb forms and such...by the time you figure one out, the mech has exploded, he's become a she, a mermaid no less, and is elected Supreme Overlord, to roll a few stories into one), is to learn CJ^2 for it's base, then spend a month in Japan. After a terribly ackward first week or two, you'll have forgotten the baggage of CJ^2, and can converse with confidence with almost anyone you meet (and not have them think you're an elitest with your formal verb forms and such...politeness can sound condecending, especially to your peers). After that, watch anime...lots and lots of it (do other things, too...you didn't go to Japan to watch cartoons!). Pay attention to the stories, and try to match up what's going on with what you think you hear. Write down things you hear a few times in your notebook (you have a notebook, right?). This goes for your communications in Real Japanese...write stuff down you don't understand, or hear over and over.
Other than that, you should be fine. You're doing a good thing, but don't expect to listen to anime right out of class (watch all you like). Japanese class is a great start, but the only way to be communicative in Japanese is to go there and speak nothing but Japanese. It will be a huge shock the first dozen or so days, and if you go back to Japanese class after that, everyone will think you're either a genius or out of your mind (either way, they will 'ph33r' you).
You mean like the mouse balls went missing?::up...down...left...right:: I know nuttzing!
Re:Not just a girl...a rather messed up girl
on
Why Not Ada?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I'm an Electrical and Computer Engineering major (hardware, not software), and further, I'm supposed to be in the Fortran class, but was misadvised and wound up in Ada with the CS majors. Being a hardware major, I only get a little programming. The irony of all this is, one of the things I'm considering doing with this hardware education of mine is going into military-type work where they use Ada. Go figure.
Problem: They were bootleggers, now they want to have a system to distribute music and such legally.
Solution: Distribute it for BEER
chortle...I kill me
virtual beer n. Praise or thanks. Used universally in the Linux community. Originally this term signified cash, after a famous incident in which some some Britishers who wanted to buy Linus a beer and sent him money to Finland to do so.
^-----from The Jargon File v4.2.0 sorry if someone made this joke already...it just seemed to fit so well
Re:Not just a girl...a rather messed up girl
on
Why Not Ada?
·
· Score: 1
There's nothing wrong with a language being named after a girl...just that Ada is named after a rather messed up girl. Allow me to loosely paraphrase from a text I found in my/info where my prof kept all the stuff from the book.
Important Disclaimer Warning, the following loose paraphrase reads like the "Killer the Dog" monologue in Half Baked. The author would like to publicly state that he is not baked..just feeling the effects of sublingually ingested Penguin Mints
The Story of Ada, as told by some file I found with my GNAT compiler
"Ada was Lord Byron's daughter. It is practically the law to mention this point in any discussion having a word with the letters 'ada' in it, whether or not the disussion is related to programming. She was his only legitimate daughter. Previously, he was married to his half-sister and had a kid or two. (I'd go re-read all this, but I don't want to log into my filesys on account of my laziness).
So anyway, he was the only legitimate daughter of this guy Byron (who left his sister and married someone else, hense her legitimate status).
She worked with Charles Babbage...she was the first programmer. (This line inserted in accordance with the Ada Detail Discussion Act). She worked alot...eventually she got some kind of digestive/respiratory problem.
They gave her drugs.
Literally, lots and lots of drugs. (Begin the freaky part...I'm not making any of this up). Using the finest "modern scientifik resoning methods" of the day, they treated her with a mixture of brandy, morphine, and heroine, and some other stuff. Needless to say, she became quite addicted to this stuff.
Also, she went insane (echo: insaaane). She believed she could communicate and do math with God. Eventually, she figured out that the drugs were messing with her, and quit cold turkey. To dull the pain of her many and various kinds of simultanious withdrawl, she took up gambling on horse racing. She died in debt. .steady now .. ...wait for it .... ...........oh yeah....and they named a language after her."
RE: Perl...yeah...perl was named after that completely messed up kid in that hateful book: The Scarlet Letter
To the great and wise moderators: yeah, this is mad out of date, but I'm being force-fed Ada95 and have been waiting for an opportunity to vent in a public forum.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on what side of the CSE you're most interested in (software or hardware). I'm more of a hardware fanatic than software, so I'm ok with the prospect of being an ueber-coder. This is good, because the first few semesters of the CS end of my ECE program aren't so hot. Intro to Programming and Algo. and Data. Structures were in, get this, *ADA95* (spew). I would have killed for some Fortran. It shapes up a bit in the 4th semester with "C as a Second Language" (the one-credit programming class from hell...meets once a week, but covers *everything*), and MIPS assembler. Right now I'm reading this string while I put off looking at my grades....Ada class can go either way (trend being 80% passed Intro, 33% passed Algorithms, where I am), and I'm going to go postal if I have to take any more of that piece of crap.
What happens when you take the time to learn and become proficient in DVORAK, then you turn around and realize that basically every other computer in the world is QWERTY. You'd have trouble if you had to use somebody elses computer, another lab, a kiosk or whatever. Sure, many DVORAK boards have a QWERTY switch for when your friends come over, but going the other way takes some doing.
Sure, it's expensive....most new technology is expensive (not like research and development costs anything, afterall). And maybe it doesn't speak bluetooth or make rice, but it does what it does in a pretty small package.
Do what I'm going to do...wait for Handspring to see how this does, and pick up the next version in a year or so. They should work out most of the kinks, and it most likely won't cost too much. Same goes for the Prism...it's nice, but it's expensive, and it has a few quirks.
I have been taking Japanese since 6th grade, and I have figured a few things out about Japanese instruction, having had a few different teachers with different methods. There are three different kinds of Japanese...Real Japanese...Anime Japanese...College Japanese Class Japanese. Real Japanese is what you hear 90% of the time in Japan. Anime Japanese is derived from Real Japanese. College Japanese Class Japanese, or CJ^2 is derived from your profs doctoral thesis. My profs dissertation must have been a dilly, because I had a hard time in that class.
I started freshman year in 003, which is lower-middle intermediate, and was pretty much review for me, with something new thrown in every now and then. I wound up with an A-, because I pretty much quit doing homework after the midterm. Anyway, What you learn in class isn't exactly what you're going to hear in Japan.
Baggage and other such things:
1. Know those things called 'particles'? 75% of the time you can forget them, and nobody will look at you crosswise. Except for the ladies in the elevator, and announcements at the train station, you're not goign to hear them.
2. If you live with a host family (and I highly suggest it), you'll use 'desu' with your host mother for the first week or so, untill you become a part of the family, and you'll never hear it again.
3. Any sentence containing more than a few words: College Japanese professors like nice, long, well structured, super-polite strings of words and particles that sound pretty, but take half an hour to get your point across. (DOn't worry, I get to anime shortly). Forget it...by the time you say "Kagaku no kurasu ato de, nani o shitai desu ka?" your friends will have made the plans and bailed on you. It's all about "Kurasu-ato-nan-suru?" said as basically one word with no clear beginning or end; your pals will reply with the usual indecicive "uun..shiranai" and you'll be off.
4. You will not ever, ever be able to understand small children...they speak Small Children Japanese. It's....strange. I've never lived in a family with small children, so I've never had a problem with that.
5. Anime Japanese is a combination of Real Japanese and Small Children Japanese (depending on what you watch, of course). It's very quick, very terse, full of slang, strange katakana-type words, and cultural references that couldnt' ever be translated.
Anime Japanese is the anti-College Japanese Class Japanese.
I meet people who say they learned Japanese from watching anime, and I tell them they have to be very careful what they say to whom, and learn some Real Japanese fast, or they'll offend the bulk of the people they talk to.
Just as you learn stuff in CJ^2 that has little application in trying to speak Real Japanese, there are plenty of things in Anime Japanese that you just wont' hear a real person say.
In my opinion, and that of my friends from middle and high school who have done this:
The best way to be able to watch anime in the origonal Japanese (assuming that's your intent...I just follow the story and not get too hung up on the strange verb forms and such...by the time you figure one out, the mech has exploded, he's become a she, a mermaid no less, and is elected Supreme Overlord, to roll a few stories into one), is to learn CJ^2 for it's base, then spend a month in Japan. After a terribly ackward first week or two, you'll have forgotten the baggage of CJ^2, and can converse with confidence with almost anyone you meet (and not have them think you're an elitest with your formal verb forms and such...politeness can sound condecending, especially to your peers). After that, watch anime...lots and lots of it (do other things, too...you didn't go to Japan to watch cartoons!). Pay attention to the stories, and try to match up what's going on with what you think you hear. Write down things you hear a few times in your notebook (you have a notebook, right?). This goes for your communications in Real Japanese...write stuff down you don't understand, or hear over and over.
Other than that, you should be fine. You're doing a good thing, but don't expect to listen to anime right out of class (watch all you like). Japanese class is a great start, but the only way to be communicative in Japanese is to go there and speak nothing but Japanese. It will be a huge shock the first dozen or so days, and if you go back to Japanese class after that, everyone will think you're either a genius or out of your mind (either way, they will 'ph33r' you).
You mean like the mouse balls went missing? ::up...down...left...right:: I know nuttzing!
Actually, I'm an Electrical and Computer Engineering major (hardware, not software), and further, I'm supposed to be in the Fortran class, but was misadvised and wound up in Ada with the CS majors. Being a hardware major, I only get a little programming. The irony of all this is, one of the things I'm considering doing with this hardware education of mine is going into military-type work where they use Ada. Go figure.
They were bootleggers, now they want to have a system to distribute music and such legally.
Solution:
Distribute it for BEER
chortle...I kill me
^-----from The Jargon File v4.2.0
sorry if someone made this joke already...it just seemed to fit so well
Important Disclaimer
Warning, the following loose paraphrase reads like the "Killer the Dog" monologue in Half Baked. The author would like to publicly state that he is not baked..just feeling the effects of sublingually ingested Penguin Mints
The Story of Ada, as told by some file I found with my GNAT compiler
"Ada was Lord Byron's daughter. It is practically the law to mention this point in any discussion having a word with the letters 'ada' in it, whether or not the disussion is related to programming. She was his only legitimate daughter. Previously, he was married to his half-sister and had a kid or two. (I'd go re-read all this, but I don't want to log into my filesys on account of my laziness).
So anyway, he was the only legitimate daughter of this guy Byron (who left his sister and married someone else, hense her legitimate status).
She worked with Charles Babbage...she was the first programmer. (This line inserted in accordance with the Ada Detail Discussion Act). She worked alot...eventually she got some kind of digestive/respiratory problem.
They gave her drugs.
Literally, lots and lots of drugs. (Begin the freaky part...I'm not making any of this up). Using the finest "modern scientifik resoning methods" of the day, they treated her with a mixture of brandy, morphine, and heroine, and some other stuff. Needless to say, she became quite addicted to this stuff.
Also, she went insane (echo: insaaane). She believed she could communicate and do math with God. Eventually, she figured out that the drugs were messing with her, and quit cold turkey. To dull the pain of her many and various kinds of simultanious withdrawl, she took up gambling on horse racing. She died in debt.
.steady now
..
...wait for it
....
...........oh yeah....and they named a language after her."
RE: Perl...yeah...perl was named after that completely messed up kid in that hateful book: The Scarlet Letter
To the great and wise moderators: yeah, this is mad out of date, but I'm being force-fed Ada95 and have been waiting for an opportunity to vent in a public forum.