The expression you're grasping for is "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." (Reciprocate means to return, recapitulate means to repeat.)
Translated to plain English, it means that the developmental stages of an organism repeat the evolutionary stages of the species.
It may be "a simple concept", but it is completely bogus. It was a popular theory a few decades ago that evolution is a linear ladder of ever increasing complexity culminating in the grand perfection of Homo sapiens -- The Ascent of Man. The early researchers saw the superficial similarities between the developmental stages of "higher" animals to other "lower" organisms and came up with that pithy phrase.
For more details read any of the modern popularisations of evolutionary theory, like those by Stephen Jay Gould.
I don't believe in evolution.
On second thought, don't waste your time reading Gould, just stick to the nice comfortable fairy tales in the Bible.
If Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, is urging his own country to increase Computer Science enrollement, and the largest University in his home state is stupid enough to be turning down students due to limited capacity, right after Bill Gates made a large donation to the Computer Science department...
Alas, our politicians don't seem to listen to Bill. No, let me rephrase that: on this issue, the politicians don't seem to listen to Bill.
Again, no specific knowledge of UofW CS, but often these large donations can't be used to hire faculty (other than specific grants like Endowed Chairs etc.). At Stanford the Gates money went into a new building. Faculty hiring goes all the way to the Deans and, at state universities, often to the Regents. In other words, it's a politically charged issue.
While I sure did enjoy Big O notation, learning how to write perl scripts would have been 3 trillion times more valuible.
Did you manage to pick up perl on your own?
Would you have learned about run-time analysis of programs on your own?
Do you think run-time analysis of programs is useful?
An education should give you the fundamentals that allow you to use all the tools out there (and create new ones), not teach you how to use specific tools. The latter is called vocational training, and there are plenty of places like DeVry that will teach you to write perl scripts.
How selective are they? Stories of students with a 4.0 GPA not being accepted into the school (transfering from Community College) abound.
As someone who's been on the other side of this issue, let me ask you: if I can accept 25 students to the program, and there are 50 applicants with a GPA of 4.0, who should get in?
To have a snowballs chance in hell of getting into the department you had best have all of your math and science courses completed, the department apparently did NOT want anyone who would take any more than the minimum amount of time coming in there.
Another way to think about it is: if I have a limited number of openings, shouldn't I favour those who are more likely to graduate?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying anything specifically about UofW CS; I don't know anything about UofW CS. But if we as a society want a quality education to be more accessible, we need to increase education funding. It's as simple as this: you get what you pay for. If a department has fifteen people on the faculty (and is not allowed to hire more) there can't be more than about 400-500 students.
It seems we'd rather pay to kill hundreds of thousands of people in far away lands than help our own children.
... the best and the brightest... the folks who create innovation... have a tendency to value money pretty highly
Colour me extremely skeptical. "Value money highly" is not the same as "want the highest paying occupation". It's been my experience that the best and brightest [won't say "innovative" since that seems to be a Micros**t trademark these days] don't just follow the money. As an example (warning: anecdotal evidence coming up!) what do you think the median salary is for Nobel Laureates? Compare that to the median salary and brightness of, say, lawyers.
It may be that "the best people" form a bi-modal distribution: those who feel the road to happiness lies in having more money (money == equipment [toys] for cool things), and those who feel it lies in having more time (time == freedom for cool things).
I feel working in software is the best of both worlds: being paid lots of money to do the things I want to do anyway, i.e. tinker and hack. I still recommend CS as an undergraduate major to smart people who like to tinker.
At every company I've worked for over the last couple of decades, everyone used free (beer and speech) software -- this even includes the regrettable couple of years at Micros**t shops. If you don't, you and the company you work for are being fools for not using tools with infinite benefit-to-cost ratio.
On occasion, where the license permitted it, we've also incorporated code from free software into products.
Yes, you're right, it's true but unfortunate that you need the buzzwords to get past HR. I was trying to say "when you're looking through job openings, any skills requirements should be taken with a pinch of salt since they're often made up by a recruiter" -- but my brain misfired.
However, a bigger problem is that most CS graduates have no clue about software engineering (stuff like OOP design, UML, patterns, and so on). If someone uses a bubblesort instead of quicksort or vice versa, it's pretty easy to fix (in most civilized languages, you just specify a different object from the standard library).
My point was not about bubble sort as such, but using it as an example to drive home the point that the CS discipline really does have a lot of stuff that you don't just pick up on the street. You need a solid understanding of algorithms, runtime analyses and data structures if you want to be a professional. Otherwise you're liable to strike out on your own, not knowing that others have already made those mistakes and you don't have to.
It's my pet peeve that these days people pay more attention to hot buzzwords like OOP, patterns and UML than to the really basic stuff. But that's a rant for another time and place!
Given that you have just completed a Master's degree, you have been in school for about 6 years. Nearly everything you learned first year is obsolete.
If all you got from college is a list of soon-to-be-obsolete "skills" in using specific tools, you should ask for your money back. College should be teaching you the basics, the fundamentals underlying all tools and techniques. Like the difference between O(n^2) and O(n log n), for instance -- I can't believe how much crap code I've seen in "production" software with basic errors like that.
When I'm looking for people, I don't really care what "skills" people claim to have. I want people that are smart and enthusiastic -- hell, I can teach then any skills they might need. Therefore find a job that you are enthusiastic about and you won't have to keep any lies straight.
Remember, getting a job has two pretty distinct parts: the resume, and the interview. HR people screen resumes, and they may not know Java from mocha. They're also the people who ask for ten years of experience in a language that has only existed for five, so take any skill and experience requirements in a job posting with a pinch of salt. Don't lie (or exaggerate) to any geeks about your technical skills, though.
That would mean that the mean power consumption of a house is 1.4 kW. A good hair dryer uses that much. Large appliances like air-conditioners, refrigerators, dishwashers, clothes dryers, etc. are all around 1-2 kW.
1.4 kW is about 2 horsepower. At 110 V, 1.4 kW is a current draw of 12 A. (At 220 V, it's 6 A.) I guess "over 1000 houses" sounds much better than "a few hundred houses."
'Almost all - 96 pecent - of the insiders were men, and 30 percent of them had previously been arrested, including arrests for violent offenses (18 percent), alcohol or drug-related offenses (11 percent), and non-financial-fraud related theft offenses (11 percent).'
Yeah, so? Without knowing these numbers for the IT workforce, or even the general population, it's impossible to draw any conclusions.
"In a study of corporate fraud and pension raiding scams, all the offenders were middle-aged white men who played golf." Nasty piece of work, these middle-aged golf-playing white men -- let's throw them all in jail to be on the safe side.
Freedom tests? "More" free? If your grandma gave the violin to the school under condition that it be used in instruction, but the school realised it was $25K so they sold it, of course your grandma has the right to be pissed off.
the BSD license is always going to come out second to the GPL (and even third to the LGPL) because it allows (and in most cases, encourages) abuse without any penalty.
How is that less freedom? Thats more freedom for people who use the project.
Freedom is not absolute: your freedom to act stops at my nose. With the GPL it's the code that's free, not other programmers. If I release code under the GPL, the code will always be free -- it cannot be incorporated into a non-free project.
We can argue about which is "more free", but keep this distinction in mind: the BSD license frees other programmers; the GPL license frees the code.
Personally, I care more for my code than for Micros**t's (or any other company's) coders, so I use the GPL to release free software. However that doesn't make someone who releases under the BSD license a fool. Use the license that matches your attitude.
No, not every OS X Compatible printer is supported by CUPS.
And vice versa. MacOS X doesn't support the HP LaserJet 1150 although it's supported by CUPS.
If you dig through the CUPS documentation you learn that the 1150 is a PCL 6 printer so if you select "LaserJet 6" in the print setup tool you can print to the 1150. But Apple can't really expect Grandma (or even my non-geek lawyer friend) to figure that out.
(I may be misremembering it being PCL 6 and LaserJet 6, it might have been 5.)
Agile my ass. If the design evolves as you code, the documentation -- design docs, functional specs, comments in the code, whatever -- must evolve to match it. If you don't update the doc when the design changes, you are doing a half assed job. If you whine that you don't have the time to, well, why was your time estimate so off to begin with?
Certainly, estimates of how long it's going to take to do something are just estimates and can be wrong. But if they're constantly wrong so you never have time for documentation, face it -- you're incompetent. If you can't resist management pressures to do a quick half-assed job and get it out the door, you should quit. Unless you don't mind doing a half-assed job, of course.
And if for any reason your doc becomes out of date and you're not going to fix it -- delete it. Bogus documentation is worse than no documentation.
As Abelson and Sussman write, "Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." The more complex the system, the more important that is.
If you just disassemble the executable into assembly, and convert that to some HLL, what you have is still derived from the original, i.e. it's still under the original copyright.
But this is a start: someone can look at this code and write a detailed spec about the Mimic stream. (Something like Apple's iChat spec.) Then someone else takes this spec and re-implements it.
This is a time-honoured method in the world of software.
...980 millibars, the standard sea level air pressure
The International Standard Atmosphere is 1013.2 millibars (29.92" Hg) and 15 deg. Celsius (288.2 K). 980mb is quite low -- that's the border between a mere tropical storm and a hurricane.
Re:An accessible page, more types of fluids tested
on
Bang But No Splash
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· Score: 1
I would have thought that the shape of the drop in the top would have been shaped more like [a teardrop]
The best quick reference on drop shape is the Bad Meteorology page on Bad Rain.
You paint a colourful picture. (Have you thought about going into screenwriting, for "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit"?)
How likely is that? The media and the government hype up each crime and whip us up into a state of frenzy. Crime has become glamorous. They each have their own motives for doing so, of course, but keep in mind there are 300,000,000 people in the US, and 6.5 billion people in the world. I'm not going to buy into this culture of hysteria. I could get hit by a meteorite tomorrow, but that doesn't keep me from leaving the house.
Eh? "Blocking of the smtp port only stops guests sending mails under you account"? It doesn't sound like you understand SMTP.
I block outbound SMTP because I don't want a neighbour to use me for spamming -- I hate spam because it hurts us all and has no redeeming qualities. (An end-user on a wireless laptop has no business with plain SMTP anyway -- an MUA should use IMAP+SSL to receive and SMTP/TLS to send. Or they can just stick to webmail.)
Everything else -- I am not going to be cowed by alarmist propaganda like "downloading kiddie porn!!!" or "file sharing!!!". They still have to prove me guilty. If they confiscate anything, it's only equipment and can be replaced. (Of course I have backups.) If "they" come for me I will fight them to the best of my abilities, that's all any citizen can do. Don't give up your rights just because they make it uncomfortable for you to exercise them.
And join the EFF and ACLU while you're at it. Remember, you don't have to agree with every single case they take on.
Some of us believe in the right to be anonymous. I have a publicly accessible unencrypted WiFi network. Outbound port 25 is blocked, but everything else is open and unlogged.
The convenience of law enforcement officials does not override citizens' rights.
Slashdot Mirror
(People called Romanes they go the house?)
sic -- thus; semper -- always; "So there will always be spam."
Semper ubi sub ubi -- Always wear under wear.
It may be "a simple concept", but it is completely bogus. It was a popular theory a few decades ago that evolution is a linear ladder of ever increasing complexity culminating in the grand perfection of Homo sapiens -- The Ascent of Man. The early researchers saw the superficial similarities between the developmental stages of "higher" animals to other "lower" organisms and came up with that pithy phrase.
For more details read any of the modern popularisations of evolutionary theory, like those by Stephen Jay Gould.
On second thought, don't waste your time reading Gould, just stick to the nice comfortable fairy tales in the Bible.Again, no specific knowledge of UofW CS, but often these large donations can't be used to hire faculty (other than specific grants like Endowed Chairs etc.). At Stanford the Gates money went into a new building. Faculty hiring goes all the way to the Deans and, at state universities, often to the Regents. In other words, it's a politically charged issue.
- Did you manage to pick up perl on your own?
-
Would you have learned about run-time analysis of programs on your own?
-
Do you think run-time analysis of programs is useful?
An education should give you the fundamentals that allow you to use all the tools out there (and create new ones), not teach you how to use specific tools. The latter is called vocational training, and there are plenty of places like DeVry that will teach you to write perl scripts.Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying anything specifically about UofW CS; I don't know anything about UofW CS. But if we as a society want a quality education to be more accessible, we need to increase education funding. It's as simple as this: you get what you pay for. If a department has fifteen people on the faculty (and is not allowed to hire more) there can't be more than about 400-500 students.
It seems we'd rather pay to kill hundreds of thousands of people in far away lands than help our own children.
It may be that "the best people" form a bi-modal distribution: those who feel the road to happiness lies in having more money (money == equipment [toys] for cool things), and those who feel it lies in having more time (time == freedom for cool things).
I feel working in software is the best of both worlds: being paid lots of money to do the things I want to do anyway, i.e. tinker and hack. I still recommend CS as an undergraduate major to smart people who like to tinker.
On occasion, where the license permitted it, we've also incorporated code from free software into products.
Yes, you're right, it's true but unfortunate that you need the buzzwords to get past HR. I was trying to say "when you're looking through job openings, any skills requirements should be taken with a pinch of salt since they're often made up by a recruiter" -- but my brain misfired.
It's my pet peeve that these days people pay more attention to hot buzzwords like OOP, patterns and UML than to the really basic stuff. But that's a rant for another time and place!
Remember, getting a job has two pretty distinct parts: the resume, and the interview. HR people screen resumes, and they may not know Java from mocha. They're also the people who ask for ten years of experience in a language that has only existed for five, so take any skill and experience requirements in a job posting with a pinch of salt. Don't lie (or exaggerate) to any geeks about your technical skills, though.
1.4 kW is about 2 horsepower. At 110 V, 1.4 kW is a current draw of 12 A. (At 220 V, it's 6 A.) I guess "over 1000 houses" sounds much better than "a few hundred houses."
"In a study of corporate fraud and pension raiding scams, all the offenders were middle-aged white men who played golf." Nasty piece of work, these middle-aged golf-playing white men -- let's throw them all in jail to be on the safe side.
We can argue about which is "more free", but keep this distinction in mind: the BSD license frees other programmers; the GPL license frees the code.
Personally, I care more for my code than for Micros**t's (or any other company's) coders, so I use the GPL to release free software. However that doesn't make someone who releases under the BSD license a fool. Use the license that matches your attitude.
Or did you mean that Jeb is a member of a group subject to persecution and discrimination, i.e. the super-mega-rich middle-aged white men?
If you dig through the CUPS documentation you learn that the 1150 is a PCL 6 printer so if you select "LaserJet 6" in the print setup tool you can print to the 1150. But Apple can't really expect Grandma (or even my non-geek lawyer friend) to figure that out.
(I may be misremembering it being PCL 6 and LaserJet 6, it might have been 5.)
Certainly, estimates of how long it's going to take to do something are just estimates and can be wrong. But if they're constantly wrong so you never have time for documentation, face it -- you're incompetent. If you can't resist management pressures to do a quick half-assed job and get it out the door, you should quit. Unless you don't mind doing a half-assed job, of course.
And if for any reason your doc becomes out of date and you're not going to fix it -- delete it. Bogus documentation is worse than no documentation.
As Abelson and Sussman write, "Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." The more complex the system, the more important that is.
But this is a start: someone can look at this code and write a detailed spec about the Mimic stream. (Something like Apple's iChat spec.) Then someone else takes this spec and re-implements it.
This is a time-honoured method in the world of software.
Amazing!! Man, it gives me hope that there are still business people -- in Poland, at least -- with a sense of ethics and a sense of humour.
How likely is that? The media and the government hype up each crime and whip us up into a state of frenzy. Crime has become glamorous. They each have their own motives for doing so, of course, but keep in mind there are 300,000,000 people in the US, and 6.5 billion people in the world. I'm not going to buy into this culture of hysteria. I could get hit by a meteorite tomorrow, but that doesn't keep me from leaving the house.
Everything else -- I am not going to be cowed by alarmist propaganda like "downloading kiddie porn!!!" or "file sharing!!!". They still have to prove me guilty. If they confiscate anything, it's only equipment and can be replaced. (Of course I have backups.) If "they" come for me I will fight them to the best of my abilities, that's all any citizen can do. Don't give up your rights just because they make it uncomfortable for you to exercise them.
And join the EFF and ACLU while you're at it. Remember, you don't have to agree with every single case they take on.
Some of us believe in the right to be anonymous. I have a publicly accessible unencrypted WiFi network. Outbound port 25 is blocked, but everything else is open and unlogged.
The convenience of law enforcement officials does not override citizens' rights.