At the end of the article, it says that one of the unschoolers figured out how to read by herself. That's nothing special. I figured out how to read before I went to kindergarten, and the same thing happened to my smart friends whose parents read to them.
Anyway, reading between the lines, my BS alert is going off. Unschooling sounds a lot more like a semantics game to justify playing all day. I see it as an overreaction to putting too much structure into childrens' lives.
I like the healthy dose of reality that comes from this article. In Silicon Valley, I meet so many people who treat the Singularity as "fact" much like I meet Christians who treat their belief in Jesus as "fact." The way I can tell who's smart is how they react when I tell them that if they believe in Jesus and go to Church every Sunday, they'll go to heaven. The smart ones quickly realize that an unquestioning belief in the Singularity requires just as much irrational faith as a belief in a religion like Christianity.
Not that there's anything wrong with having faith, but assuming that one's faith in technology is right is just as silly as putting faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
In my first job out of college I made sure that the code built cleanly, and beat people over the head to keep their unit tests running well. I refused to accept any unit tests that had undocumented dependencies; although I was perfectly happy with a short paragraph or two in a README.
The more senior developers had better things to do then worry about running builds and keeping the unit tests clean.
"Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander.""
Back when I ran a dial-up, I hex-edited the "please register" pauses to say something like "loading, please wait."
Have you ever tried abusing the try/catch statements?
That's even worse. Throwing an exception is a resource-intense operation; and many debuggers have a break-on-exception feature. As a result, it's a pain to debug mysterious exceptions because the program will keep breaking into the debugger where someone used try/catch instead of normal logic.
Why? Because my current stylish computer desk is glass. I have to use a mouse pad, and it's really annoying. My end-table in my living room is also glass, and I have to use a mouse pad there for my HTPC.
I hope that Java and C# ASP.NET programmers take this to heart - rewriting their sites in Ruby after the first implementation went way overbudget and looked like shit is a very profitable business...
C# and Java are great languages, as long as they aren't used for generating web sites. I love C#, but I took a few looks at ASP and ran as fast as I could. All it does is take a simple thing (HTTP) and make it very complicated.
IMO, once you understand how the web works, ASP just gets in the way.
What's to stop me from coming to a different conclusion, such as that Python and Ruby are toy languages not meant for serious projects? It would be just as presumptuous, wouldn't it?
You can also conclude that Python and Ruby are great for rapid prototyping.
How valuable is your data? If it's so valuable that you don't want it remotely administered, then can you justify the extra cost for on-site administration?
ust shot themselves in the foot, what better advertising is there than participants showing what a great time they had at the event...
There is a significant amount of public nudity at Burning Man. Part of the reason why public nudity at Burning Man is so fun is because you don't have to worry about pictures of you in the buff show up where you don't expect it.
There policies are somewhat liberal compared to other nudist resorts I've been to; they just don't allow any cameras at all.
The Computer History Museum is free and has an unbelievable collection of computer artifacts. It is in the Bay Area, so there are lots of other things you can see in San Francisco, San Jose, etc. I will leave recommendation of those up to others who will certainly chime in.
The Babbage machine is really cool. I was there the day they unveiled it, and people dressed up in steampunk.
And, if you're going to the San Francisco Bay Area, there are also plenty of other cool museums. Golden Gate Park has the DeYoung art museum, and directly across the field is a cool museum of natural history. (I can't remember the name.) These museums are about 45 minutes north of the Computer History Museum.
It sounds a little like security by obscurity - but Mr. Liu seems to know his local competition. Now who would want to force feed the GPL to Mr. Liu because "all software must be free"?
What if he allowed people to buy a GPL version at a very, very, very high price? Could time the sale to allow him a form of early retirement?
False; RMS himself used to charge $150 for tapes of the GNU system. The GPL FAQ specifically states that you may charge for software under the terms of the GPL. Here's a current example of GPL software being sold for money.
How long did it take RMS to make the tapes? Was it a case where he just didn't want to go through the trouble of making lots of tapes?
The labels have been promoting the singles-based emphasis ever since they first came into existence, because that's how songs used to be recorded. The album is a much more recent invention. Small surprise they're having trouble adapting to it.
Ever listen to classical? There are short pieces and long pieces. Beethoven's 9th is so popular that the playback time of a CD was chosen specifically so it could fit an entire performance without swapping / flipping.
Beethoven's 9th is AWESOME, and it predates recorded music.
As a side note, TFA seems to be confused between codecs and containers.
As a programmer, I understand the concept of a container.
As a media enthusiast, I find the real-world differences between container and codec to be almost inconsequential. New codecs and functionality often come with new containers. (avi for MPEG4, mkv for H21)
Forget WAV, MP3 and M4A - major labels have something new in mind, and it's called CMX
WAV, MP3, and M4A tend to imply different programs.
My point, however, is that the difference between container and codec really is an engineering detail that might be overlooked in a more consumer-focused press release. Musicians really don't care about the difference between a codec and a container; but they really want a digital "something" that replaces the album cover.
Hopefully the container and codec are open enough that there are many playback programs to choose from.
Whowever designed this has obviously never worn progressive lenses. In real, ordinary life, you don't "decide" to focus on something for a minute and adjust the slider accordingly, you adjust your focal point *all the time*, unconsciously. What progressive lenses do is allow your neck muscle to "emulate" what your eye muscles would normally do if you weren't an old fart.
From the article
The goal is a system that will automatically determine focus by using an accelerometer, a sensor that measures changes in motion, said Ronald Bloom, the company founder. It would need recharging every two or three days.
I'd like to see technology that uses the difference in angle between the eyes to know what distance it needs to focus at. Hopefully this can be mature once presbyopia sets in for me.
Actually, I think that an application that monitors your car's battery/fuel/power source and is linked to a GPS with a trip planner saying "Hey, you won't get there with your current battery/fuel/etc level, you need to get more juice" would be fricken useful.
I already have that. It's called a gas gauge + a GPS with locations of gas stations + common sense.
It also helps that I drive a hybrid that can go from the boarder of Nevada to the California coast on a single tank of gas.:)
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I used to do that until I was buried in CDs.
At the end of the article, it says that one of the unschoolers figured out how to read by herself. That's nothing special. I figured out how to read before I went to kindergarten, and the same thing happened to my smart friends whose parents read to them.
Anyway, reading between the lines, my BS alert is going off. Unschooling sounds a lot more like a semantics game to justify playing all day. I see it as an overreaction to putting too much structure into childrens' lives.
I like the healthy dose of reality that comes from this article. In Silicon Valley, I meet so many people who treat the Singularity as "fact" much like I meet Christians who treat their belief in Jesus as "fact." The way I can tell who's smart is how they react when I tell them that if they believe in Jesus and go to Church every Sunday, they'll go to heaven. The smart ones quickly realize that an unquestioning belief in the Singularity requires just as much irrational faith as a belief in a religion like Christianity.
Not that there's anything wrong with having faith, but assuming that one's faith in technology is right is just as silly as putting faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
In my first job out of college I made sure that the code built cleanly, and beat people over the head to keep their unit tests running well. I refused to accept any unit tests that had undocumented dependencies; although I was perfectly happy with a short paragraph or two in a README.
The more senior developers had better things to do then worry about running builds and keeping the unit tests clean.
Big deal.
Currently, my cable company only sends terrestrial broadcast channels as ClearQAM. I get everything else through Hulu or the show's web site.
Flushing drugs down the toilet isn't the problem. The problem is that a large portion of many medications taken are simply peed away.
The problem is that people aren't partying hard enough!
My current favorite: Use IKVM to convert a java .jar file into a .dll that will work under .Net and Mono!
"Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander.""
Back when I ran a dial-up, I hex-edited the "please register" pauses to say something like "loading, please wait."
Have you ever tried abusing the try/catch statements?
That's even worse. Throwing an exception is a resource-intense operation; and many debuggers have a break-on-exception feature. As a result, it's a pain to debug mysterious exceptions because the program will keep breaking into the debugger where someone used try/catch instead of normal logic.
Anybody know what the range of the cordless mouse is? Will it work across a living room from my glass coffee table?
Someone tagged this article with "why."
Why? Because my current stylish computer desk is glass. I have to use a mouse pad, and it's really annoying. My end-table in my living room is also glass, and I have to use a mouse pad there for my HTPC.
I hate mouse pads, and I like glass.
I hope that Java and C# ASP.NET programmers take this to heart - rewriting their sites in Ruby after the first implementation went way overbudget and looked like shit is a very profitable business...
C# and Java are great languages, as long as they aren't used for generating web sites. I love C#, but I took a few looks at ASP and ran as fast as I could. All it does is take a simple thing (HTTP) and make it very complicated.
IMO, once you understand how the web works, ASP just gets in the way.
What's to stop me from coming to a different conclusion, such as that Python and Ruby are toy languages not meant for serious projects? It would be just as presumptuous, wouldn't it?
You can also conclude that Python and Ruby are great for rapid prototyping.
C++, when done properly, has very little of the problems of C (type unsafety and tedious manual memory management
Doing C++ properly is tedious.
How valuable is your data? If it's so valuable that you don't want it remotely administered, then can you justify the extra cost for on-site administration?
ust shot themselves in the foot, what better advertising is there than participants showing what a great time they had at the event...
There is a significant amount of public nudity at Burning Man. Part of the reason why public nudity at Burning Man is so fun is because you don't have to worry about pictures of you in the buff show up where you don't expect it.
There policies are somewhat liberal compared to other nudist resorts I've been to; they just don't allow any cameras at all.
The Computer History Museum is free and has an unbelievable collection of computer artifacts. It is in the Bay Area, so there are lots of other things you can see in San Francisco, San Jose, etc. I will leave recommendation of those up to others who will certainly chime in.
The Babbage machine is really cool. I was there the day they unveiled it, and people dressed up in steampunk.
And, if you're going to the San Francisco Bay Area, there are also plenty of other cool museums. Golden Gate Park has the DeYoung art museum, and directly across the field is a cool museum of natural history. (I can't remember the name.) These museums are about 45 minutes north of the Computer History Museum.
It sounds a little like security by obscurity - but Mr. Liu seems to know his local competition. Now who would want to force feed the GPL to Mr. Liu because "all software must be free"?
What if he allowed people to buy a GPL version at a very, very, very high price? Could time the sale to allow him a form of early retirement?
False; RMS himself used to charge $150 for tapes of the GNU system. The GPL FAQ specifically states that you may charge for software under the terms of the GPL. Here's a current example of GPL software being sold for money.
How long did it take RMS to make the tapes? Was it a case where he just didn't want to go through the trouble of making lots of tapes?
The labels have been promoting the singles-based emphasis ever since they first came into existence, because that's how songs used to be recorded. The album is a much more recent invention. Small surprise they're having trouble adapting to it.
Ever listen to classical? There are short pieces and long pieces. Beethoven's 9th is so popular that the playback time of a CD was chosen specifically so it could fit an entire performance without swapping / flipping.
Beethoven's 9th is AWESOME, and it predates recorded music.
As a side note, TFA seems to be confused between codecs and containers.
As a programmer, I understand the concept of a container.
As a media enthusiast, I find the real-world differences between container and codec to be almost inconsequential. New codecs and functionality often come with new containers. (avi for MPEG4, mkv for H21)
Forget WAV, MP3 and M4A - major labels have something new in mind, and it's called CMX
WAV, MP3, and M4A tend to imply different programs.
My point, however, is that the difference between container and codec really is an engineering detail that might be overlooked in a more consumer-focused press release. Musicians really don't care about the difference between a codec and a container; but they really want a digital "something" that replaces the album cover.
Hopefully the container and codec are open enough that there are many playback programs to choose from.
Whowever designed this has obviously never worn progressive lenses. In real, ordinary life, you don't "decide" to focus on something for a minute and adjust the slider accordingly, you adjust your focal point *all the time*, unconsciously. What progressive lenses do is allow your neck muscle to "emulate" what your eye muscles would normally do if you weren't an old fart.
From the article
The goal is a system that will automatically determine focus by using an accelerometer, a sensor that measures changes in motion, said Ronald Bloom, the company founder. It would need recharging every two or three days.
I'd like to see technology that uses the difference in angle between the eyes to know what distance it needs to focus at. Hopefully this can be mature once presbyopia sets in for me.
Actually, I think that an application that monitors your car's battery/fuel/power source and is linked to a GPS with a trip planner saying "Hey, you won't get there with your current battery/fuel/etc level, you need to get more juice" would be fricken useful.
I already have that. It's called a gas gauge + a GPS with locations of gas stations + common sense.
It also helps that I drive a hybrid that can go from the boarder of Nevada to the California coast on a single tank of gas. :)
We'll be providing blow-by-blow coverage.
As in, you're going to the coke party that the music industry execs throw with all their profits?
What about Linux circuit simulation software? At least that can be run in a VM for free.