My grades are high (95.6 on a 100 scale), I have several leadership positions in clubs, however I'm pretty sure that's not enough. What else can I do to improve my chances of being accepted there?
The answer is simple: You need to learn that life is not objective. There is no magic formula for you to follow so that you will get ahead and have a comfortable lifestyle.
Instead, realize this: Youth is irreplacable.
When I was in high school, I was told that good grades and extra-curriculars were required for college. While somewhat truthful; the real motivation of the statement is to keep impressionable highschool students under the control of the administration. Make sure that you take control of your life so that your youth isn't wasted as someone else's pawn.
It sounds like your students will eventually need laptops so that they can do their homework on computers. It's going to take a few years for such a reality to occur.
My suggestion is to start turning more classrooms into inexpensive computer labs. You could try bolting cheap laptops to desks and rely on wireless networking to ease wiring expenses. (For example, you might be able to buy refurbished centrinos that are good enough for web browsing.) It's going to take a few years before the computer industry can provide the product you're looking for, at the price and durability that you need.
The article is a total crock of @#$#. Just looking at the charts shows you that the audio "difference" is so incredibly tiny that the actual players probably have far more to do with it than the format.
I didn't read the article, but I knew it was a crock by the audio "difference" thing.
AFAIK, the audio on both formats is the exact same (and the same as standard DVD as well). DTS (the best) and DD. Now some content is encoded better into DD or DTS at the studio, but the delivery of the digital information is for all sake of argument the same 1s and 0s that were put on the disk at the studio.
Actually, I have heard that since the data capacity of the newer disks is so great that many of the soundtracks are uncompressed (raw PCM data), but still AfAIK there is no difference between the formats in the audio realm.
I you read TFA, they explain the reason why BluRay appears to have better audio: Most HD-DVDs are released with audio using lossy compression; BluRay doesn't use lossy compression.
I really wanted to mod this, but I feel obliged to respond. Green is that last possible thing you should every try to outsource. It defeats the whole purpose of green. Being green is about taking personal responsibility to reduce the total load of industry on the environment. Paying someone else to do it for you effectively allows you to ignore the core concept for which you are striving. You're essentially saying that it's too much bother for you to do it, so you're going to pay someone else. I think of it as trying to reduce the instance of obesity and smoking by paying two other fit and smoke free folks workout every day for 30 minutes and not to smoke. You're still fat and have emphysema, and there are no additional fit, non-smokers in the population.
This is not to say that you shouldn't buy alternative energy, just that you should do what you can in your own backyard first. Put a green roof on your building, plant more trees, have a permeable parking lot, reduce the energy used (turn the lights off when you leave), and all the other varied suggestions here.
It's very easy to tell me to put a solar panel on my roof... But it was much easier for me to check the box on my electric bill so that I can buy from the local windmills! (I live in an apartment.)
Something to consider is that many electric companies will do a free audit of a business's energy usage.
This just reminds me of the BBS gatherings that used to occur back in the 80s and 90s. It appears that many of these people use YouTube as a video-based BBS.
I suggest keeping a "green" server farm simple by outsourcing your "green".
Where I live, (Santa Clara, in Silicon Valley,) I buy solar and wind power directly from the grid. It's not the cheapest electricity, but it is affordable. PG&E, a major electric company in CA, has very low carbon output per kilowatt hour. They also allow you to sponsor reforestation, thus allowing you to recapture the carbon generated from running your servers.
It is also possible to buy carbon credits. This is where you essentially pay someone to remove carbon from the air. At the consumer level, Terrapass allows consumers to purchase carbon credits.
I was confused by the summary at first, and now that I've R'ed TFA, I am no more enlightened.
Don't confuse DRM with copy protection.
DRM != copy protection.
A proposed version of DRM is to watermark downloadable media with information that will identify the purchaser. Such media would have no copy protection, but if it made it onto a P2P network, the original purchaser would be sued.
Thus, with watermarking DRM, honest people can make as many copies and format-shift to their heart's delight.
Likewise, Wendy Carlos watermarks all of her music as a way of signaling that she doesn't want it used without her permission.
I wonder what race people thought their charachters were back in the 80s and 90s when almost all people in video games were pixelated abstractions.
When I played Zelda 1 & 2 on the NES, back in the late 80s, I thought the game was supposed to be placed in a setting based on mid-evil Europe, with all characters being white. Recently, I've been playing Zelda on the Wii and have been wondering what race the characters are. Everyone has light skin, and one of the major players (Colin) has very blond hair. On the other hand, many of the characters have asian facial features and postures. Sumo wrestling is part of the plot.
I don't know why anyone is every surprised when stuff goes wrong on missions, or equipment breaks down. Nasa is a governmental agency and as such has a big beaurocratic morass, and often different divisions don't know what the others are doing.
The fact that things go wrong has nothing to do with beuracracy. Whenever you build a [big complex device] that runs in [an environment that's difficult to reproduce] and you don't have an opportunity to fix things once they leave your workbench, the risk of failure is quite high. The fact that many of our space probes have failures is unavoidable; we really won't be able to increase our success rate until we can cheaply send lots of engineers to space so that they can perform better testing and gain more experience.
Actually, you don't need anything quite as elaborate as what this article seems to describe. All you need is the ability for power companies to charge rates that vary in realtime based on supply/demand, and to allow customer to elect to use these rates instead of averaged-out ones.
Be careful! Enron used such rules to artificially inflate the cost of electricity. (I believe they were turning off power plants at peak load.) It was the only business venture that they actually were profitable at.
I wouldn't pay 5$ for a 128kbps mp3 album when I could down 192kbps VBR for free. 128kbps mp3 isn't even worth listening to, unless you're into poetry/other spoken material. I would however pay £5 for a high- or very high- quality mp3 album.
I think £5 (~$10) is a fair price for a physical CD that's about five years old. It's too expensive for MP3.
I'd spend $5 on a download if it was lossless at CD-resolution, or high-bitrate at 20-bit, 96khz. $5 for an MP3 at any bitrate is a ripoff, considering how widespread AAC and WMA are.
Oh, I also forgot to mention intellisense. Basically, when you hit ".", Visual Studio allows you to use tab completion with whatever API you're using. It also shows the arguments and expected types in the IDE. Such functionality makes it very easy to learn a new API, and it reduces spelling mistakes, (which aren't caught by the Objective C compiler.)
The whole connections thing. In Visual Studio, I can double-click on a button and all event handlers are automatically written for me; XCode still requires me to wire the button to the code.
Depricating Java. There's something to be said for having a strongly-typed language with null checking.
Basically, it's difficult to write a quick-and-dirty GUI on a Mac. With XCode, I need to spend more time wiring and debugging. The real advantage of Visual Studio is that it allows the programmer to slap together an imperfect program, which results in the Windows platform having more applications.
Support is expensive! I thought the reason for MS requiring the expensive Vista was because of support costs. I can empathise; an hour of technical support must cost Microsoft at least $25 if the guy is in India, or $100 if the guy is in the US.
Something that used to bug me in some RPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior is that you'd progress to a point in the game where you suddenly needed to increase your level by a significant amount. This would require you to literally play 5-6 hours straight fighting random enemies in the woods.
I always give up at the point where I need to spend an entire afternoon or evening doing boring tasks. Games are supposed to be FUN!
What is amazing to me is that Jobs/Apple have a near monopoly on digital music downloads/players that would only be hurt by a lack of DRM lock-in and yet Jobs is still advocating for the change. Would any other company or CEO do this?
I'd consider buying music online if it didn't have DRM. (I'd also want a higher bitrate and resolution!)
Completly turning off a PC isn't practical. I recieve incoming calls via Skype, which requires that I leave my computer on.
Granted, with a few relays, we could make monitors & speakers more efficient. I wired up a 10-amp AC relay to my reciever, which I use to completly turn off my subs and TV when my home theater is off. It saves me about $5 / month! Those of us who are real power misers could just plug our PC monitors into a switched outlet for real savings.
$19.88 download of Windows only crippled move. Not a deal. No extras, worse quality. Sounds like the Amazon movie thing.
I like the Netflix approach, for about the same price, I get to watch ~18 movies a month in their flash-based player. What's cool about that approach is that flash-based movies work on the Wii! Last night I was watching YouTube on my TV with my Wii.
This isn't just a convenience thing: if the robot is fetching a car, it can't put one in the garage, so the faster you can get cars in and out, the more cars (over the course of a day) you can store (and the more money you can make). This would be especially crucial for local events like sports games, where 20k people are all going to be getting their cars at the same time.
You really don't need robotic parking for events where everyone shows up and leaves at the same time. In Boston, near Fenway park, during Red Sox games, the cheap parking lots just block everyone in. When the game ends, everything sorts itself out! I've seen the same approach work at a church; everyone who plans on leaving right after the mass blocks each other in.
Anyway, who cares? The whole point of the Wii is not to deliver stunning movie-quality graphics. The point of the Wii is to change the way games are played. High end graphics are overrated anyway. Doom 3 and Quake 4 both have fantastic fx but the game play is not innovative and is boring. WarioWare for the Wii has minimal graphics, but IMHO, is very replayable. I know I'm sounding old here but I'm sick of the argument that graphics are everything. In other words, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 may render a piece of crap in high detail... capturing all the intricate details and using 16X anti-aliasing to render the post steam convecting off of it... but it still a piece of crap. I want to be able to play with that piece of crap... toss it around like bowling or in tennis. I can do this with the Wii and it smells fantastic.
I just bought a Wii. It's the first console I've spent serious money on in over 10 years. I specifically bought it because Nintendo made games for it that are fun and innovative.
I must admit that I wish Nintendo put in a little bit of anti-aliasing. It's a little distracting (for me) to see Link's fishing line as a dashed line. (Granted, if Nintendo built a super-console, it'd cost as much as a PS3!)
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is simple: You need to learn that life is not objective. There is no magic formula for you to follow so that you will get ahead and have a comfortable lifestyle.
Instead, realize this: Youth is irreplacable.
When I was in high school, I was told that good grades and extra-curriculars were required for college. While somewhat truthful; the real motivation of the statement is to keep impressionable highschool students under the control of the administration. Make sure that you take control of your life so that your youth isn't wasted as someone else's pawn.
It sounds like your students will eventually need laptops so that they can do their homework on computers. It's going to take a few years for such a reality to occur.
My suggestion is to start turning more classrooms into inexpensive computer labs. You could try bolting cheap laptops to desks and rely on wireless networking to ease wiring expenses. (For example, you might be able to buy refurbished centrinos that are good enough for web browsing.) It's going to take a few years before the computer industry can provide the product you're looking for, at the price and durability that you need.
I you read TFA, they explain the reason why BluRay appears to have better audio: Most HD-DVDs are released with audio using lossy compression; BluRay doesn't use lossy compression.
It's very easy to tell me to put a solar panel on my roof... But it was much easier for me to check the box on my electric bill so that I can buy from the local windmills! (I live in an apartment.)
Something to consider is that many electric companies will do a free audit of a business's energy usage.
All I can say is that a 10-year-old girl asked me if she could play with my Wii.
This just reminds me of the BBS gatherings that used to occur back in the 80s and 90s. It appears that many of these people use YouTube as a video-based BBS.
I suggest keeping a "green" server farm simple by outsourcing your "green".
Where I live, (Santa Clara, in Silicon Valley,) I buy solar and wind power directly from the grid. It's not the cheapest electricity, but it is affordable. PG&E, a major electric company in CA, has very low carbon output per kilowatt hour. They also allow you to sponsor reforestation, thus allowing you to recapture the carbon generated from running your servers.
It is also possible to buy carbon credits. This is where you essentially pay someone to remove carbon from the air. At the consumer level, Terrapass allows consumers to purchase carbon credits.
Don't confuse DRM with copy protection.
DRM != copy protection.
A proposed version of DRM is to watermark downloadable media with information that will identify the purchaser. Such media would have no copy protection, but if it made it onto a P2P network, the original purchaser would be sued.
Thus, with watermarking DRM, honest people can make as many copies and format-shift to their heart's delight.
Likewise, Wendy Carlos watermarks all of her music as a way of signaling that she doesn't want it used without her permission.
I wonder what race people thought their charachters were back in the 80s and 90s when almost all people in video games were pixelated abstractions.
When I played Zelda 1 & 2 on the NES, back in the late 80s, I thought the game was supposed to be placed in a setting based on mid-evil Europe, with all characters being white. Recently, I've been playing Zelda on the Wii and have been wondering what race the characters are. Everyone has light skin, and one of the major players (Colin) has very blond hair. On the other hand, many of the characters have asian facial features and postures. Sumo wrestling is part of the plot.
The fact that things go wrong has nothing to do with beuracracy. Whenever you build a [big complex device] that runs in [an environment that's difficult to reproduce] and you don't have an opportunity to fix things once they leave your workbench, the risk of failure is quite high. The fact that many of our space probes have failures is unavoidable; we really won't be able to increase our success rate until we can cheaply send lots of engineers to space so that they can perform better testing and gain more experience.
I agree, the online petition to release the original unmodified Star Wars trillogy went completly unnoticed!
Be careful! Enron used such rules to artificially inflate the cost of electricity. (I believe they were turning off power plants at peak load.) It was the only business venture that they actually were profitable at.
I think £5 (~$10) is a fair price for a physical CD that's about five years old. It's too expensive for MP3.
I'd spend $5 on a download if it was lossless at CD-resolution, or high-bitrate at 20-bit, 96khz. $5 for an MP3 at any bitrate is a ripoff, considering how widespread AAC and WMA are.
Oh, I also forgot to mention intellisense. Basically, when you hit ".", Visual Studio allows you to use tab completion with whatever API you're using. It also shows the arguments and expected types in the IDE. Such functionality makes it very easy to learn a new API, and it reduces spelling mistakes, (which aren't caught by the Objective C compiler.)
Laugh. When I was 12 I wrote a video game in GWBasic using GOTOs.
Actualy I'm dissapointed that XCode with Objective C doesn't have anything like intellisense. It's a real time-saver.
Basically, it's difficult to write a quick-and-dirty GUI on a Mac. With XCode, I need to spend more time wiring and debugging. The real advantage of Visual Studio is that it allows the programmer to slap together an imperfect program, which results in the Windows platform having more applications.
I recently switched to a MacBook Pro. While the platform has its advantages, XCode is about ten years behind Microsoft Visual Studio.
Apple really needs a modern development enviornment; without one it will always be second-runner when it comes to variety of applications.
Support is expensive! I thought the reason for MS requiring the expensive Vista was because of support costs. I can empathise; an hour of technical support must cost Microsoft at least $25 if the guy is in India, or $100 if the guy is in the US.
Something that used to bug me in some RPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior is that you'd progress to a point in the game where you suddenly needed to increase your level by a significant amount. This would require you to literally play 5-6 hours straight fighting random enemies in the woods.
I always give up at the point where I need to spend an entire afternoon or evening doing boring tasks. Games are supposed to be FUN!
I'd consider buying music online if it didn't have DRM. (I'd also want a higher bitrate and resolution!)
Completly turning off a PC isn't practical. I recieve incoming calls via Skype, which requires that I leave my computer on.
Granted, with a few relays, we could make monitors & speakers more efficient. I wired up a 10-amp AC relay to my reciever, which I use to completly turn off my subs and TV when my home theater is off. It saves me about $5 / month! Those of us who are real power misers could just plug our PC monitors into a switched outlet for real savings.
I like the Netflix approach, for about the same price, I get to watch ~18 movies a month in their flash-based player. What's cool about that approach is that flash-based movies work on the Wii! Last night I was watching YouTube on my TV with my Wii.
You really don't need robotic parking for events where everyone shows up and leaves at the same time. In Boston, near Fenway park, during Red Sox games, the cheap parking lots just block everyone in. When the game ends, everything sorts itself out! I've seen the same approach work at a church; everyone who plans on leaving right after the mass blocks each other in.
I just bought a Wii. It's the first console I've spent serious money on in over 10 years. I specifically bought it because Nintendo made games for it that are fun and innovative.
I must admit that I wish Nintendo put in a little bit of anti-aliasing. It's a little distracting (for me) to see Link's fishing line as a dashed line. (Granted, if Nintendo built a super-console, it'd cost as much as a PS3!)
You tell them about a cool computer with Linux pre-installed. (How do you think Apple sells their Unix-based MacOS?)
Seriously, most people have no desire to install an OS; it's easier to point them to a different brand for their NEXT computer.