I was trying to point out that I consider it from both sides of the fence. The only music I have 'illegally' downloaded recently was the Guitar Hero music, where I already own the game which has all the songs in it for one, and it has inspired me to buy several albums, so I certainly don't feel I've done anything wrong. I buy all my software too, but again since I have always considered MS to be holding back computing (no matter how much they helped it in the early days, their actual OSes design and security was always worse than the alternatives even if it had more driver support..). I know that's a bit hypocritical but I honestly don't care when it comes to corporations that treat their customers and competitors like shit.
The 'game' in this case (personal morals) is whatever the player makes it. I think people who download all their music for free are jerks, and I think people who illegally get MS software are also being jerks (I legally bought my copy of XP Pro for home use a few years ago, though then started using Ubuntu instead and gave the XP CD to my brother). I just think that the latter situation is less evil. I'd prefer if people just used Linux but it isn't always viable.
I already had given that person a machine with Ubuntu pre-loaded in the past. I know it's wrong and relative but I don't care these days. My friend asked me for something and I thought okay fair enough, your choice here it is if you want it. I don't have a problem with ripping off MS, I have much more of a problem with ripping off musical artists. I don't think that what is legal always equates with what is 'right'. What would be right would be for MS to use open standards and compete on level ground, and for music companies to treat their artists better. Again I repeat I buy all my music these days. Even when I was a student I bought most of my music from shops, but for more obscure songs I had to download them. These days I just order it all from Amazon, they have pretty much anything.
Ripping people off is ripping people off sure, though in the MS case, it's ripping off people who rip people off, which even if it's still wrong, is better (in MY opinion, which I don't claim is objectively 'right' or 'good', if such things even exist).
I know it's bullshit and that's why I started with "that's only true to an extent", I was going to point out that it's still damaging but I got sidetracked. I buy all my music these days, though I have music that other people have sent me over the years, but I have bought the albums of bands I like too. I do think it's wrong just to copy music and not pay for it. I also consider it stealing to pirate office and Windows - which I don't do myself btw, though someone recently asked me about keys for office 2007 and I pointed them to the pirate bay after considering for a moment. I am not saying that there is any right to steal from them, but I'm saying I don't have a problem with it, MS are a bunch of morons and the more their company is damaged the better off the world would be. Sadly piracy is just another way of perpetuating their stranglehold on the market, they've already shown that they're quite happy for people to pirate their software as long as it locks them in.
And in case you haven't noticed, when you copy music, you don't get rid of the original so it's a bit different from phsyical stealing (not saying it's not wrong, but it's not exactly the same as the person who first bought the music doesn't then lose it - it's breaking copyright, rather than 'stealing').
I don't get why you think I generally approve of illegal music downloading when I said that I usually buy CDs.. I said in a post above that I think it's bullshit to expect to get everything for free, and that I believe artists need to get some income too (just as Open Source contributors generally need a real job to stay alive, and contribute to OSS in their spare time).
It's spelled 'reek' btw. You wreak havoc with the english language.
in the absence of the ability to pirate the music I own wouldn't be buying it anyway That is only true to an extent. I know people that buy pirated DVDs and download singles that they would otherwise end up buying. They wouldn't buy as much as they download, but they would still buy some of it. I have no problem whatsoever with people pirating office and Windows because I have a problem with the way Microsoft operates as a company, and I do extend that to music publishers - I'd much prefer if artists just released their music themselves online through their own website or possibly through iTunes plus. I tried iTunes last week, downloaded some An Endless Sporadic and it was fine, no DRM, I did see 'iTunes+' on the page but I didn't know what it meant. I then downloaded some Dragonforce and couldn't play it directly in Winamp, and discovered that all the latest versions of iTunes don't seem to have any DRM removal tools because Apple were threatening DVD Jon with court action:/ I had to burn and rip a CD just to be able to listen to my own music. I'm not buying anything else from iTunes unless it is 'plus'. I really want to support An Endless Sporadic, and they don't have any albums out on CD otherwise I would have just bought that..
What are you suggesting is at stake? I have downloaded music illegally on occasion, though I've actually bought a few albums because I like what I hear. For example I downloaded the Guitar Hero III soundtrack and have bought albums from 5 of the artists on there, 4 of whom I'd never heard of before. I do own the game though so maybe that's a bit of a grey area. I have received music from a few people illegally and similarly I just bought a Dream Theater album as a result of that. So I can see the point of people who want to encourage file sharing and say that it doesn't always damage the industry, though I also accept that it is currently illegal. Some people will always be jerks and just want to get everything for free. I met someone recently who went on about SoulSeek and how it's great you can get everything for free etc, I was pretty disgusted because I think that anyone who likes a band should give something back to the artist rather than use the excuse that the artist should do it just for the love of music, though it is a fair point because a lot of bands don't get paid much if anything and really do play just for the love of music (I used to be in a band, it was good fun, though if I were to do it as my main occupation then I would definitely want paid - hiring a decent recording studio for a day costs about as much as I make in 2 weeks.. and hiring a practice room for an hour costs about as much as I make per hour). Using the "music should be free" reasoning, a coder should always work for free (open source is good, but how do you pay the bills?), doctors should always work for free (I know doctors and nurses that pay to go out to other countries to help out, but again how do they pay for their training or bills if they don't have a job?). People that act like everything should be free that are just freeloaders who pretend to be acting for the greater good, but really are just making the whole situation worse and giving the RIAA et al an excuse to push for bullshit control laws like this. I don't have a problem with this as long as it's just monitoring actual illegal music downloading, but how are they even going to know if someone is downloading music if for example they are using an encrypted network?
Even if you only read the articles relevant to your work you could end up being side tracked by an offtopic thread on just about anything:P Still, when it comes to things like network security and other topics where you could easily miss something, it's good to see a lot of different opinions and ideas. I certainly have wasted a lot of time on slashdot, but you need to keep up with the news or risk being completely out of touch with new developments in important stuff like dealing with new viruses and spam. Strangely the time when I was least up to date with my computing news was when I was studying Computing at University, but since starting work again and being pointed to The Register and then finding Slashdot, I'm back in the loop.
I'm in the exact same position as the article submitter, except that I have become a bit of a jack of all trades because I've been in the job for a few years (and was part time over the summers before that), so I rarely need to get outside advice from our outsourcing bunch, but I do google for information on a lot of topics:P As well as being a sysadmin I'm doing lots of coding. I primarily would like to think of myself as a coder at the moment than a manager or admin - thankfully things run pretty smoothly most of the time these days, a lot better than in the days when I was just working summers anyway, so I must be doing something right:)
Fair enough, I consider a reasonable address space to be unreasonably large though, if I may use such oxymoronical language:p I agree that there are definitely a lot of wasteful and inconsiderate idiots out there - most of them probably gravitating towards management jobs at Microsoft:p When I first learned to code I had a 5Mhz Amiga with 1MB of RAM, it always seems crazy to me that anything these days could ever be slow with thousands of megahertz, gigabytes of RAM and highly powerful dedicated graphics and sound processors.. that we still are living in days when some people just accept monstrosities like Vista as being remotely viable software makes me sad.
my landlord asked me what type of letter box I wanted for precisely this reason Ew.. is that quite a common thing in England? I live in Scotland and haven't heard of anyone doing that, it's certainly not an everyday occurence at least (peeing in the street sure.. through a letter box, not so much!). My answer to the question in this situation would be "one with teeth";)
From wikipedia:
It is common to see examples that attempt to show that the IPv6 address space is extremely large. For example, IPv6 supports 2^128 (about 3.4x10^38) addresses, or approximately 5x10^28 addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion (6.5x10^9) people alive today.[1] In a different perspective, this is 252 addresses for every star in the known universe[2] - more than ten billion billion billion times as many addresses as IPv4 supported. Now, I don't know about you but I think that is quite reasonable for now. When we all need 5x10^28 addresses each (not to mention the extra addresses each person can get behind a NAT) then there will be a problem.. in the meantime, "5x10^28 IP addresses should be enough for anyone";)
When you're talking about the majority of people that is of course correct, there are different ways to be 'smart'. But some people obviously are disruptive or just not performing well academically for whatever reason - these pupils do need to be treated differently, and hopefully still end up receiving the best education they can get, but if this is at the cost of those who are already doing well then IMO that is a problem.
Just because someone is starved for attention at home doesn't mean they should get away with always disrupting their school classes. I used to sit next to such a person in my Geography class, he was well known as a bully and as someone who always messed around in class. I know he was fairly capable underneath it all and probably could have done well in class if he'd wanted to, but just the types of friends he had and his family situation etc contributed towards him wasting everyone's time. He used to get special assistance type teachers coming into class to try to deal with him and motivate him. That's all well and good, but only as long as he isn't disrupting things for the rest, which he sometimes did.
Likewise if someone is performing poorly compared to everyone else for whatever reason, or if someone is performing much better than the rest, I think ideally it would be best if they could have special provisions made for them to work faster or slower, though in the real world that is very difficult. But I think it's even worse to slow down the whole class for one person than to have the whole class move along at a medium pace and hold back the students that are performing better. Some people may be performing poorly because they are 'intimidated' somehow, or they may just be dumb, but the thing is that this shouldn't hold back the progress of the rest of the class. It's like telling America not to attemp a moon landing because the Russians haven't quite caught up to their level of technology yet. No matter why a child is falling behind, it shouldn't slow down the rest, though I of course agree that anything possible should be done to help the failing child. I know that while I'm good at the majority of things without trying, there was one time in chemistry where I just didn't get what was happening with some equilibrium reaction and it took the teacher something like 10-15 minutes to get me to understand what was actually happening (though perhaps nobody else in the class was trying to understand the process and just accepted it without asking - I think the thing that threw me off was that I didn't realise the reaction was still happening even during the perceived state of equilibrium, whereas using a formula for the reaction made me think that the reaction just 'happened' until equilibrium was achieved, and then it somehow stopped)
I'd forgotten, but part of the reason I enjoyed my first high school so much could be that there were so many pupils, that there had to be about 6-7 maths and english classes, so they could split the pupils by how good they were (I was in class 2 for English, and class 1 for Maths). That school also had prizes each year for exam results (I was first for Physics and Computer, and 6th equal for the whole year overall out of at least 100 so was pretty happy with that). Then we moved house and the Maths and English classes were split into 2 or 3 classes - obviously with a smaller sample size there were more 'dumb' people in the classes I was in, and the whole school overall just didn't seem very proud or confident of itself. It was just so demoralising to see the Rector get so enthusiastic about who had the best attendance and hand out prizes for it, but to neglect prizes for grades. I still did pretty well on my exams in the first year I was at that school (7 1s and a 2 out of possible 8 '1's) but after that I just stopped really trying because I didn't feel I had anything to aim for. I got more than enough for what I needed to do Computing at University level anyway and that's all I wanted to do by that point. If we hadn't moved I think I would have been putting much more effort in though.
I think my point is that you enjoy learning much more if you actually have an incentive to be in the 'best' class or you are rewarded for having the best marks. Some people (most likely those that never get the best marks) might find that a bit petty or shallow, but I think there always has to be something to strive for if you are wanting people to try and fulfil their potential. Just look at the number of people that play MMORPGs - always trying to get their character to the next/highest 'level' and beat others in PvP.
Not really - it's what you get when you live in a culture where it's politically incorrect to say some people are just better than others. IMO this is just an over the top reaction to the whole Nazi thing, same as the reactions to racism and sexism where some organisations feel they should meet a certain quota of non-white or female workers. If someone can learn faster than the rest of the class, they should ideally be given the chance to do so. Often it's just down to a lack of resources (basically just not enough teachers, at least here in the UK) that the brighter kids can't be given more challenging work though. Home tutoring can be good for catering to an individual child's needs, but than can hamper proper social development too.
I haven't done studies to prove any of that but a lot of it seems 'obvious' from experience and anecdotal 'evidence':p In this case I don't think it's so much of a problem helping the lower achievers, but placing higher achievers in the same class is the issue. Our family lived on an island off the coast of Scotland for a few months and I ended up having to be put into the year above the one for my age because their curriculum was quite different to the rest of the UK, and it all worked out okay. Most schooling at a really young age is pretty random anyway, you learn to read and write first, learn some basic maths, learn some more complex maths, learn to spell, but aside from that you just do whatever, a bit of random local history, geography etc. Once you get to the more structured syllabuses in high school then it's probably more difficult to start spreading out the classes though as the main subjects to learn (and national exams to take) have already been decided.
It is obvious yes, but the reason that nothing is done about it is entirely for political correctness as you say. I'm sure I could have skipped at least one year of high school - I always thought the first couple of years would be better compressed into one, and probably a few of the years towards the end of primary school as well. When I was in primary school we were running out of space in one of our classrooms so me and a few other people were putting into the class above for a year. I don't remember how that worked, the teacher must have given us separate exercises from the rest of the class - then again, maybe we were just doing similar work to the rest of the year above..
Catering to the needs of the lowest common denominator is a good way to hold back progress, and I don't care how politically incorrect that is. If someone isn't making the effort or is just 'dumb' then they should be focusing on other things than school, perhaps sports, the fast food industry, the army, or some kind of apprenticeship.
Link to a CKD website. The guy who invented CKD is the guy who brought Tae Kwon Do (which was probably my favourite martial art out of the judo, Karate and Tae Kwon Do I'd done as a kid) to the UK and North America. He'd done lots of martial arts all his life and it was taking a toll on his joints, he was in a wheelchair at one point. He then designed CKD so that you could practice without locking out your joints, and making the most use of your whole body. For example to punch you start off by rotating your hips (which also uses your rear leg for a rear punch so rear punch should be stronger) and then flicking out/round your arm, rather than just using your arm's force alone. For round punches especially you can get an awful lot of force even for targets right in front of your face. Likewise with kicks we started off very simple and a lot of attention is given to technnique - for example lifting your heel off the ground while you kick and then not dropping it back down until your other foot is fully on the ground, which ensures that your hips follow the proper movement rather than just staying stationary. It doesn't apply to all kicks but for basic front kicks and rear leg front, knee smashes, round knee, and the kicks that start off with the same technique as round knee (took a good couple of month or two before I'd built up the muscles to lift my leg properly for executing the proper movements for side kick.. it really quite tiring but in the end you end up with a much better technique than if you just lift your leg up rather than swing it round).
So even from the basic front punch and front kick you are going through the proper body kinematics from the very start. I still have all that stuff in my head (I had to unlearn a couple of bad habits I'd picked up from Karate and Tae Kwon Do even though I hadn't done them for over 10 years gor example), so I don't agree that the teaching wasn't very good:p It makes you very aware of all parts of your body and makes you think about where the power is coming from, and you don't grade until the teacher thinks you have mastered the techniques. You sound like you think I'm some feeble bodied and minded person who can't tie his shoe laces, but that is not the case:P It's not like I picked everything up amazingly quickly, there were a few techniques where I just didn't get it and asked a lot of questions until I understood the purpose of certain movements (for example in a side kick you have to spin your base foot round so that your toes are facing away from your target, which I thought was really weird and pointless, but the purpose is that when you put a lot of force into the kick you don't end up damaging your knee if the target comes towards you or whatever, as your knee can bend naturally rather than have the joint forced out sideways. We'd never done it like that at Tae Kwon Do (which I found to be a lot more natural in general) but after having it explained I saw the point in it. I'm sure I would be capable of teaching others the same techniques quite well too - we often helped each other out in class when doing shield work (one person holding a padded shield while the other attacks).
So if you decide that you are getting too old for your other styles, you should probably look into something like Choi Kwang Do. Is Chen Taiji "Tai Chi"? I would think you'd be able to carry on something like that until you die basically..
As others have pointed out the body age metric is very variable even in people who have been doing Wii fit for month and as such isn't reliable at all. I suppose you could say it was 2 belts but there are lower and senior grades on each belt so they did actually give me a new belt each time (senior ones have stripes). The quality of the training was pretty good actually (I too have done a few other things over the years, tho the fact that my family moved around a couple of times which meant I never managed to get to grading level with anything before, as well as the fact that most gradings are on sundays and my parents didn't agree with that since they were Christians). I was just giving the tying laces as an example, and talking about with one foot in the air while - I could do it before but would have to hop around a bit. I was simply more stable after doing a bit of exercise for a few months because I had a bit more ankle strength, so less/no hopping required:p
I am 24 btw. You should look into Choi Kwang Do, it's a very interesting style - it's been designed to get a good balance between power and stress to your body, and in fact a few people in the class were older (as in over 50), as well as some people closer to my age. I like to think I have a good control of my body and good balance. Each belt level only introduced about 2 more techniques and another patter to learn (that uses techniques from the levels below so that you can keep refining them) and practicing for 1.5 hours twice a week, as well as some practice on my own at home (I occasionally still do the yoga stuff from the start of the class on my own) didn't seem too much to me. The teacher in our class is the highest blackbelt level in Scotland (that's not saying that much since it's a small country, but she is a good teacher).
I didn't think exercise in general has anything to do with balance, I have been walking to work which is good exercise, but I don't feel it is doing anything but building up a bit of leg muscle (there's a big uphill section, which I jog down in the evenings).
Yes, martial arts sounds cooler than exercise. And it's a lot more fun too, while still being good exercise. I get bored on treadmills.
I thought of it as relevant, because my balance is still improved over what it was a couple of years ago. I was only referring to my balancing 'prowess' which I consider to be pretty good anyway, I can skateboard/snowboard okay. I had noticed my balance wasn't as good as it used to be though, and even after doing Choi Kwang Do for a couple of months I was definitely more able to do stuff like stand on one foot and do up my shoes, that kind of thing. That's dragging it out now, but originally I was just commenting on how my balance is pretty good.
I was going to say that sure it's not a life changer, but the more I think about it, it is. Doing martial arts improves your awareness over your body, improves your balance, improves self confidence (not just because you think "I could take that person in a fight" type thing, it's just that the martial arts tend to to instill self confidence through good body posture etc), increases your flexibility (I was surprised how little flexibility I've lost over the years anyway but pretty soon I was back to being as flexible as I was when I was 10, if not moreso, I can still touch my head off my knees even after not going for months..). I'm probably not going to go back anytime soon as I've been wanting to spend time doing other things, but it was a 'great life changer' to me at that time in my life as I'd gone through a bit of a rough patch and just having something to aim for (I went up 4 belts in 6-8 months) and getting exercise was good for me, and there was a very positive change in my concentration at work and general mood. And that was after only a few weeks. So unless you've done such training for a year yourself, I don't think you're in a position to comment on what kind of effect it has? I'm not doing martial arts atm but I am getting other forms of exercise and I generally just enjoy running around and jumping off of things:p
I pour a cup in the morning and just sip at it all day, until it's 6pm and I'm still sipping cold coffee:P When I have a whole cup at once (usually if there's cake or donuts around) I go rather mental:)
Yeah I heard in the 90s that computer game coders get a really raw deal, which kind of put me off from going into the games industry and so instead I went to work for my uncle's engineering company, and some of the things I write here can be almost as interesting as writing games.
I'm not even sure if I'd be interested in coding games these days as I tend to see most of them boring not-quite-as-good clones of stuff I've already played.
As a side note, while thinking of the types of games that would interest me, I remembered Elite IV. It caught my interest because as well as the standard space trading you can also enter a planet's atmosphere and walk around inside its cities. I really enjoyed X2 but lamented not being able to actually land on the planets (which you could do in Elite 2 of course but you couldn't walk around). According to Wikipedia, Elite IV could actually be out this year!
Man I hate political correctness. While I wouldn't make fun of a deaf person, I think it's quite valid to suggest that people are 'meant' to be able to hear. As far as dwarfism goes, that is a recognised class of disease but that could be going down the 'slippery slope' route if you try to eradicate all forms of 'defect'. It could be kind of cool to have a nation of dwarves though, living inside a mountain (okay so that's maybe going beyond political incorrectness into over the top stereotyping). The pygmys seemed to do okay for themselves..
Actually, Windows server is getting pretty good these days. What is needed to 'beat' them is a good Exchange alternative (that has alternatives to direct push email, integrated calendar, and doesn't need weeks fiddling with LDAP to install - I tried openexchange but kept having issues, I think eventually it was something like if the LDAP domain name was the same as the email domain then it wouldn't work), or for the world to friggin get rid of email already..
I would have no qualms installing Linux on every client in our company if all of the software we need ran on it. A lot of our engineering software already has Linux versions, but the Autodesk products dont, and they're the most widely used among the engineers:(
While I doubt working at Apple would be much more fun and mentally stimulating than working at google, as long as I enjoy my job and can pay the bills plus a few luxuries (mostly music, movies and video games for me), I honeslty wouldn't care how much I earned. Those salaries are all above mine, though for the average 24 year old in western civilisation I'm probably doing quite well for myself tbh. My rent is only £215 a month including broadband though, in an area where £300 or more per person is standard - them's the perks of your landlord being your room-mate's brother!:)
Heh.. I don't have time to read that now as it's 12:40AM, but the guy says he finally finished the marble rolling game on day 55.. I did it on my second go after using the board for about 20 minutes (though maybe he was doing the advanced version rather than the beginner one):s I'm 24 btw. I do think the age thing seems pretty weird because I stayed well in the balance circle thingy, I'm thinking they just try to make people feel bad at first and then let it get better over time to try and show that they have 'improved' somewhat? It's especially hilarious when it suggests that you should lose weight. I was *right* on the line between healthy and obese, but seeing as nobody but the most anorexic person would dare call me fat (it's muscle, honest!). To lose any significant weight I'd probably have to just stop eating entirely and stop doing anything that uses my muscles:P
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I was trying to point out that I consider it from both sides of the fence. The only music I have 'illegally' downloaded recently was the Guitar Hero music, where I already own the game which has all the songs in it for one, and it has inspired me to buy several albums, so I certainly don't feel I've done anything wrong. I buy all my software too, but again since I have always considered MS to be holding back computing (no matter how much they helped it in the early days, their actual OSes design and security was always worse than the alternatives even if it had more driver support..). I know that's a bit hypocritical but I honestly don't care when it comes to corporations that treat their customers and competitors like shit.
The 'game' in this case (personal morals) is whatever the player makes it. I think people who download all their music for free are jerks, and I think people who illegally get MS software are also being jerks (I legally bought my copy of XP Pro for home use a few years ago, though then started using Ubuntu instead and gave the XP CD to my brother). I just think that the latter situation is less evil. I'd prefer if people just used Linux but it isn't always viable.
I already had given that person a machine with Ubuntu pre-loaded in the past. I know it's wrong and relative but I don't care these days. My friend asked me for something and I thought okay fair enough, your choice here it is if you want it. I don't have a problem with ripping off MS, I have much more of a problem with ripping off musical artists. I don't think that what is legal always equates with what is 'right'. What would be right would be for MS to use open standards and compete on level ground, and for music companies to treat their artists better. Again I repeat I buy all my music these days. Even when I was a student I bought most of my music from shops, but for more obscure songs I had to download them. These days I just order it all from Amazon, they have pretty much anything.
Ripping people off is ripping people off sure, though in the MS case, it's ripping off people who rip people off, which even if it's still wrong, is better (in MY opinion, which I don't claim is objectively 'right' or 'good', if such things even exist).
I know it's bullshit and that's why I started with "that's only true to an extent", I was going to point out that it's still damaging but I got sidetracked. I buy all my music these days, though I have music that other people have sent me over the years, but I have bought the albums of bands I like too. I do think it's wrong just to copy music and not pay for it. I also consider it stealing to pirate office and Windows - which I don't do myself btw, though someone recently asked me about keys for office 2007 and I pointed them to the pirate bay after considering for a moment. I am not saying that there is any right to steal from them, but I'm saying I don't have a problem with it, MS are a bunch of morons and the more their company is damaged the better off the world would be. Sadly piracy is just another way of perpetuating their stranglehold on the market, they've already shown that they're quite happy for people to pirate their software as long as it locks them in.
And in case you haven't noticed, when you copy music, you don't get rid of the original so it's a bit different from phsyical stealing (not saying it's not wrong, but it's not exactly the same as the person who first bought the music doesn't then lose it - it's breaking copyright, rather than 'stealing').
I don't get why you think I generally approve of illegal music downloading when I said that I usually buy CDs.. I said in a post above that I think it's bullshit to expect to get everything for free, and that I believe artists need to get some income too (just as Open Source contributors generally need a real job to stay alive, and contribute to OSS in their spare time).
It's spelled 'reek' btw. You wreak havoc with the english language.
What are you suggesting is at stake? I have downloaded music illegally on occasion, though I've actually bought a few albums because I like what I hear. For example I downloaded the Guitar Hero III soundtrack and have bought albums from 5 of the artists on there, 4 of whom I'd never heard of before. I do own the game though so maybe that's a bit of a grey area. I have received music from a few people illegally and similarly I just bought a Dream Theater album as a result of that. So I can see the point of people who want to encourage file sharing and say that it doesn't always damage the industry, though I also accept that it is currently illegal. Some people will always be jerks and just want to get everything for free. I met someone recently who went on about SoulSeek and how it's great you can get everything for free etc, I was pretty disgusted because I think that anyone who likes a band should give something back to the artist rather than use the excuse that the artist should do it just for the love of music, though it is a fair point because a lot of bands don't get paid much if anything and really do play just for the love of music (I used to be in a band, it was good fun, though if I were to do it as my main occupation then I would definitely want paid - hiring a decent recording studio for a day costs about as much as I make in 2 weeks.. and hiring a practice room for an hour costs about as much as I make per hour). Using the "music should be free" reasoning, a coder should always work for free (open source is good, but how do you pay the bills?), doctors should always work for free (I know doctors and nurses that pay to go out to other countries to help out, but again how do they pay for their training or bills if they don't have a job?). People that act like everything should be free that are just freeloaders who pretend to be acting for the greater good, but really are just making the whole situation worse and giving the RIAA et al an excuse to push for bullshit control laws like this. I don't have a problem with this as long as it's just monitoring actual illegal music downloading, but how are they even going to know if someone is downloading music if for example they are using an encrypted network?
Would you accept the metric measured in abridged libraries of congress? I don't have time to count all the pages in the full thing at the moment.
Even if you only read the articles relevant to your work you could end up being side tracked by an offtopic thread on just about anything :P Still, when it comes to things like network security and other topics where you could easily miss something, it's good to see a lot of different opinions and ideas. I certainly have wasted a lot of time on slashdot, but you need to keep up with the news or risk being completely out of touch with new developments in important stuff like dealing with new viruses and spam. Strangely the time when I was least up to date with my computing news was when I was studying Computing at University, but since starting work again and being pointed to The Register and then finding Slashdot, I'm back in the loop.
:P As well as being a sysadmin I'm doing lots of coding. I primarily would like to think of myself as a coder at the moment than a manager or admin - thankfully things run pretty smoothly most of the time these days, a lot better than in the days when I was just working summers anyway, so I must be doing something right :)
I'm in the exact same position as the article submitter, except that I have become a bit of a jack of all trades because I've been in the job for a few years (and was part time over the summers before that), so I rarely need to get outside advice from our outsourcing bunch, but I do google for information on a lot of topics
Fair enough, I consider a reasonable address space to be unreasonably large though, if I may use such oxymoronical language :p I agree that there are definitely a lot of wasteful and inconsiderate idiots out there - most of them probably gravitating towards management jobs at Microsoft :p When I first learned to code I had a 5Mhz Amiga with 1MB of RAM, it always seems crazy to me that anything these days could ever be slow with thousands of megahertz, gigabytes of RAM and highly powerful dedicated graphics and sound processors.. that we still are living in days when some people just accept monstrosities like Vista as being remotely viable software makes me sad.
When you're talking about the majority of people that is of course correct, there are different ways to be 'smart'. But some people obviously are disruptive or just not performing well academically for whatever reason - these pupils do need to be treated differently, and hopefully still end up receiving the best education they can get, but if this is at the cost of those who are already doing well then IMO that is a problem.
Just because someone is starved for attention at home doesn't mean they should get away with always disrupting their school classes. I used to sit next to such a person in my Geography class, he was well known as a bully and as someone who always messed around in class. I know he was fairly capable underneath it all and probably could have done well in class if he'd wanted to, but just the types of friends he had and his family situation etc contributed towards him wasting everyone's time. He used to get special assistance type teachers coming into class to try to deal with him and motivate him. That's all well and good, but only as long as he isn't disrupting things for the rest, which he sometimes did.
Likewise if someone is performing poorly compared to everyone else for whatever reason, or if someone is performing much better than the rest, I think ideally it would be best if they could have special provisions made for them to work faster or slower, though in the real world that is very difficult. But I think it's even worse to slow down the whole class for one person than to have the whole class move along at a medium pace and hold back the students that are performing better. Some people may be performing poorly because they are 'intimidated' somehow, or they may just be dumb, but the thing is that this shouldn't hold back the progress of the rest of the class. It's like telling America not to attemp a moon landing because the Russians haven't quite caught up to their level of technology yet. No matter why a child is falling behind, it shouldn't slow down the rest, though I of course agree that anything possible should be done to help the failing child. I know that while I'm good at the majority of things without trying, there was one time in chemistry where I just didn't get what was happening with some equilibrium reaction and it took the teacher something like 10-15 minutes to get me to understand what was actually happening (though perhaps nobody else in the class was trying to understand the process and just accepted it without asking - I think the thing that threw me off was that I didn't realise the reaction was still happening even during the perceived state of equilibrium, whereas using a formula for the reaction made me think that the reaction just 'happened' until equilibrium was achieved, and then it somehow stopped)
I'd forgotten, but part of the reason I enjoyed my first high school so much could be that there were so many pupils, that there had to be about 6-7 maths and english classes, so they could split the pupils by how good they were (I was in class 2 for English, and class 1 for Maths). That school also had prizes each year for exam results (I was first for Physics and Computer, and 6th equal for the whole year overall out of at least 100 so was pretty happy with that). Then we moved house and the Maths and English classes were split into 2 or 3 classes - obviously with a smaller sample size there were more 'dumb' people in the classes I was in, and the whole school overall just didn't seem very proud or confident of itself. It was just so demoralising to see the Rector get so enthusiastic about who had the best attendance and hand out prizes for it, but to neglect prizes for grades. I still did pretty well on my exams in the first year I was at that school (7 1s and a 2 out of possible 8 '1's) but after that I just stopped really trying because I didn't feel I had anything to aim for. I got more than enough for what I needed to do Computing at University level anyway and that's all I wanted to do by that point. If we hadn't moved I think I would have been putting much more effort in though.
I think my point is that you enjoy learning much more if you actually have an incentive to be in the 'best' class or you are rewarded for having the best marks. Some people (most likely those that never get the best marks) might find that a bit petty or shallow, but I think there always has to be something to strive for if you are wanting people to try and fulfil their potential. Just look at the number of people that play MMORPGs - always trying to get their character to the next/highest 'level' and beat others in PvP.
Heh, please don't tell me her official birth name is v2.0? :P I'm hoping it just means she has the same name as your wife..!
Not really - it's what you get when you live in a culture where it's politically incorrect to say some people are just better than others. IMO this is just an over the top reaction to the whole Nazi thing, same as the reactions to racism and sexism where some organisations feel they should meet a certain quota of non-white or female workers. If someone can learn faster than the rest of the class, they should ideally be given the chance to do so. Often it's just down to a lack of resources (basically just not enough teachers, at least here in the UK) that the brighter kids can't be given more challenging work though. Home tutoring can be good for catering to an individual child's needs, but than can hamper proper social development too.
:p In this case I don't think it's so much of a problem helping the lower achievers, but placing higher achievers in the same class is the issue. Our family lived on an island off the coast of Scotland for a few months and I ended up having to be put into the year above the one for my age because their curriculum was quite different to the rest of the UK, and it all worked out okay. Most schooling at a really young age is pretty random anyway, you learn to read and write first, learn some basic maths, learn some more complex maths, learn to spell, but aside from that you just do whatever, a bit of random local history, geography etc. Once you get to the more structured syllabuses in high school then it's probably more difficult to start spreading out the classes though as the main subjects to learn (and national exams to take) have already been decided.
I haven't done studies to prove any of that but a lot of it seems 'obvious' from experience and anecdotal 'evidence'
It is obvious yes, but the reason that nothing is done about it is entirely for political correctness as you say. I'm sure I could have skipped at least one year of high school - I always thought the first couple of years would be better compressed into one, and probably a few of the years towards the end of primary school as well. When I was in primary school we were running out of space in one of our classrooms so me and a few other people were putting into the class above for a year. I don't remember how that worked, the teacher must have given us separate exercises from the rest of the class - then again, maybe we were just doing similar work to the rest of the year above..
Catering to the needs of the lowest common denominator is a good way to hold back progress, and I don't care how politically incorrect that is. If someone isn't making the effort or is just 'dumb' then they should be focusing on other things than school, perhaps sports, the fast food industry, the army, or some kind of apprenticeship.
Link to a CKD website. The guy who invented CKD is the guy who brought Tae Kwon Do (which was probably my favourite martial art out of the judo, Karate and Tae Kwon Do I'd done as a kid) to the UK and North America. He'd done lots of martial arts all his life and it was taking a toll on his joints, he was in a wheelchair at one point. He then designed CKD so that you could practice without locking out your joints, and making the most use of your whole body. For example to punch you start off by rotating your hips (which also uses your rear leg for a rear punch so rear punch should be stronger) and then flicking out/round your arm, rather than just using your arm's force alone. For round punches especially you can get an awful lot of force even for targets right in front of your face. Likewise with kicks we started off very simple and a lot of attention is given to technnique - for example lifting your heel off the ground while you kick and then not dropping it back down until your other foot is fully on the ground, which ensures that your hips follow the proper movement rather than just staying stationary. It doesn't apply to all kicks but for basic front kicks and rear leg front, knee smashes, round knee, and the kicks that start off with the same technique as round knee (took a good couple of month or two before I'd built up the muscles to lift my leg properly for executing the proper movements for side kick.. it really quite tiring but in the end you end up with a much better technique than if you just lift your leg up rather than swing it round).
:p It makes you very aware of all parts of your body and makes you think about where the power is coming from, and you don't grade until the teacher thinks you have mastered the techniques. You sound like you think I'm some feeble bodied and minded person who can't tie his shoe laces, but that is not the case :P It's not like I picked everything up amazingly quickly, there were a few techniques where I just didn't get it and asked a lot of questions until I understood the purpose of certain movements (for example in a side kick you have to spin your base foot round so that your toes are facing away from your target, which I thought was really weird and pointless, but the purpose is that when you put a lot of force into the kick you don't end up damaging your knee if the target comes towards you or whatever, as your knee can bend naturally rather than have the joint forced out sideways. We'd never done it like that at Tae Kwon Do (which I found to be a lot more natural in general) but after having it explained I saw the point in it. I'm sure I would be capable of teaching others the same techniques quite well too - we often helped each other out in class when doing shield work (one person holding a padded shield while the other attacks).
So even from the basic front punch and front kick you are going through the proper body kinematics from the very start. I still have all that stuff in my head (I had to unlearn a couple of bad habits I'd picked up from Karate and Tae Kwon Do even though I hadn't done them for over 10 years gor example), so I don't agree that the teaching wasn't very good
So if you decide that you are getting too old for your other styles, you should probably look into something like Choi Kwang Do. Is Chen Taiji "Tai Chi"? I would think you'd be able to carry on something like that until you die basically..
As others have pointed out the body age metric is very variable even in people who have been doing Wii fit for month and as such isn't reliable at all. I suppose you could say it was 2 belts but there are lower and senior grades on each belt so they did actually give me a new belt each time (senior ones have stripes). The quality of the training was pretty good actually (I too have done a few other things over the years, tho the fact that my family moved around a couple of times which meant I never managed to get to grading level with anything before, as well as the fact that most gradings are on sundays and my parents didn't agree with that since they were Christians). I was just giving the tying laces as an example, and talking about with one foot in the air while - I could do it before but would have to hop around a bit. I was simply more stable after doing a bit of exercise for a few months because I had a bit more ankle strength, so less/no hopping required :p
I am 24 btw. You should look into Choi Kwang Do, it's a very interesting style - it's been designed to get a good balance between power and stress to your body, and in fact a few people in the class were older (as in over 50), as well as some people closer to my age. I like to think I have a good control of my body and good balance. Each belt level only introduced about 2 more techniques and another patter to learn (that uses techniques from the levels below so that you can keep refining them) and practicing for 1.5 hours twice a week, as well as some practice on my own at home (I occasionally still do the yoga stuff from the start of the class on my own) didn't seem too much to me. The teacher in our class is the highest blackbelt level in Scotland (that's not saying that much since it's a small country, but she is a good teacher).
I didn't think exercise in general has anything to do with balance, I have been walking to work which is good exercise, but I don't feel it is doing anything but building up a bit of leg muscle (there's a big uphill section, which I jog down in the evenings).
Yes, martial arts sounds cooler than exercise. And it's a lot more fun too, while still being good exercise. I get bored on treadmills.
I thought of it as relevant, because my balance is still improved over what it was a couple of years ago. I was only referring to my balancing 'prowess' which I consider to be pretty good anyway, I can skateboard/snowboard okay. I had noticed my balance wasn't as good as it used to be though, and even after doing Choi Kwang Do for a couple of months I was definitely more able to do stuff like stand on one foot and do up my shoes, that kind of thing. That's dragging it out now, but originally I was just commenting on how my balance is pretty good.
:p
I was going to say that sure it's not a life changer, but the more I think about it, it is. Doing martial arts improves your awareness over your body, improves your balance, improves self confidence (not just because you think "I could take that person in a fight" type thing, it's just that the martial arts tend to to instill self confidence through good body posture etc), increases your flexibility (I was surprised how little flexibility I've lost over the years anyway but pretty soon I was back to being as flexible as I was when I was 10, if not moreso, I can still touch my head off my knees even after not going for months..). I'm probably not going to go back anytime soon as I've been wanting to spend time doing other things, but it was a 'great life changer' to me at that time in my life as I'd gone through a bit of a rough patch and just having something to aim for (I went up 4 belts in 6-8 months) and getting exercise was good for me, and there was a very positive change in my concentration at work and general mood. And that was after only a few weeks. So unless you've done such training for a year yourself, I don't think you're in a position to comment on what kind of effect it has? I'm not doing martial arts atm but I am getting other forms of exercise and I generally just enjoy running around and jumping off of things
Nopes - it will guess "Starbucks", and there's always one within 200km, even in Andromeda.
I pour a cup in the morning and just sip at it all day, until it's 6pm and I'm still sipping cold coffee :P When I have a whole cup at once (usually if there's cake or donuts around) I go rather mental :)
Yeah I heard in the 90s that computer game coders get a really raw deal, which kind of put me off from going into the games industry and so instead I went to work for my uncle's engineering company, and some of the things I write here can be almost as interesting as writing games.
I'm not even sure if I'd be interested in coding games these days as I tend to see most of them boring not-quite-as-good clones of stuff I've already played.
As a side note, while thinking of the types of games that would interest me, I remembered Elite IV. It caught my interest because as well as the standard space trading you can also enter a planet's atmosphere and walk around inside its cities. I really enjoyed X2 but lamented not being able to actually land on the planets (which you could do in Elite 2 of course but you couldn't walk around). According to Wikipedia, Elite IV could actually be out this year!
Man I hate political correctness. While I wouldn't make fun of a deaf person, I think it's quite valid to suggest that people are 'meant' to be able to hear. As far as dwarfism goes, that is a recognised class of disease but that could be going down the 'slippery slope' route if you try to eradicate all forms of 'defect'. It could be kind of cool to have a nation of dwarves though, living inside a mountain (okay so that's maybe going beyond political incorrectness into over the top stereotyping). The pygmys seemed to do okay for themselves..
Actually, Windows server is getting pretty good these days. What is needed to 'beat' them is a good Exchange alternative (that has alternatives to direct push email, integrated calendar, and doesn't need weeks fiddling with LDAP to install - I tried openexchange but kept having issues, I think eventually it was something like if the LDAP domain name was the same as the email domain then it wouldn't work), or for the world to friggin get rid of email already..
:(
I would have no qualms installing Linux on every client in our company if all of the software we need ran on it. A lot of our engineering software already has Linux versions, but the Autodesk products dont, and they're the most widely used among the engineers
While I doubt working at Apple would be much more fun and mentally stimulating than working at google, as long as I enjoy my job and can pay the bills plus a few luxuries (mostly music, movies and video games for me), I honeslty wouldn't care how much I earned. Those salaries are all above mine, though for the average 24 year old in western civilisation I'm probably doing quite well for myself tbh. My rent is only £215 a month including broadband though, in an area where £300 or more per person is standard - them's the perks of your landlord being your room-mate's brother! :)
Heh.. I don't have time to read that now as it's 12:40AM, but the guy says he finally finished the marble rolling game on day 55.. I did it on my second go after using the board for about 20 minutes (though maybe he was doing the advanced version rather than the beginner one) :s I'm 24 btw. I do think the age thing seems pretty weird because I stayed well in the balance circle thingy, I'm thinking they just try to make people feel bad at first and then let it get better over time to try and show that they have 'improved' somewhat? It's especially hilarious when it suggests that you should lose weight. I was *right* on the line between healthy and obese, but seeing as nobody but the most anorexic person would dare call me fat (it's muscle, honest!). To lose any significant weight I'd probably have to just stop eating entirely and stop doing anything that uses my muscles :P