1) The lazy method: Look for a job that will fund you and give you time to do your masters Pros: - Cheap (although possibly offset by lower pay vs. method 2 below) - Easy
Cons: - May have to accept lower wages - May be tied to company for x number of years - May be more competition for such jobs - May be harder to find the job you want that also supports this
2) Fund it yourself in your own time and also work full time still Pros: - Having the commitment to do it in your own time will put you ahead of other masters students at CV/interview time - Not limited as to what jobs you wish to apply for/choose - Will not be tied to the company you work for
Cons: - Requires you to be good at managing your time and money
Don't limit yourself to one or the other when you can do both, when you go for interviews mention you're interested in doing your masters and ask if they would be willing to support that if you were successful in getting the job. No company you want to work for would look down on you for asking and showing enthusiasm to continue learning.
But more importantly, ask what masters you want to do and ask if you enjoy learning. You need to do something useful and that you will enjoy else there's no point. It's easy to overlook what qualifications bring you - it's not just a peice of paper, you have the chance to get skills out of them that make you a better employee. If you're doing it for the extra peice of paper it's not going to get you much further in life than if you didn't have it. If however you do something you can learn lots from and you take the time and effort to figure out how to apply and use what you've learnt then it'll get you much further in life. This is why I chose mathematics because as a subject, it has so much scope for you to go and figure out how to apply the techniques for yourself and come up with truly efficient, accurate and innovative solutions to problems that often otherwise are just left unsolved or worked around with tacky, half arsed band-aid fixes.
"Second, in the US, police need a warrant to use it -- that is, the evidence they need to use anything that sees "inside" your house is no less that what they need to kick the door down and look inside themselves."
Are you sure? I'm not saying you're wrong, but that sounds surprising to me coming from the UK. Here our police helicopters have this tech and use it to look for houses letting off unusual amounts of heat that could be cannabis factories, but also looking for fugitives and so on. It'd be hard to use this technology from a helicopter and not accidently see people's houses for which you have no warrant I'd imagine, particularly in the case where it's used to find out which houses to get a warrant for in the first place.
Do US police helicopters not use this technology, or is there some other fundamental difference I've missed?
Really though, the level of incomeptence required by Labour's PR people to allow that shot to be taken has to make you wonder if it was intentional. I'm amazed they can be that utterly incompetent, particularly at a time when Labour is being criticised for spending the last decade implementing totalitarian laws and pursuing a totalitarian path.
I don't think Brown is a Nazi, but I mean come on, the fact they're not even sensitive to having that in the background on official media releases? It suggests they at very least don't understand why the Nazi regime was bad such that it's main symbol makes a bad background for a government already accused of creating policy identical to that of the likes of Hitler and Stalin. I'd go as far as saying that perhaps they even sympathise with many of the ideas for controlling the population that these leaders had even if they disagree with the murderous bits.
Labour seems to want to foster severe incompetence to the very end. Luckily that end is getting closer, 12 more months and counting.
I don't think it's as simple as being the lack of graphics that leads to that though. It's the fact that most game developers nowadays pay no attention at all to content.
If you look at past MMOs like Ultima Online, they had a million little things, massive flexibility in what you could do and how your character could develop and no MMO to this day has come close to the content it had, despite the fact it's not far off 15 years old.
Too much money is spent on artists, game designers, developers who program special effects and physics engines and not enough on people who actually script/program in content and make sure the game is full of it and fun.
It's a shame, because Prey had a longer history than DNF I believe in that it was originally announced before Quake 1, but eventually Prey came to fruition, and personally I thought it was an absolutely superb game - I might even go as far as saying I thought it was worth the wait!
Similarly, Teamfortress 2 dated back to about 1998 with it's original release due for Quake 2 and was changed/cancelled/restarted so many times it seemed it would never come to be released, amazingly however, like Prey, it finally saw the light of day even though it was much less ambitious than the earlier versions of the game that were touted many years before.
Alas though, it seems now that DNF really might not ever be able to suprise like Prey did or see the light of day like both TF2 and Prey did.
It depends what size screen and resolution you run at presumably. On a 24" screen at 1920x1200 the sidebar just doesn't take up enough space to be a problem, it fits in really nicely. I have seen it on lower resolution screens though - particularly non-widescreen screens and have to agree it's too big to fit there.
I like it because I can have it up and still have plenty of room to run two windows side by side such as a PDF, Word or Web document document to reference whilst working in another Window next to it. At that resolution and with this screen size I can effectively fit everything I need on screen at the same time a lot of the time - I don't need to alt+tab, minimise, maximise etc.
I'm not sure what side-by-side maximisation offers but if it does what it sounds like, you can already do this in Vista and even XP.
If you select something in the taskbar, hold control and select another item in the taskbar then right click one of them you can show Windows side by side. They are floating but they fill up the screen side by side.
I find this useful also because I can type into one document whilst referring to another for reference material etc.
The same has occured with the trade of endangered plant species to an extent.
The illegal trade of endangered flora has let to the destruction or near destruction of many species. Ebay sales have allowed people to trade plants that were grown in private collections rather than habitat and due to the risk of illegal habitat smuggling of plants, people growing them in cultivation can undercut those selling plants taken illegally from habitat.
This has allowed some highly endangered species to recover as the pressure from illegal smuggling has died away due to it not being worth the time for smugglers when mass growing at plant nurseries means they can be undercut to the point it's not even worth the smugglers driving to the habitat, let alone risking doing the smuggling itself.
Ironically though, the international process designed to help protect endangered species - CITES - actually hampers this because it prevents international trade of endangered plants even if they were grown purely in private collections and never grown in habitat, whilst smugglers ignore such regulations anyway.
As with this and as with artifacts there's a lot to be said about free trade of fakes, or in this case - privately and responsibly grown plants rather than restriction of it. It allows market forces to undercut costs of authentic specimens to the point where it's simply not worth smuggling from a monetary point of view. If more was done to support the trade of "fakes" rather than hamper it as per CITES I think decline of smuggling would actually help - it's better to prevent smuggling at the source and protect habitat than it is to try and catch it at the ports because again, smugglers will avoid the ports anyway.
That's an oversimplified view of my usage patterns.
I buy/sell stuff online from other countries a fair bit and like having an immediate way to do the currency conversion.
Weather is handy to see, as I can keep an eye out for sudden major drops outdoors as I grow tropical plants in a cold climate so sometimes need to act if the temp drops too much but also because I do a 45 minute commute to/from work every day and so have the weather for home and work and depending on the weather at both locations I alter my route as the country roads are the quickest way unless it's raining, snowy or icy nearer work etc.
Calendar isn't just about checking todays date, it's useful to see what day of the week a particular calendar date is and that sort of thing, I have a fairly busy schedule so it's handy for planning.
Notes are of course useful to remind you about non-trivial things, or to scribble down a phone message and that sort of thing - certainly less clunky than using a notepad window and saving it to the desktop like I used to in XP.
RSS on the sidebar is also simply useful to see the latest headlines for various sites also.
You're right in that if you oversimplify it that the widgets are largely useless, but that's the problem with oversimplification, it never paints the full picture and between all the gadgets I get damn good use out of the sidebar. I'm not sure why you feel qualified to suggest what is and isn't the right tool for my usage patterns when you do not know what they are. Having used various tools through the years, the sidebar is absolutely one of the best tools for my usage that I've encountered so far, hence why I'm dismayed to see Microsoft appeared to have largely bastardised it in Windows 7.
The language of the whole threat makes it sound like he's about 8 years old, so using that logic we should also be looking for an 8 year old.
I'm not sure how two words, "gone missing" indicate being from the UK. I'm pretty sure many people speaking English worldwide who aren't British have used those two words in that way before.
The one thing I really like about Vista is the sidebar, I find it pretty useful having currency converter, calendar and such immediately to hand. In Windows 7 they seem to have done away with it and made the gadgets stand alone such that they either obscure windows if set to always on top, or they hide behind them otherwise making them either annoying or useless depending on which setting you have.
As the performance tweaks in Windows 7 don't matter to me because my machine is powerful enough that I've not had performance issues in Vista nor noticed a difference with Windows 7 beta anyway and as I don't find the new taskbar worthwhile is there anything in Windows 7 that makes it worthwhile?
I can see Windows 7 being good for those who held on to XP, but for those of us who did switch to Vista and have had no problems with it (so all 3 of us then:p), and particularly those of us who liked the sidebar it seems a step backwards. I can't see the gadgets being worthwhile to anyone in their current incarnation - has anyone found them useful when they're only ever out the way or in the way?
"Mod parent up. "Cytokine storm" is the new Internet meme lately."
That's because it sounds like something an evil wizard would summon above his enemies and would fit right into an RPG, this makes it attractive as an internet meme.
I was working for a newspaper when 9/11 happened and was wandering through the corridors of our offices that day and passed our CEO talking to another guy as I passed them in the corridor and heard them say about it "This is great, it's going to sell so many papers".
So I'd say it's not always just as innocent as human nature, there are some arseholes out there who like the money that tragedy brings in, whether it's common or not in the news business I don't know, but certainly there's at least one arsehole thinking that way.
She's a Liberal Democrat MP which isn't the same as the ruling Labour government or the Conservatives who will almost certainly get in next.
For the most part she is following the party line, because the issues she gets involved in are the sorts of issues that the Liberal Democrats as a whole support. The real difference between her and the rest of her party is that she's much more active and much more vocal about the issues, so in that respect she's one of the most prominent figures regularly speaking out against the government on these issues.
Agreed. It's easy to look at modern computer games like Assassins Creed and think it's not going to get much better, however, the other weekend I went to see Monsters vs. Aliens in 3D and it really was impressive - it's that sort of thing that we need more of, the sheer quality of the rendered images coupled with the 3D experience was outstanding. I can't wait until we can have that kind of experience for computer games in the home, things really did come out at you and make you flinch. When you see that sort of thing you begin to realise how crap gaming technology actually is compared to where it could be. When I got my XBox 360 the visuals were jaw dropping and I was amazed with the games that were out then, but I go back to them and the graphics are mediocre at best compared to many of the newest releases on the 360 and PS3.
I think it's easy to underestimate what changes in graphics technology are already happening, but also what changes could potentially happen.
Those who say "Well I just bought an old budget last gen card and it can't really get any better" either have poor eyesight or have simply never seen anything better and as you say, simply have no imagination. Computer visuals have come on leaps and bounds, but there is still a long way they can go in terms of quality and innovative effects such as 3D.
Regarding AI on the GPU, the problem with AI in gaming is that you can't really scale the quality of it like you can graphics. You don't want your AI getting more intelligent on high end machines but stupid and hence almost certainly easier to deal with on low end machines, you want AI to be consistently intellignet really. The problem is, you can scale graphics and make things look worse on low end, better on high end so you get this situation where no matter how good machines get, AI has to cater to the lowest common denominator whilst all additional processing power on high end machines is poured into better graphics processing. AI will of course continue to improve, but only along the lines of whatever the lowest common denominator in machine requirements can spare for it.
I agree, I suppose the kind of factors in terms of quality that Windows lacks vs. say Linux are those of security and stability, but Windows is also historically much stronger in terms of usability which is a measure of quality that matters more than any other to most end users - they just want to be able to use it, even if it's not perhaps all that secure.
I would argue though, that from a more objective perspective though, security, stability and modularity are more important factors when measuring overall quality, it's simply that most end users don't realise this until it comes back to bite them (i.e. they lose all their documents to a virus, or lose documents to a crash etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
shutdown -a
There's two ways you can achieve this:
1) The lazy method: Look for a job that will fund you and give you time to do your masters
Pros:
- Cheap (although possibly offset by lower pay vs. method 2 below)
- Easy
Cons:
- May have to accept lower wages
- May be tied to company for x number of years
- May be more competition for such jobs
- May be harder to find the job you want that also supports this
2) Fund it yourself in your own time and also work full time still
Pros:
- Having the commitment to do it in your own time will put you ahead of other masters students at CV/interview time
- Not limited as to what jobs you wish to apply for/choose
- Will not be tied to the company you work for
Cons:
- Requires you to be good at managing your time and money
Don't limit yourself to one or the other when you can do both, when you go for interviews mention you're interested in doing your masters and ask if they would be willing to support that if you were successful in getting the job. No company you want to work for would look down on you for asking and showing enthusiasm to continue learning.
But more importantly, ask what masters you want to do and ask if you enjoy learning. You need to do something useful and that you will enjoy else there's no point. It's easy to overlook what qualifications bring you - it's not just a peice of paper, you have the chance to get skills out of them that make you a better employee. If you're doing it for the extra peice of paper it's not going to get you much further in life than if you didn't have it. If however you do something you can learn lots from and you take the time and effort to figure out how to apply and use what you've learnt then it'll get you much further in life. This is why I chose mathematics because as a subject, it has so much scope for you to go and figure out how to apply the techniques for yourself and come up with truly efficient, accurate and innovative solutions to problems that often otherwise are just left unsolved or worked around with tacky, half arsed band-aid fixes.
"Second, in the US, police need a warrant to use it -- that is, the evidence they need to use anything that sees "inside" your house is no less that what they need to kick the door down and look inside themselves."
Are you sure? I'm not saying you're wrong, but that sounds surprising to me coming from the UK. Here our police helicopters have this tech and use it to look for houses letting off unusual amounts of heat that could be cannabis factories, but also looking for fugitives and so on. It'd be hard to use this technology from a helicopter and not accidently see people's houses for which you have no warrant I'd imagine, particularly in the case where it's used to find out which houses to get a warrant for in the first place.
Do US police helicopters not use this technology, or is there some other fundamental difference I've missed?
Yes, it could have, but it seems it wasn't so I guess the AC was right, I found this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8033388.stm
and someone else in this thread listed this:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6229529.ece
It seems pretty authentic.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8033388.stm
It's from a school visit.
Really though, the level of incomeptence required by Labour's PR people to allow that shot to be taken has to make you wonder if it was intentional. I'm amazed they can be that utterly incompetent, particularly at a time when Labour is being criticised for spending the last decade implementing totalitarian laws and pursuing a totalitarian path.
I don't think Brown is a Nazi, but I mean come on, the fact they're not even sensitive to having that in the background on official media releases? It suggests they at very least don't understand why the Nazi regime was bad such that it's main symbol makes a bad background for a government already accused of creating policy identical to that of the likes of Hitler and Stalin. I'd go as far as saying that perhaps they even sympathise with many of the ideas for controlling the population that these leaders had even if they disagree with the murderous bits.
Labour seems to want to foster severe incompetence to the very end. Luckily that end is getting closer, 12 more months and counting.
You're right, what you can't do is resell an OEM copy by itself.
It's for that reason that WGA ties your software to your hardware and never actually asks for your personal details.
I don't think it's as simple as being the lack of graphics that leads to that though. It's the fact that most game developers nowadays pay no attention at all to content.
If you look at past MMOs like Ultima Online, they had a million little things, massive flexibility in what you could do and how your character could develop and no MMO to this day has come close to the content it had, despite the fact it's not far off 15 years old.
Too much money is spent on artists, game designers, developers who program special effects and physics engines and not enough on people who actually script/program in content and make sure the game is full of it and fun.
Austria and Australia are different countries.
Australia is the one you describe, Austria is the one that's given us such gems through the years as Adolf Hitler and Josef Fritzl.
But they also have given us the likes of Gödel, Mozart, Schrödinger and his cat I suppose ;)
No but at the speed politicians work it's bought us another 2 years at least ;)
It's a shame, because Prey had a longer history than DNF I believe in that it was originally announced before Quake 1, but eventually Prey came to fruition, and personally I thought it was an absolutely superb game - I might even go as far as saying I thought it was worth the wait!
Similarly, Teamfortress 2 dated back to about 1998 with it's original release due for Quake 2 and was changed/cancelled/restarted so many times it seemed it would never come to be released, amazingly however, like Prey, it finally saw the light of day even though it was much less ambitious than the earlier versions of the game that were touted many years before.
Alas though, it seems now that DNF really might not ever be able to suprise like Prey did or see the light of day like both TF2 and Prey did.
It depends what size screen and resolution you run at presumably. On a 24" screen at 1920x1200 the sidebar just doesn't take up enough space to be a problem, it fits in really nicely. I have seen it on lower resolution screens though - particularly non-widescreen screens and have to agree it's too big to fit there.
I like it because I can have it up and still have plenty of room to run two windows side by side such as a PDF, Word or Web document document to reference whilst working in another Window next to it. At that resolution and with this screen size I can effectively fit everything I need on screen at the same time a lot of the time - I don't need to alt+tab, minimise, maximise etc.
I'm not sure what side-by-side maximisation offers but if it does what it sounds like, you can already do this in Vista and even XP.
If you select something in the taskbar, hold control and select another item in the taskbar then right click one of them you can show Windows side by side. They are floating but they fill up the screen side by side.
I find this useful also because I can type into one document whilst referring to another for reference material etc.
The same has occured with the trade of endangered plant species to an extent.
The illegal trade of endangered flora has let to the destruction or near destruction of many species. Ebay sales have allowed people to trade plants that were grown in private collections rather than habitat and due to the risk of illegal habitat smuggling of plants, people growing them in cultivation can undercut those selling plants taken illegally from habitat.
This has allowed some highly endangered species to recover as the pressure from illegal smuggling has died away due to it not being worth the time for smugglers when mass growing at plant nurseries means they can be undercut to the point it's not even worth the smugglers driving to the habitat, let alone risking doing the smuggling itself.
Ironically though, the international process designed to help protect endangered species - CITES - actually hampers this because it prevents international trade of endangered plants even if they were grown purely in private collections and never grown in habitat, whilst smugglers ignore such regulations anyway.
As with this and as with artifacts there's a lot to be said about free trade of fakes, or in this case - privately and responsibly grown plants rather than restriction of it. It allows market forces to undercut costs of authentic specimens to the point where it's simply not worth smuggling from a monetary point of view. If more was done to support the trade of "fakes" rather than hamper it as per CITES I think decline of smuggling would actually help - it's better to prevent smuggling at the source and protect habitat than it is to try and catch it at the ports because again, smugglers will avoid the ports anyway.
That's an oversimplified view of my usage patterns.
I buy/sell stuff online from other countries a fair bit and like having an immediate way to do the currency conversion.
Weather is handy to see, as I can keep an eye out for sudden major drops outdoors as I grow tropical plants in a cold climate so sometimes need to act if the temp drops too much but also because I do a 45 minute commute to/from work every day and so have the weather for home and work and depending on the weather at both locations I alter my route as the country roads are the quickest way unless it's raining, snowy or icy nearer work etc.
Calendar isn't just about checking todays date, it's useful to see what day of the week a particular calendar date is and that sort of thing, I have a fairly busy schedule so it's handy for planning.
Notes are of course useful to remind you about non-trivial things, or to scribble down a phone message and that sort of thing - certainly less clunky than using a notepad window and saving it to the desktop like I used to in XP.
RSS on the sidebar is also simply useful to see the latest headlines for various sites also.
You're right in that if you oversimplify it that the widgets are largely useless, but that's the problem with oversimplification, it never paints the full picture and between all the gadgets I get damn good use out of the sidebar. I'm not sure why you feel qualified to suggest what is and isn't the right tool for my usage patterns when you do not know what they are. Having used various tools through the years, the sidebar is absolutely one of the best tools for my usage that I've encountered so far, hence why I'm dismayed to see Microsoft appeared to have largely bastardised it in Windows 7.
See in the UK we have a better approach with protecting the public from the effects of cyber attacks.
We just allow our public sector to be so fucking useless no one misses them when their systems go offline anyway.
The language of the whole threat makes it sound like he's about 8 years old, so using that logic we should also be looking for an 8 year old.
I'm not sure how two words, "gone missing" indicate being from the UK. I'm pretty sure many people speaking English worldwide who aren't British have used those two words in that way before.
The one thing I really like about Vista is the sidebar, I find it pretty useful having currency converter, calendar and such immediately to hand. In Windows 7 they seem to have done away with it and made the gadgets stand alone such that they either obscure windows if set to always on top, or they hide behind them otherwise making them either annoying or useless depending on which setting you have.
As the performance tweaks in Windows 7 don't matter to me because my machine is powerful enough that I've not had performance issues in Vista nor noticed a difference with Windows 7 beta anyway and as I don't find the new taskbar worthwhile is there anything in Windows 7 that makes it worthwhile?
I can see Windows 7 being good for those who held on to XP, but for those of us who did switch to Vista and have had no problems with it (so all 3 of us then :p), and particularly those of us who liked the sidebar it seems a step backwards. I can't see the gadgets being worthwhile to anyone in their current incarnation - has anyone found them useful when they're only ever out the way or in the way?
Installed on Vista 64.
I think what TFA actually means to say is:
"I got really click happy and just blindly clicked my way through the IE8 install without looking and it made itself my default browser, how dare it!"
"Mod parent up. "Cytokine storm" is the new Internet meme lately."
That's because it sounds like something an evil wizard would summon above his enemies and would fit right into an RPG, this makes it attractive as an internet meme.
*Xest was killed by Knara's cytokine storm*
I was working for a newspaper when 9/11 happened and was wandering through the corridors of our offices that day and passed our CEO talking to another guy as I passed them in the corridor and heard them say about it "This is great, it's going to sell so many papers".
So I'd say it's not always just as innocent as human nature, there are some arseholes out there who like the money that tragedy brings in, whether it's common or not in the news business I don't know, but certainly there's at least one arsehole thinking that way.
She's a Liberal Democrat MP which isn't the same as the ruling Labour government or the Conservatives who will almost certainly get in next.
For the most part she is following the party line, because the issues she gets involved in are the sorts of issues that the Liberal Democrats as a whole support. The real difference between her and the rest of her party is that she's much more active and much more vocal about the issues, so in that respect she's one of the most prominent figures regularly speaking out against the government on these issues.
Agreed. It's easy to look at modern computer games like Assassins Creed and think it's not going to get much better, however, the other weekend I went to see Monsters vs. Aliens in 3D and it really was impressive - it's that sort of thing that we need more of, the sheer quality of the rendered images coupled with the 3D experience was outstanding. I can't wait until we can have that kind of experience for computer games in the home, things really did come out at you and make you flinch. When you see that sort of thing you begin to realise how crap gaming technology actually is compared to where it could be. When I got my XBox 360 the visuals were jaw dropping and I was amazed with the games that were out then, but I go back to them and the graphics are mediocre at best compared to many of the newest releases on the 360 and PS3.
I think it's easy to underestimate what changes in graphics technology are already happening, but also what changes could potentially happen.
Those who say "Well I just bought an old budget last gen card and it can't really get any better" either have poor eyesight or have simply never seen anything better and as you say, simply have no imagination. Computer visuals have come on leaps and bounds, but there is still a long way they can go in terms of quality and innovative effects such as 3D.
Regarding AI on the GPU, the problem with AI in gaming is that you can't really scale the quality of it like you can graphics. You don't want your AI getting more intelligent on high end machines but stupid and hence almost certainly easier to deal with on low end machines, you want AI to be consistently intellignet really. The problem is, you can scale graphics and make things look worse on low end, better on high end so you get this situation where no matter how good machines get, AI has to cater to the lowest common denominator whilst all additional processing power on high end machines is poured into better graphics processing. AI will of course continue to improve, but only along the lines of whatever the lowest common denominator in machine requirements can spare for it.
I was thinking something more along the lines of dictatorship with Steven Hawking or Tim Berners-Lee in charge ;)
The irony of it is that as she's a peer in the house of Lords, she's one of the ones that isn't actually elected to her position ;)
Perhaps this whole democracy thing is actually the problem ;)
I agree, I suppose the kind of factors in terms of quality that Windows lacks vs. say Linux are those of security and stability, but Windows is also historically much stronger in terms of usability which is a measure of quality that matters more than any other to most end users - they just want to be able to use it, even if it's not perhaps all that secure.
I would argue though, that from a more objective perspective though, security, stability and modularity are more important factors when measuring overall quality, it's simply that most end users don't realise this until it comes back to bite them (i.e. they lose all their documents to a virus, or lose documents to a crash etc.).