Let me preface this by saying I'm a Christian. I beleive in the Bible, God, Jesus all that. I would be considered "evangelical" by some I suppose, although I don't know if I label myself as such. And I won't post this as a coward because I am not ashamed.
Not all of us believe in a literal 6 day creation. That is not the only one theory of creationism, it is just the best known. There are young earth creationists, old earth creationists and all kinds of other theories out there. So when creationism is talked about, it may not alwasy mean literally 6 days.
I do beleive in creation by God, I don't pretend to have any idea how it came about or anything like that. I simply beleive God acted and creation occured. Could God use evolution to pull it off? You bet He could. While I personally don't beleive evolution is as iron clad as the world thinks it is, thats not what I am here to debate.
I beleive God created this universe and everything in it, I don't know how, none of us do.
I just want to set the record straight. You can be a Christian and not be some kind of wacko. Nor does being a Christian make someone suddenly an idiot. I'm in college, I'll be getting my Master's soon. I know at 4 math professors who are Christians as well. You weren't making these accusations, but I know it's how many on slashdot feel.
Many people are uninformed people on both sides of the debate. It's easy for us to lump each other into sterotypes, but I hope we can learn to go beyond that. This is just my attempt to help everyone better understand us crazy Christian folk.
You are totally correct in my opinion. In my short(2 Months) time in working with networks I have come to see they are indeed clueless about this stuff. They also like to make money though. If the DVR ads get removed from the count, the count is going down.
The big Ad sales period for cable networks just ended recently, and things went pretty badly for the networks due to this whole debate.
The basic way it works is:
Cable comapnies want to make more money
Advertisers want to spend less money or get more for their money.
I just hope the debate doesn't result in increased cable bills for all of us...
I'm an intern at a software company that produces the software that runs the majority of cable networks. So I hav ebeen hearing a lot about this issue lately.
The problem is that advertisers feel they are paying for less than they are actually getting. Which is resulting in lower demand for ads this year and also lower cost of Ads. There has been an industry wide push to get Digital Video Recorders(DVR) to count the skips so that advertisers know how many viewers they are actually getting.
Tv ads are sold based on the number of eyeballs expected to watch. The network then has to make up for any discrepancy(usually issue free ad time). The issue up for debate is how to count the DVR views. The networks want all DVR downloads counted as ratings, the Advertisers don't want any counted.
I think what we are seeing here is a compromise between the Networks and major advertising agencies.
As much as we all hate ads, someone has to pay for the TV broadcast. Either you let the advertisers pay in exchange for watchign there crap or you pay even more to watch TV.
I'm definately excited to hear this news! I recently dusted off some of my old B5 tapes and the show still rocks. I used to love it when I was about 17 and it's still awesome today. I'd watch it every week wth some friends.
I never realized how popular it was 500 mil in DvD sales, thats pretty darn good.
At the store I worked at we had 4 self checkouts. Each regular register had 1 cashier and 1 bagger making about 6.50 per hour. The self checkout had one person watching it. So right there it's 7 less people you have to employ.
Which saves about 45.50 an hour. Our self checkouts were open from 7am - 11pm, which is 16 hours a day. 45.50 * 16 = $728 a day. 728 * 363(not open easter or Christmas) = $264,264 a year. Of course you have to take out to cover the service costs and such. Even if a manager was hired to watch them, I doubt he makes that much in a year.
As to manager intervention, they can't do much of anything the average cashier couldn't do. Our manager's solution was to unplug it and then plug it back in. He didn't even know it had a reset button...
I will agree that it could still be causing stores to lose money, people steal a lot of stuff through the self checkout. Or ring a cheap item and then send somethign expensive down the belt. Like ring up a pack of gum and send down razor blades. Thats part of the reason they are so annoying, to try to stop people from stealing.
I worked in a Grocery store for 6 years(High school and half of college). I often times ended up watching the 4 self checkout machines at our store. I hated almost every minute of it.
The machines often don't work propery, no one really knows how to fix them and they crash and need a reboot at least 5 times a day. Our manager had no idea how these magical boxes worked, and often paid a technician 50-100 bucks to come reboot the thing or something like that.
You see the problem isn't just that customers can't work them it is that managers at grocery stores have no idea how they work. So instead of fixing the problem we would often work around it or ignore it.
My manager loved the fact that I could fix computers; sometimes I would fix the machines for him. The things actually are running Windows XP or 2000 most of the time. When you boot them up you can actually get to the desktop and work it like a normal computer(touch screen is like the mouse). Ours even had 3D Pinball installed on them!
The customers do suck at using them. However, when the guy in charge of the store has to look at the instructions everytime he goes to turn it on you know it's not going to work well.
The other big problem the machines caused our store was theft. I caught a lot of people trying to swindle the machine, but I'm sure lots more got away. You know something is wrong when you hear "Please move your soup to the belt" and you look over and see a steak going down the belt. The things have weight sensors, but as long as the weights are decently close it will accept it. Employees can set the tolerance, ours was pretty forgiving. Also, many people just never scan larger items. They just leav it in the cart and say they "forgot"....
Here is the reason I hate scheme. Compare these two lines and tell me which makes you're head hurt really bad.
Java, C++, C#, C:
(3+4) *5 -6/2 +3
Scheme:
(+ (/ (* (+ 3 4) 5 ) 2) 3)
I thought the functional thing was cool, I just think they went a bit too far.
I was not talking about industry experience, I was talking about univesity experience. I figured this would be helpful, as it has been many years since many people on \. went to a university. It's easy to talk about what is supposedly being taught, but unless you are currently in a university how can you know?
The simple fact is the supposed univeristy experience the parent talks about is not realistic, at least nto for me.
I am not saying I am some software expert or even know all that much, I am just giving the observations of a student.
I can't say I will learn everything I need to know, but I think it will be pretty close. A big problem today is that computer majors are gettign really hard to squeeze into 4 year programs.
As far as the testing remark, I have used the Visual Studio debugger to trace through C, C++, assembly. It wasn't all that bad.
However, in my Software Tetsing class we actually created testing tools in Java and C#, it was pretty cool I actually made my own java debugger quite easily. Java has some cool features that actually let you talk to the virtual machine. This can be very helpful.
We made one tool that let you see how many times every line of code was executed, that way you could make sure you covered them all in test cases. Maybe C and assembly have this, I don't know.
I thought it might be helpful for a current student to let you know what it is we learn today at my college. I'm a senior Software Engineering major, not a comp sci major. Comp Sci is another department and has a totaly different focus. They focus on super efficent algorithms, we focus on developing large software projects.
My software engineering program has been very Java intensive. My software engineering class, object oriented class, and software testing class were all java based. We dabbled in C# a bit as well.
However, I also had an assembly class, a programming languages class where we learned perl and scheme(this language sucks) and about five algorithms classes in C++. I also had an embedded systems class in both C and assembly(learned assembly MCU code, then did C).
I feel like this is all pretty well rounded; I've learned a bunch of languages and am not really specialized in one. I'd say I am best at Java right now, but I can also write C++ code just fine.
I've never been told a computer has any kind of crazy limitless performance. In embedded systems, I learned about performance. Making a little PIC microcontroller calculate arctan was fun(took literally 30 seconds without a smart solution). I also learned that there is a trade off between several things such as performance, development time, readability, and portability.
We are taught to see languages as tools, you look at your problem and pull a tool out of the tool box that you think fit the problem best. You have to weigh whats important for the project and chose based off of that.
The final thing I'd like to point out is that one huge issue with software today is it is bug ridden. How easy something is a test makes a big difference in my opinion. Assembly and C will pretty much always be harder to test than languages like Java and C#.
I don't think the universities are the problem, at least not in my experience.
I'm not saying oil is awesome or anything like that. I am also not talking about Bush or Iraq, those are totally unrelated to my question.
The simple question is what happens when our nation decides that instead of producing food to eat we should produce food for fuel? I'm just asking if anyone has any hard evidence yet about whether this can be sustained. Can we make enough food to both eat and have fuel?
Also, what about the other consequences of linking fuel to food. If fuel demand spikes, then food prices could also spike. Farmers will have to chose if they are going to grow food or fuel, which ultimately results in less food being produced.
I don't think oil is the answer, I am just pointing out that there may be same bad consequences when we link food and fuel.
I'm not sure if everyone really thought this through, but bio fuel comes from stuff we would normally eat. So what happens if the entire world switched to bio fuel that's "grown in the heartland"? Will we have to chose between eating and driving?
To me it just seems like a bad idea to make you're energy source and food source compete. There's already enough hunger in the world, why turn food into fuel? Do we then stop sending out foreign aid and such because we need fuel instead?
As far as electric cars go, where do you get that electricity from? Probably from the local power plant which is most likely burnign coal/oil. Currently the only ways we have to make sustainable clean energy are hydro power and nuclear power(waste isn't too clean). Hydro only works in certain areas, and nuclear is protested by enviromentalists and leaves quite a mess. If we go solar, what happens on a cloudy day? Does the whole nation shut down? With wind what happens when the wind dies down for a long period of time? These are great things to help boost energy, but will not sustain an entire nation.
I have no idea what the answer is, but these ideas don't seem like it.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me preface this by saying I'm a Christian. I beleive in the Bible, God, Jesus all that. I would be considered "evangelical" by some I suppose, although I don't know if I label myself as such. And I won't post this as a coward because I am not ashamed.
Not all of us believe in a literal 6 day creation. That is not the only one theory of creationism, it is just the best known. There are young earth creationists, old earth creationists and all kinds of other theories out there. So when creationism is talked about, it may not alwasy mean literally 6 days.
I do beleive in creation by God, I don't pretend to have any idea how it came about or anything like that. I simply beleive God acted and creation occured. Could God use evolution to pull it off? You bet He could. While I personally don't beleive evolution is as iron clad as the world thinks it is, thats not what I am here to debate.
I beleive God created this universe and everything in it, I don't know how, none of us do.
I just want to set the record straight. You can be a Christian and not be some kind of wacko. Nor does being a Christian make someone suddenly an idiot. I'm in college, I'll be getting my Master's soon. I know at 4 math professors who are Christians as well. You weren't making these accusations, but I know it's how many on slashdot feel.
Many people are uninformed people on both sides of the debate. It's easy for us to lump each other into sterotypes, but I hope we can learn to go beyond that. This is just my attempt to help everyone better understand us crazy Christian folk.
I've been trying to convince my girlfriend to let me upgrade her computer as a gift, but she insists on getting these shiny rocks instead.
Now I have proof that deep down inside she really does want that 256 Mb graphics card, extra gig of ram and better CPU more than those silly diamonds.
Now I just need proof that she really wants a new set of tires more than those sparkly rocks...
The big Ad sales period for cable networks just ended recently, and things went pretty badly for the networks due to this whole debate.
The basic way it works is:
- Cable comapnies want to make more money
- Advertisers want to spend less money or get more for their money.
I just hope the debate doesn't result in increased cable bills for all of us...I'm an intern at a software company that produces the software that runs the majority of cable networks. So I hav ebeen hearing a lot about this issue lately. The problem is that advertisers feel they are paying for less than they are actually getting. Which is resulting in lower demand for ads this year and also lower cost of Ads. There has been an industry wide push to get Digital Video Recorders(DVR) to count the skips so that advertisers know how many viewers they are actually getting. Tv ads are sold based on the number of eyeballs expected to watch. The network then has to make up for any discrepancy(usually issue free ad time). The issue up for debate is how to count the DVR views. The networks want all DVR downloads counted as ratings, the Advertisers don't want any counted. I think what we are seeing here is a compromise between the Networks and major advertising agencies. As much as we all hate ads, someone has to pay for the TV broadcast. Either you let the advertisers pay in exchange for watchign there crap or you pay even more to watch TV.
I'm definately excited to hear this news! I recently dusted off some of my old B5 tapes and the show still rocks. I used to love it when I was about 17 and it's still awesome today. I'd watch it every week wth some friends.
I never realized how popular it was 500 mil in DvD sales, thats pretty darn good.
At the store I worked at we had 4 self checkouts. Each regular register had 1 cashier and 1 bagger making about 6.50 per hour. The self checkout had one person watching it. So right there it's 7 less people you have to employ.
Which saves about 45.50 an hour. Our self checkouts were open from 7am - 11pm, which is 16 hours a day. 45.50 * 16 = $728 a day. 728 * 363(not open easter or Christmas) = $264,264 a year. Of course you have to take out to cover the service costs and such. Even if a manager was hired to watch them, I doubt he makes that much in a year.
As to manager intervention, they can't do much of anything the average cashier couldn't do. Our manager's solution was to unplug it and then plug it back in. He didn't even know it had a reset button...
I will agree that it could still be causing stores to lose money, people steal a lot of stuff through the self checkout. Or ring a cheap item and then send somethign expensive down the belt. Like ring up a pack of gum and send down razor blades. Thats part of the reason they are so annoying, to try to stop people from stealing.
I worked in a Grocery store for 6 years(High school and half of college). I often times ended up watching the 4 self checkout machines at our store. I hated almost every minute of it.
The machines often don't work propery, no one really knows how to fix them and they crash and need a reboot at least 5 times a day. Our manager had no idea how these magical boxes worked, and often paid a technician 50-100 bucks to come reboot the thing or something like that.
You see the problem isn't just that customers can't work them it is that managers at grocery stores have no idea how they work. So instead of fixing the problem we would often work around it or ignore it.
My manager loved the fact that I could fix computers; sometimes I would fix the machines for him. The things actually are running Windows XP or 2000 most of the time. When you boot them up you can actually get to the desktop and work it like a normal computer(touch screen is like the mouse). Ours even had 3D Pinball installed on them!
The customers do suck at using them. However, when the guy in charge of the store has to look at the instructions everytime he goes to turn it on you know it's not going to work well.
The other big problem the machines caused our store was theft. I caught a lot of people trying to swindle the machine, but I'm sure lots more got away. You know something is wrong when you hear "Please move your soup to the belt" and you look over and see a steak going down the belt. The things have weight sensors, but as long as the weights are decently close it will accept it. Employees can set the tolerance, ours was pretty forgiving. Also, many people just never scan larger items. They just leav it in the cart and say they "forgot"....
Here is the reason I hate scheme. Compare these two lines and tell me which makes you're head hurt really bad. Java, C++, C#, C: (3+4) *5 -6 /2 +3
Scheme:
(+ (/ (* (+ 3 4) 5 ) 2) 3)
I thought the functional thing was cool, I just think they went a bit too far.
I was not talking about industry experience, I was talking about univesity experience. I figured this would be helpful, as it has been many years since many people on \. went to a university. It's easy to talk about what is supposedly being taught, but unless you are currently in a university how can you know? The simple fact is the supposed univeristy experience the parent talks about is not realistic, at least nto for me. I am not saying I am some software expert or even know all that much, I am just giving the observations of a student. I can't say I will learn everything I need to know, but I think it will be pretty close. A big problem today is that computer majors are gettign really hard to squeeze into 4 year programs. As far as the testing remark, I have used the Visual Studio debugger to trace through C, C++, assembly. It wasn't all that bad. However, in my Software Tetsing class we actually created testing tools in Java and C#, it was pretty cool I actually made my own java debugger quite easily. Java has some cool features that actually let you talk to the virtual machine. This can be very helpful. We made one tool that let you see how many times every line of code was executed, that way you could make sure you covered them all in test cases. Maybe C and assembly have this, I don't know.
I thought it might be helpful for a current student to let you know what it is we learn today at my college. I'm a senior Software Engineering major, not a comp sci major. Comp Sci is another department and has a totaly different focus. They focus on super efficent algorithms, we focus on developing large software projects.
My software engineering program has been very Java intensive. My software engineering class, object oriented class, and software testing class were all java based. We dabbled in C# a bit as well.
However, I also had an assembly class, a programming languages class where we learned perl and scheme(this language sucks) and about five algorithms classes in C++. I also had an embedded systems class in both C and assembly(learned assembly MCU code, then did C).
I feel like this is all pretty well rounded; I've learned a bunch of languages and am not really specialized in one. I'd say I am best at Java right now, but I can also write C++ code just fine.
I've never been told a computer has any kind of crazy limitless performance. In embedded systems, I learned about performance. Making a little PIC microcontroller calculate arctan was fun(took literally 30 seconds without a smart solution). I also learned that there is a trade off between several things such as performance, development time, readability, and portability.
We are taught to see languages as tools, you look at your problem and pull a tool out of the tool box that you think fit the problem best. You have to weigh whats important for the project and chose based off of that.
The final thing I'd like to point out is that one huge issue with software today is it is bug ridden. How easy something is a test makes a big difference in my opinion. Assembly and C will pretty much always be harder to test than languages like Java and C#.
I don't think the universities are the problem, at least not in my experience.
I'm not saying oil is awesome or anything like that. I am also not talking about Bush or Iraq, those are totally unrelated to my question. The simple question is what happens when our nation decides that instead of producing food to eat we should produce food for fuel? I'm just asking if anyone has any hard evidence yet about whether this can be sustained. Can we make enough food to both eat and have fuel? Also, what about the other consequences of linking fuel to food. If fuel demand spikes, then food prices could also spike. Farmers will have to chose if they are going to grow food or fuel, which ultimately results in less food being produced. I don't think oil is the answer, I am just pointing out that there may be same bad consequences when we link food and fuel.
I'm not sure if everyone really thought this through, but bio fuel comes from stuff we would normally eat. So what happens if the entire world switched to bio fuel that's "grown in the heartland"? Will we have to chose between eating and driving? To me it just seems like a bad idea to make you're energy source and food source compete. There's already enough hunger in the world, why turn food into fuel? Do we then stop sending out foreign aid and such because we need fuel instead? As far as electric cars go, where do you get that electricity from? Probably from the local power plant which is most likely burnign coal/oil. Currently the only ways we have to make sustainable clean energy are hydro power and nuclear power(waste isn't too clean). Hydro only works in certain areas, and nuclear is protested by enviromentalists and leaves quite a mess. If we go solar, what happens on a cloudy day? Does the whole nation shut down? With wind what happens when the wind dies down for a long period of time? These are great things to help boost energy, but will not sustain an entire nation. I have no idea what the answer is, but these ideas don't seem like it.