Any first year compsci student should know that this happens, and should know to choose data types that can represent the data to the needed degree of accuracy.

A simple struct {int integral_part, int decimal_part}; would do the job for this. Or since you care exactly about .1 second increments, you could even use integral values in the first place. With 24 bits, you can cover 19 days before it overflows, and almost half a day on top of that to provide a buffer if bad guys show up right as the scheduled reset comes up.

100 hours = 3,600,000 ticks? Wait, summary math is wrong. One hour = 60 minutes. Each of those 60 minutes is 60 seconds. 60 sets of 60 seconds is 60 * 60 = 3,600 seconds per hour. 100 hours means 100*3,600 = 360,000. Either they missed a digit and the system was online for 1,000 hours straight or they added one to the final result.

Mostly I agree, though Discovery has gotten better as History gets worse.

I did like an Ancient Astronaut one History ran a few months ago.

For most of the hour, they let the nutters run wild with all sorts of ridiculous crap.

And proceeded to demolish all of the nutters arguments in the last five minutes. It was a beautiful piece of debunking the way they did it. I wish I rememberd the exact title or what exactly was said, I really only remember my impressions of it.

For simple image quality, especially fast animation, yes, CRTs are superior.

The desk space advantage of an LCD can be very significant though. It's enough space to fit stuff like books that you wouldn't be able to put in a convenient place otherwise. This is the primary reason I'm a fan of LCDs.

Granted, if I was more of a gamer or used the computer mainly as a media center, I'd give CRTs a closer look. But for many real world tasks, the desk space advantage can be a big practical benefit to LCDs.

Well, technically, they do, I don't think WinFS has been nuked yet.

It might as well be. Better odds of seeing Duke Nukem Forever.

When SSDs come down A LOT in price, and up in size, maybe.

Go do a search on Newegg. Biggest they've got is 256GB, of those, the cheapest is $595. You can get several terabytes for that price with a magnetic hard drives.

SSDs have a place, but as a general replacement for magnetic hard drives they are too expensive with too little capacity.

There is also more to the file system than access speed.

Gordon Brown bears no personal responsibility for Alan Turings treatment.

However, he leads an organization which does bear responsibility for it. That organization owed an apology, and due to his leadership position, Gordon Brown was the correct one to deliver it on behalf of that organization.

It can prove that the invention was created no later than the date of the postmark.

This might not be enough in all cases to survive a challenge. But if the deciding factor is date of invention, it can prove your case. Or destroy it. Either way, it can provide reliable information to decide the issue.

The GPL has no provisions relating to the price of the compiled binaries. You can set these to whatever you want for whatever reason you want.

I can't recall offhand if you can charge anything for source code, if you can, charging more than distribution even if permitted would definitely be iffy from an ethical perspective IMO.

There is no universal ethical tradition regarding selling GPL code, provided you fullfill the terms of the license and don't exploit any loopholes you find to restrict source availability- any such loopholes you find should be reported to the FSF and the copyright holder(if different) so they can be plugged, you should not take any advantage of them.

So it's really up to you. Just remember that while you have a right to expect credit, if someone takes your port, compiles it, and starts distributing it for free, you cannot do anything to stop them. The most you might be able to do is demand credit for your part of the code.

If the entire project team asks you to stop charging, I'd consider it, but it's really not their call to make. I personally think you should be nice and consider their request, but keep it firmly in mind that it is a request only, it has no legal force, and only as much moral force as you choose to give it.

Perl's strength for a new programmer is in the wide variety of programming techniques it directly supports.

It is not, however, all that accessible beyond the most basic stuff. It has historically been designed such that every time a conflict between ease for the experienced programmer, and ease for the learner, exists, the experienced programmer won out. Always.

This is apparently changing somewhat for Perl 6, I haven't read much about it but apparently Wall and the other leading Perl people do want to make things easier for people learning it. But without a break from the past so substantial that the new language is "Perl In Name Only", there really isn't a huge amount of progress they can make on that front.

Perl's flexibility, especially for tasks bigger than a shell script but smaller than an application, makes it very good to know. Especially if your programming is primarily to support sysadmin or other duties rather than being the job itself. But it really isn't suitable as a first language. I'd probably even recommend C over Perl, integrating with the OS and various APIs needed to do real work is often easier that way.

Python or Ruby are probably the best bets. Easy, flexible, and powerful enough for real world tasks. On Windows, C# or VB.NET(do not go to 6 or earlier, it was really a mess then) aren't too bad if the learner focuses on structure rather than the language. Objective C via XCode can serve a similar role on OS X.

Because the jobs call for a degree.

I've seen entry level hell desk jobs call for a 4 year compsci degree. Not even a supervisor or lead position. Grunt tech on the phones.

A good argument can be made that most of the tech jobs, perhaps even most programming jobs, shouldn't require a degree, or at least not a 4 year degree. But the fact of the matter is they do. You don't get the degree, you can't get the job no matter how qualified you actually are.

Some places will budge a bit from the formal job requirements(but you have to be that much better in other ways), and there are some that are smart enough to not even officially require it when they don't actually need it, but many will just toss your resume in the reject bin without a thought.

Basic procedure for building important databases and data processing apps, is to fill it with test data. Some realistic, some not realistic, and some that should be impossible. See what happens before the system goes live.

I'm not seeing anything in this report that conclusively rules out the possibility this is test data. Though, I suppose something might have gotten lost in translation.

The modern general purpose computer, even Macs, are very open products compared to typical consumer goods.

A CD player is a CD player. It has to work properly with itself, and CDs. Even componentized systems have a very limited environment within which they have to work. Precisely defined interfaces in and out, and they are limited in number.

A general purpose computer program though, is another beast entirely. There are thousands, if not millions, of other programs that they may have to coexist with. Most only need to worry about one OS, though with Java getting more popular for general applications, there might be several OSes to consider. And hardware... Even with Macs, there are several different models with different hardware configurations, and wierd stuff occasionally happens between them.

And then you get into end user use patterns and configurations. It's really a miracle that software is as reliable as it is, it really shows how good the compiler/linker/OS people are, even on Windows, given that it all mostly works in the real world.

A liability law is a nice idea, but this stuff would ahve to be taken into account.

The timeline with Kirk taking command..

Bad Stuff happens. Billions of lives are at stake, and the Federation needs to respond immediately.

Enterprise, Farragut, several other ships end up crewed nearly entirely by cadets because no other ships are available, and they don't have experienced officers on hand to crew them. Eventually, Pike has to leave Enterprise(if he hadn't, we're talking Game Over for the Federation, so the departure from protocol is justified by the extremity of the situation), and names Spock as acting Captain and Kirk as acting First Officer.

Eventually Spock has to relinquish command. Watch to find out details. McCoy says somethign about they have noone who can be captain, which suggests that there were no fully commisioned officers available. Either none on board in the first place apart from Pike and Spock, or those they did have had gotten killed in previous scenes(their original CMO had died at least)

"I don't understand how this works. If this was the case, what incentive would the professor have to require four of his books and never use them in the course?"

Spanish department at my school requires the textbook and a workbook. Recommends an audio CD set that costs close to 70USD.

Not only will the school library copy the CDs for you if you provide blanks, but all of the material from the CD set is available at the publishers website for free. Don't even need to register or provide a code from the book!

So why do they bother recommending this CD set?

iPhone uses a capacitive touchscreen. In short, this means it depends on the electrical charge of the users body to track touch.

Styli and gloves are pretty much guaranteed to block this charge, though I suppose conductive ones could be made to work if the resistance is low enough.

Windows Mobile devices, and at least all the palms I've seen, use different technology that is based in pressure rather than charge. Fingers work, but in my experience they just don't have the precision to work well with this sort of touchscreen, at least on a smartphone scale.