I judged two years in a row at the local FIRST competition. I don't do it anymore because the awards are an "everybody is a winner" type of event. In the two years I judged, one or two teams were head and shoulders above the other teams, and deserved to clean up. But the judges agonized and spread out the awards to everybody. That does both the winners and losers a disservice and doesn't reflect how life really works. It was an interesting idea, but the lack of awards based on merit sort of soured it for me.

Sheldon

That's very true. But Romney/Ryan was a vote for the American Taliban. Both choices sucked. And both choices will continue to suck until moderates are allowed back into government.

This is offtopic but:

More importantly, god invented python (Guido == God in the rest of this post). Which kicks the everliving crap out of MATLAB for most computing tasks, and is free. As a MATLAB person, I've been doing a lot of coding in Python with pylab and numpy, and my life is significantly improved.

A gimped set of python toolboxes and a python environment is available for the iPad, but when I'm coding, I want a keyboard.

Sheldon

My two corgis (corgwn) aprove.

I can still hear the sound of the floppy drives. Man, that's music to these old and tired ears.

The IIe was my first computer I programmed for as well. But the Macintosh was much more magical in what it could do.

Sheldon

Just what I need to have a blissful night sleep is a lamp that is controlled by someone else. Next up, let's put control of the toilet flush lever in someone else's hands while I'm showering.

As someone with binocular vision, I would also like to be cheated out of 3D movies. Please please never let me see that gimmicky crap ever again.

And the glasses can go suck it too...

Sheldon

Go easy on the guy. I'm no stranger to slashdot, but I had to run to google to verify that project glass was the VR glasses and not some other google project brewing in the labs. I had read about it at least twice, but find it so unappealing to me that I don't keep it in my mind for long.

This strikes me as a solution looking for a problem.

The CrIS hyper spectral sounder is enabling much more precise forecasting. Proving once again that it's not the number of pixels, but the quality of them.

http://npp.gsfc.nasa.gov/cris.html

Sheldon

Sadly, that's the way I'm seeing slashdot these days...

John Sculley

Hey do you work in my company?!? I'm the third cube on the right at the top of the stairs.

permanent magnet is fixed, coils rotate with LEDs. easy peasy. Think of it this way with a common DC motor: The shaft is clamped to the pole, and the body of the motor is attached to the propeller. So the wiring all lives on the propeller.

This is the sort of stuff you make in elementary or jr. high school.

Sheldon

He may or may not be a troll, but I work for a HUGE company, and they dumped all the Crack-Berrys and went all-in on windows phones. I was not surprised that they did that, as we are microsoft to the core (with all the benefits that entails, like blue screens galore). Before the giant black-berry purge, I had not actually seen a windows phone in the wild.

Apparently our IT folks examined the smart-phone landscape and something (hopefully) smart pushed them to WP7. so the GP may have a point.

BTW, I hate the cut-off text of WP7, and would not buy one with my money.

Sheldon

Plus one way pagers are allowed into places that no cell phone would be allowed. like all tech, they have a place

Sheldon