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Education

Submission + - Pen Still Mightier than the Laptop for Notetaking? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: While waiting to see if the iPad is a game-changer, CS student Carolyn continues to take class notes with pen and paper while her fellow students embrace netbooks and notebooks. Why? In addition to finding the act of writing helps cement the lecture material in her mind, there's also the problem of keeping up with the professor: 'Every five minutes I found myself cursing at not being able to copy the diagram on the board.' So, when it comes to education or business, do you take notes on a notepad/netbook, or stick with good old-fashioned handwriting? Got any tips for making the transition, or arguments for staying the course?
Role Playing (Games)

Genre Wars — the Downside of the RPG Takeover 248

Posted by Soulskill from the you-gain-1912-experience dept.
Phaethon360 writes "From Bioshock and Modern Warfare 2 to even Team Fortress 2, RPG elements are creeping into game genres that we never imagined they would. This change for the most part has managed to subtly improve upon genres that needed new life, but there's a cost that hasn't been tallied by the majority of game developers. 'The simple act of removing mod tools, along with the much discussed dedicated server issue, has made [MW2] a bit of a joke among competitive players. Gone are the days of "promod," and the only option you have is to play it their way. If Infinity Ward are so insistent on improving the variety of our experiences, they don’t have to do it at the expense of the experience that many of us already love. It really is that simple. If they don’t want to provide a good "back to basics experience," they could at least continue to provide the tools that allow us to do that for ourselves.'"
Science

Programmable Quantum Computer Created 132

Posted by Soulskill from the four-out-of-five-ain't-bad dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A team at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) used berylium ions, lasers and electrodes to develop a quantum system that performed 160 randomly chosen routines. Other quantum systems to date have only been able to perform single, prescribed tasks. Other researchers say the system could be scaled up. 'The researchers ran each program 900 times. On average, the quantum computer operated accurately 79 percent of the time, the team reported in their paper.'"

Comment Re:Accountability (Score 1) 234

by D-Fly (#23132960) Attached to: Sacha Baron Cohen Wikipedia Entry Creates Circular References
The weak link on Slashdot is the writing. I opened this article link mainly because after reading Lantrix's summary twice, I could not understand for the life of me what had happened. Thank you, 26199 for giving a one-sentence summary which actually made sense, unlike slashdot's FPP. With only a couple of hundred new words per day on the front page, couldn't Slashdot hire an editor to rewrite the summaries to make them understandable?

I agree that the journalist is a fool for writing an article using a Wikipedia article as his source. I am a big fan of Wikipedia but it is this kind of thing which makes me think there must have been something seriously wrong with that study which said that wiki was as accurate as Britannica. I am betting their sample size was too small, and they just happened to miss the fairly high percentage of Wiki articles that contain wild inaccuracies; I notice them all the time in my particular field.

In addition to the journalistic world, I think Wiki research is becoming a problem in academia as well: first-and-second-year students doing their 'research' by reading and recycling wikipedia articles on the topic, and little else. The Britannica was probably used for 'research' like this back in the day, but it had a much smaller range of articles, whereas Wiki has articles on practically everything, making bad-faith research efforts by younger students proportionally easier.

Finally, for those who suggest this isn't a 'big deal', think about what this says about the new and supposedly accuracy-enhancing Wikipedia footnoting fetish. I've thought about this myself with Wiki articles I have worked on. It so happens that a good number of my edits have drawn on out-of-print and banned books published in Arabic by obscure publishing houses in Egypt. I have duly footnoted passages and quotes, but how many Wiki readers are ever going to be able to check on my sources? By citing these sources (and there really were no other options), I have in some sense armored my edits against any challenges, since I am footnoting, but with things that can't really be checked.
Slashdot.org

Journal Journal: getting people to pay attention to posts

Journal by D-Fly

I've finally realized that no matter how intelligent or informative your post on Slashdot, nobody's going to notice it unless you stick it on the first comment tree available in a discussion. That is, even if the story already runs on to 500 comments, stick it on comment 1 so that when the lazy moderators start reading the comments, yours is one of the first intelligent ones they see; it'll get modded up and people will read it and comment on it. It's frustrating to put some thought and effor

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