Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Maybe not a bad thing (Score 1) 580

/not sure if serious......

But, if you are, I'd say you actually have a good point. Probably less than 22% of those educated in the California public school system will actually go on to USE basic science in any meaningful way. That same principle could be applied to any other public or private school system.

I used to the type to think that educating every single person in every single subject was a good idea, but as I've gotten older, I'm not so sure of that anymore. Trying to expect every student to be above average (yes, that's impossible) in every subject is simply a demoralizing exercise, and my personal belief is that it causes kids to have either a) unrealistic expectations of what "successful" means or b) they are utter failures at everything they try.

Comment Re:Why not both? (Score 1) 164

I've not used a NoSQL system (meaning I'm *perfectly qualified to speak*! :-) ), but I would assume that there are abstraction libraries that can apply ORM type mapping on these things.

My co-workers think I'm nuts, but I have for years said that I would only use stored procedures, triggers, functions, what-have-you when I absolutely have no other choice. The reason is that it smears application logic into your database, which most of the time means that all of the fancy, gee-whiz tools you use to write, maintain, version and otherwise manage your code are nearly useless. It's also more difficult to scale that code (you can make copies for sure, but if you've ever had to do change management on a sizable Oracle cluster, for example, it can be painful).

Scaling application logic across cheap hardware is also easier than scaling your database.

So, for me, assuming that I have access to an abstraction layer, I can't see a downside (apart from strict ACID compliance) to a NoSQL system.

My $0.02. And I've been called a crochety old man before, so if you disagree with me you wouldn't be the first. :-)

Comment Re:It never ceases to amaze me... (Score 2) 87

GP is right though: The fact that there were drawings should have tipped them off that maybe their analysis was incomplete, rather than drawing the unwarranted conclusion of "Well, they must have just made them up".

This is the scientific equivalent of those idiots that drive off of cliffs because of what their GPS tells them rather than what they see with their own two eyes.

Comment What's the alternative? (Score 3, Insightful) 944

I'd love to see something better, but the rhetoric sounds a WHOLE lot like the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. How'd that work out?

In fact, as often as it's been tried, none of them have worked out.

Listen, I understand that you're mad, but you have to provide a solid alternative. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and no matter how badly you want something to not be so, still it remains. These revolutions have a history of plunging their respective people into the dark ages.

Comment Re:Ubuntu + VMWare Player (Score 2) 622

You know, I'm really tired of hearing this. This was MAYBE true for Win95/98. It's simply no longer true, and likely never was. (Try putting your average user in front of a prompt asking them how they want to partition. LVMwhat? Encrypted? Manual mode?)

For the record, I've been using Linux since 1999 and FreeBSD since 1996...my first computer was an Amiga. I'm a developer and have developed for both *NIX and Win32, as well as web apps. I'm hardly an MS fanboi.

Come on man, come up with a new meme. Folks around here are beginning to look like caricatures of themselves.

Robotics

Evolving Robots Learn To Prey On Each Other 115

quaith writes "Dario Floreano and Laurent Keller report in PLoS ONE how their robots were able to rapidly evolve complex behaviors such as collision-free movement, homing, predator versus prey strategies, cooperation, and even altruism. A hundred generations of selection controlled by a simple neural network were sufficient to allow robots to evolve these behaviors. Their robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behavior, but as they evolved, the robots were able to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate. The authors point out that this confirms a proposal by Alan Turing who suggested in the 1950s that building machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult for a human designer and could instead be done using an evolutionary process. The robots aren't yet ready to compete in Robot Wars, but they're still pretty impressive."
Microsoft

Bing Gains 10% Marketshare 514

samzbest writes "According to ComScore's qSearch, Microsoft's retaliation against Google search, Bing, has gained significant market share, now facilitating close to 10% of US searches. That's a gain of two large points in five months."
Medicine

Placebo Effect Caught In the Act In Spinal Nerves 167

SerpensV passes along the news that German scientists have found direct evidence that the spinal cord is involved in the placebo effect (whose diminishing over time we discussed a bit earlier). "The researchers who made the discovery scanned the spinal cords of volunteers while applying painful heat to one arm. Then they rubbed a cream onto the arm and told the volunteers that it contained a painkiller, but in fact it had no active ingredient. Even so, the cream made spinal-cord neural activity linked to pain vanish. 'This type of mechanism has been envisioned for over 40 years for placebo analgesia,' says Donald Price, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved in the new study. 'This study provides the most direct test of this mechanism to date.'"
Crime

How Much Is Your Online Identity Worth? 199

itwbennett writes "Answer a few questions about your personal Internet use, and a new tool from Symantec will calculate your net worth on the black market. You'll get three results: how much your online assets are worth, how much your online identity would sell for on the black market, and your risk of becoming a victim of identity theft. The tool is intended to raise consumer awareness about cybercrime, said Marian Merritt, Internet security advocate for Symantec. It's unlikely the average consumer would read an Internet Security Threat Report, she added, but a simply illustrated example might get the same point across. 'It's shocking how little value criminals place on your credit card,' she said."

Slashdot Top Deals

Happiness is twin floppies.

Working...