bdwlangm - Slashdot User

Comment Re:And this is how we die (Score 1) 1343

by bdwlangm on Monday February 01, 2010 @07:45PM (#30989288) Attached to: Students Failing Because of Poor Grammar

While the 5% may be statistical noise, the 30% failure rate is not. The test in question (I've taken it, UW calls it the ELPE) is not designed to fail you for small errors in punctuation or grammar, but to indicate whether you have minimal competence in written English.

Maybe composing in standard grammar has been deemphasized (obviously a bad thing) and replaced with more education on critical reading (obviously a good thing). We could fix this if we wanted to by deemphasizing critical reading (obviously a bad thing) and emphasizing standard grammar more (obviously a good thing).

I would argue that to do critical reading at all you need some grammar knowledge, whether formalized or not. The ELPE does not test much more than that.

Comment Re:When girls can be raped in public with no 911 c (Score 2, Informative) 735

by bdwlangm on Friday January 29, 2010 @01:12AM (#30945866) Attached to: Seinfeld's Good Samaritan Law Now Reality?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/27/california.gang.rape.investigation/

Submission + - Amazing Software Turns Cheap Webcam Into Instant 3 (wired.com)

Submitted by tugfoigel on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @01:43AM

tugfoigel writes: It is called ProFORMA, or Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition, but it is way cooler than it sounds. The software, written by a team headed by Qi Pan, a student at the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University in England, turns a regular, cheap webcam into a 3D scanner.

Normally, scanning in 3D requires purpose-made gear and time. ProFORMA lets you rotate any object in front of the camera and it scans it in real time, building a fully 3D texture mapped model as fast as you can turn an object. Even more impressive is what happens after the scan: The camera continues to track the object in space and matches its movement instantly with the on-screen model.

Submission + - Steve Jobs in standover against app developer (theage.com.au)

Submitted by BrokenHalo on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @11:32PM

BrokenHalo writes: The Age has an article showing us another unsavoury aspect of Apple's business model.

A long-time Apple software developer from Sydney fears he may have to lay off most of his staff after draconian Apple legal threats and a rare personal email from Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs.

Mathew Peterson, 25, has been creating Mac software since he was 17 and one of his most popular products has been "iPodRip", which allows people to back up their music collections from their iPods on to their computers. It was an instant hit and particularly useful in emergencies because, if a user's computer dies and they attempt to connect their iPod to their new machine, all music and videos on the device are usually wiped... Peterson's Manly-based company, The Little App Factory, now employs eight staff members, makes two other Apple-related software tools and claims to have approximately 6 million customers. But iPodRip, which sells for $US19.95, pulls in the lion's share of revenue.

Despite iPodRip being available for the past six years, about 2 weeks ago, Peterson received a cease and desist letter from Apple's lawyers, Baker & McKenzie. It asked him to stop using "iPod" in his software's name, remove any Apple-related logos from his product and relinquish control of his domain name, ipodrip.com.

Comment Re:Oh, the potential (Score 1) 396

by lgw on Sunday November 30, 2008 @11:05PM (#25939313) Attached to: New Asimov Movies Coming

The firm film, in the extended version, was quite good. I don't think it suffered from the lack of Bombadil - he was a walk-on from Tolkien's other writings anyhow, and the bit of Arwen thrown in didn't really hurt anything. The standoff with the Balrog in the extended version was just the sort of eye-candy I was looking for in a LOTR movie.

Jackson's increasing arrogance in the later films was tragic, really. There was plenty in the source material to make for good eye-candy without adding skateboarding elves and the like. What annoyed me the most was that half of Gollum's character got lost in the visual gimmickry - the half that knew the destruction of the Ring meant his own destruction, and sought that release. The (first) ending is just awkward if interpreted as "oops, I slipped and fell into a volcano" instead of Gollum finally uniting his desire to have the ring with his desire to see the ring destroyed.

Well, it remains to be seen whether Jackon can best the Rankin-Bass The Hobbit. ;) I can only hope that, given he's doing two movies, he'll add all his own BS to the second. There's much less room in that story for cutting.

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