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Comment Re:Engineering shortage? (Score 5, Insightful) 375

Why study engineering?

1) Hardest course loads through college (excepting perhaps hard sciences and premeds).

2) No girls in classes (5-14%, falls as engineering major gets harder (ie electrical))

3) No girls in companies you will end up working at

4) Facebook friends list is 80% men, most of friends are men. Great if you are networking, crappy if you are trying to network to find the perfect gf/wife. Other majors make balanced set of friends naturally through classes. Their networking, as a result, is exponentially easier.

5) You end up working at a multinational company that pays you less (much less) than finance, law, BUSINESS. Argh. Note that business, finance, and law types went through the OPPOSITE of #1-#4, meaning they end up knowing way more girls, earning more, and having had a better life.

6) Yet, you feel as if you contribute way more to society than money movers, patent leeching lawyers, and smoothtalking male/female bimbos/bimbettes.

You tell ME how f*** up engineering is.

You ask why I do it? Because I love analysis, creating, designing, and doing.
Education

Submission + - Antiquated Higher Level Education (andrewmland.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Higher level education is broken and desperately needs fixed.Kids today are learning the same way they were hundreds of years ago in a day in age when they have access to the vastest quantity of knowledge known to man. Learning for the test is common place and is not helping anyone. Higher education needs reformed and it has already started.
Programming

Submission + - The Return Of The Fat App (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: Mobile devices are turning the app dev ship around, and everything old is new again, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'Fat apps are making a comeback. Thanks to mobile devices, we're drifting back to the fat app model, or at least a hybrid of Web and native app. In many cases, it's not enough simply to reformat a website for mobile browsing. The user experience on mobile devices is just too different than on a PC — you can't hover over links on a tablet or use pop-up windows, for instance. You can rearrange your website's CSS all you want, but the result is usually a poor representation of the original site, shoehorned to fit on a phone or tablet. The solution? A fat app.'
Intel

Submission + - Intel: Optical Thunderbolt this year (computerworld.com.au)

angry tapir writes: "Optical cables for Thunderbolt ports that enable faster data transfers over longer distances on computers such as Apple's Macintosh will be available later this year, according to Intel. Thunderbolt, introduced just over a year ago, is a high-speed connector technology that shuttles data among computers and with peripherals. Current Thunderbolt installations are based on copper, but optical cables could provide more bandwidth and longer cable runs in the future."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Federal Reserve to Take Itself to the Classroom (zerohedge.com) 1

wattersa writes: "The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has recently released a lesson plan for K-12 students entitled "Constitutionality of a Central Bank." The full lesson plan (see PDF embedded in article) reviews the constitutional framework cited by the Fed as justification for its existence, as well as various concepts regarding the function of a central bank in controlling inflation and developing other monetary policy. Is this propaganda, as suggested in the article, or is it a legitimate educational program?"
Microsoft

Submission + - Why Microsoft Can Afford To Lose With Windows 8 (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: "Windows 8 is an experiment that may well fail, but Microsoft will cull invaluable feedback for Windows 9 in the process, long before Windows 7 runs out of gas, writes InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp. 'Can Microsoft really afford to alienate one of its biggest market segments for a whole product cycle? In a word: Yes. In fact, doing something this risky might well be vital to Microsoft's survival,' Yegulalp writes. 'Microsoft needs to gamble, and right now might well be the best time for the company to do it. The company needs to learn from its mistakes as quickly and nimbly as they can — and then turn around and make Windows 9 exceed all of our expectations. Because if Microsoft doesn't ... well, then there might well be a Mac in my future after all.'"
Government

Submission + - US is net energy exporter! (Psyche!) (hcn.org)

__aaqpaq9254 writes: Jonathan Thompson has a great piece at High Country News explaining how the recent headlines claiming that the US is a net energy exporter are simply wrong. Here's a quote: "It’s not that the headlines are lying, exactly. The US is, in fact, exporting more products made from crude oil than it imports. Distillate fuel oil is our number one seller, and “finished motor gasoline” is another healthy export. So, overall, our refineries are shipping about 800,000 to 1 million barrels per day more of these refined fuels than the U.S. is shipping in.
While this sounds great, it’s overshadowed by what is left out of the equation: Crude oil."

Security

Submission + - Digital Playground porn site hacked, user details stolen (itproportal.com)

hypnosec writes: Hackers are claiming to have found a way to steal data on over 70,000 users, from the porn site Digital Playground, stating that they have passwords, user names and email addresses — and a few credit card details too. This is no Lulzsec or Anonymous hack, instead it is from a new hacking group making themselves known with this attack. Their name? The ominous sounding "Consortium." In the wake of the hack, the Digital Playground site has been left online, but it has a message stating "Members area is available, but we are not currently accepting new sign up's. Click here to access the members area." The Consortium has posted some details from the attack over at Zone-h, stating that it currently has 72,000 email addresses, usernames and passwords, along with 40,000 numbers, expiry dates and security codes from user credit cards.

Comment The 2 main reasons why Google+ loses to Facebook (Score 1) 310

Let's not forget that the primary demographic in which any new trend starts is the college-age to twenties crowd.

Facebook smartly captured this specific demographic and their attention (away from Friendster and MySpace), because of two main reasons, whichi Google+ does not have:
1) social acceptance (ie friend confirmation button)
and
2) being the "first" network in which people could feel unstalkerish by stalking people they barely know but would possibly like to know better (flirtation, becoming friends, etc)

1) it started off being an "in-network-only" - what does that mean? It means, the college students which were its first users, mostly wanted to check out those hot girl/guys in their classes. It also had a "confirm friend", so you gained some sort of "acceptance" that it was consensual "stalking".

Google+, however, misses that boat: anyone can add you, without your consent (you can only block, not force them to unfriend). That means there is no "confirmed acceptance", missing out on a key social-emotional facet.

2) Furthermore, Facebook has most momentum *not* because it has "all your friend", but because it has "all the cool/hot girl/guys you'd like to be better friends with but-only-met-once-at-a-party-and-do-not-want-to-overtly-add-on-another-network-again". If google+ finds a way to migrate this set over to G+, I'd wager the G+ snowball would start rolling, and rolling pretty fast.

As an example, I was one of the first on facebook. So was my circle. But guess which same circle is on my G+ ? That's right! The geeky circle I have that was first on these due to being in "ivies" and having "friends who work at google". However, which group is missing from my G+ and everyone else? Those acquaintances you met once and never met again? Some you unfriend, but some you still want to see as a contact.


tl,dr:
1) Facebook's confirm friend button works far better to make users feel safe
2) Facebook has snowball effect due to people having already added, surprisingly, not their EXISTING friends but rather the *acquantainces* they'd *like-to-get-to-know-better* but would rather not admit to "stalking" by adding them on another network again.

Comment Re:Google Inflating User Amount (Score 2) 171

Gotcha. Point taken, thanks for clarifying.

But can you have it both ways? Google was oh-so-great when it was the underdog and was able to wreak havoc on M$ (kind of). Now that they are big enough to do product tie-ins here and there, people are to complain of their unfair practices (ie monopolistic advantages)?

Can the argument be made that using Youtube monopoly is akin to M$ using Win monopoly to unseat Netscape with IE ? You are in no way forced to use Youtube. An entire ecosystem of (web) apps does not revolve around Youtube - embedded videos can be replaced easily enough and any smart website designer would have made the website malleable enough to do so with some simple scripts / db changes.

Yes, point taken, so s/Youtube/other google products . Do they really have a monopoly on web services? You are always free to go to other web services.

Comment Re:Google Inflating User Amount (Score 1, Interesting) 171

Are you kidding? Youtube is a drain on money, and is unlikely to replace real entertainment anytime soon (although we can see where they are trying to head).

Google depends and dies on search. They gave Mozilla $300 million just to be not replaced by Bing, although they'd rather everyone use Chrome. And Mozilla just partnered with Twitter and FB on that stupid lame whine video about search results.

I'm not biased towards any one company, although I would like to see the evil that is FB be replaced.

Comment Minecraft influence (Score 4, Insightful) 112

He probably saw minecraft's influence.. as much as he helped totally change gaming by evolving Mario, Link from 2d ORIGINALS with *true* gameplay that has lasted the test of time (SMB1,2,3 & Link to the Past), and then moving Mario, Link into 3D very successfully.. he probably saw that one dev DOES has the power to affect gaming and gameplay (please, not talking about angry birds and crap like that).


Mr. Miyamoto, please make some cool original stuff like Minecraft did. Blaze the trail !

Comment Re:the cake is a lie (Score 1) 287

A newb, but I have toyed a tiny bit with Django and it seems that the Django model layer is also the ORM (if you want it to be). You could of course add in the ORM layer-wrapper-class yourself, but newb-basic Django seems to have the model layer BE the ORM (as opposed to Zend, which recommends you to make a ORM and then a seperate model class).

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