Comment Re:Hiding from the government is different. (Score 1) 138
It's almost impossible to resell, unfortunately. Who buys it on the street, or would trust you to cut it?
It's almost impossible to resell, unfortunately. Who buys it on the street, or would trust you to cut it?
Hmmm. I agree that there are some poor design decisions but people that are in the physical sciences tend to only know Fortran because most of what they do is number crunching and, until recently, the Fortran compilers where the ones that got the best performance on any kind of numerical computation, and there's also 40+ years of libraries that they can draw upon. At least it's Fortran90.
However all the references in the linked article appear to be data preparation and not the actual modeling. Now certainly GIGO can be a problem. It does sound like CRU should hire somebody with a Data Warehouse background to do some decent conformal mapping and set up a data quality management framework. Actually it sounds like something the whole climate research community should get together and do. But while I haven't seen the code and only have the followed the link you point to, it's not clear to me that it applies to the actual computations doing the climate modelling simulations, which is where they would presumably primarily focus their attention. Again data quality could be a problem but, since it's for a large stretch of consecutive years, I would expect its main function is to compare with retrospective predictions. In that case the researchers may have considered this a necessary distraction from what was really important: the actual modelling. This may be prototype-quality code that they felt didn't need to be polished because it wasn't time-critical and provided sufficiently accurate results given some statistical analysis of the results. The real question is what does the production simulation code, the stuff that needs to be fast and right because it's iterated millions of times, look like?
You left out turtles! all the way down!
I develop business software. Insurance and banking (mostly banking now), I'd love to develop games. What I don't want is 80-100 hour weeks as standard (pay for 30 hour weeks), competition with every upstart that thinks playing Quake for 20 hours straight makes them leet, companies that go bust and never pay you, a large percentage of projects cancelled, and fighting a perception that you're not doing anything serious with your life because all you do is play games. It just isn't for me.
By all means add more gaming components to the CS courses. Game programming is difficult and challenging and is an excellent excercise. Game physics is unforgiving and requires a good grasp of science. The creative side requires people to develop some very subtle skills. However don't expect your students to all like it or to become game programmers. That'll certainly be one path, but its not for everyone. I'd rather see this as an elective that can be taken early rather than having it forced as some incorporated part of a CS1/2 course. Access to the tools and mentoring on the methods would be useful to those interested in the field.
There are a few cafes within a short walking distance, including a Starbucks, but the closest Walmart I know of is 20 to 30 minutes drive.
Falcon
You know, my first thought when I read "seven seconds is too long" was...
... ord3r V1@gra n0w !!!!!!!!!!!1!!!
So this should be tagged "!troll" "badsummary" and "bitterposter" because I'm not entirely sure that this summary does it any justice. First, TiVo is not a troll for at least the reason that they actual manufacture products embodying the patent, have done so for a long time, and actually have revenue related to both hardware and subscription fees. [citation needed
Second, together with ReplayTV (now Motorola?), TiVo really was an innovator in this space. Whether these particular patents were innovative was at least decided with respect to DishNetwork. AT&T and Verizon will now get their chance to try to invalidate it. Who knows, maybe they have some damn good art.
Frankly could we stop with this stupid "Terminator Vision" meme? I understand it's an easy simile to make for the masses but until we have our phone chips embedded in the brain, just looking at the stuff makes it clear as day that it's nowhere near as advanced as it sounds, it's just a stupid way to advertise the stuff...
I agree somewhat, but it's not going to be long before you can get essentially an iPhone in a pair of sunglasses or a device that does this sort of information overlaying. Of course the first application will probably be language translation.
I thought they meant receiver as well but someone on another site mentioned it is there to allow you to stream audio to your FM receiver (car or home or wherever). Hands free also sounds plausible. The N900 looks like the kitchen sink of mobile gadgets on paper. I hope it can deliver.
Mod parent insightful.
I re-read it periodically
Why?
I mean it is 200 years old document, some of it is hardly relevant today. We (Finns) have had several changes to constitution as we see the world change.
So do we. In fact, we recognized that need early on and built in a process for it.
The problem comes when the legislature ignores the process and says "well, we want to do this, so we're just going to do it, lack of lawful authority be damned." When people accept the government's unauthorized laws on one point, it establishes a precedent that (constitutionally) unauthorized laws are just fine, and ultimately renders the whole document moot.
Want to step into a new function to adapt with the times? You can do that--just follow the procedure to do so. But if you can't garner the support to amend the Constitution, perhaps you ought to reconsider whether it's something you really ought to be doing.
I ahve never been to France, but I know it exists.
The cost of feathers has risen, even down is up!
