RexSilex - Slashdot User

Ball And Chain To Force Children To Study 346

Posted by samzenpus on Monday May 18, 2009 @02:15PM from the school-chain-gang dept.

You haven't tried everything to get your kids to study until you've tried the Study Ball. The Study Ball is a 21-pound prison-style device that locks onto your child's leg and only unlocks after a predetermined amount of study time has passed. The homework manacles can't be locked for more than four hours, and come with a safety key. The product website states, "Quite often, students who are having problems concentrating tend to get up every ten minutes to watch TV, talk on the phone, take something out of the fridge, and a long list of other distractions. Were they to dedicate all this wasted time to studying, they would optimise their performance and have more free time available. Study Ball helps you study more and more efficiently." Stop Teasing Your Brother Pepper Spray coming soon.

Oklahoma Ambulances Debut Sirens That You Can Feel 128

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday November 13, 2008 @02:35PM from the do-you-hear-something dept.

djupedal writes "Booming like a 1980s video game, the Howler can even make liquids ripple — Oklahoma's largest ambulance company will become the first ambulance service in the nation to outfit its entire fleet with new Howler sirens, designed to emit low-frequency tones that penetrate objects within 200 feet — such as cars — to alert drivers." This is all well and fine, but I wonder what they plan to do when their sirens call up one of the big worms from deep below?

Mythic GM Talks Warhammer Launch, Banning Gold Sellers 251

Posted by Soulskill on Monday September 22, 2008 @07:20PM from the ban-early-and-often dept.

Gamasutra has an interview with Mark Jacobs, GM and co-founder of Mythic, about the recent launch of Warhammer Online. He talks about handling the heavy demands on the servers, and how the launch is going better than the opening of Dark Age of Camelot (during which "somebody parked a truck on our internet"). Jacobs also blogged about the glee with which he and his team have been banning gold spammers: "We don't wait and let them stay in the game and ban them en-masse, my guys ban their useless, time-consuming butts right away. We have a strike team whose sole job it is to get these guys off our servers as quickly as possible. This weekend, we unveiled a new wrinkle in the fight against them, the public ban message. Players on our Phoenix Throne server have been treated to special messages when a gold seller/spammer is banned. I've given them a wide leash to come up with creative messages to tell the entire community who has been banned and we keep it within the Warhammer universe."

Comment A Straight Answer (Score 1) 558

by RexSilex on Monday September 01, 2008 @03:36PM (#24833871) Attached to: Java, Where to Start?

Unlike so many of these comments that skirt the question, I'm going to at least give you something to work with. J2EE being the key here, as JAVA in itself is not much for a resume. JAVA makes it easy to release a project that is completely cross-platform and will run on any machine with a JVM running. J2EE programming gives you tools to make large projects scalable. The key being, that most J2EE jobs will involve large projects. If your products aren't large then theres no reason to use J2EE, and if you're not worried about cross-platform then JAVA itself isn't particularly important to choose. Occam's razor right? So your goal in learning JAVA and J2EE is to start to think about threading, scalability, and agile development. In actuality, an employer will hire you because then need something from you that you can do already. However, they will expect you to be able to learn to solve other problems when that project is complete. This is the key in computer science fields. Learn that the language is just a tool, and each one is suited for different solutions and any solution can be done many ways. Never expect to learn the language and be done--instead focus on becoming better at learning the new parts fast. Heres a good roadmap:

Learn JAVA through any book or website by making some simple applications.
Start to LOVE Java API pages
Then move to making something large AND scalable. (Look into Enterprise Java Beans)
Use your existing knowledge about databases and learn about JDBC. (Check out EntityManager)
Start to learn annotations (Affect deployment descriptors but aren't run by JVM but appear directly in code)
Learn about debugging and more importantly about testing (testing is about producing errors, not successes)
Whats hot in the market is definitely web services. (Check out SOAP)
Build a Web Service
Try using PHP to access the web service. (You'll wanna know about wsdl2php to get that working)
Using NetBeans accessing the web service will be easy with jsp pages (drag and drop easy)
You'll have to learn at least two application servers: Glassfish, JBoss, WebSphere, Tomcat. Learning 2 is the only way you can see how they can be different and write projects that will work with them all. (Say hello to makefiles)

I hope this helps. Those are all skills that will be valuable in todays programming workplace.

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