Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:So, like Seiko, Kodak devised their own demise (Score 2) 28

My dad's a retired photographer. He told me that, back in the day, for a wedding the photographer got paid well, and the DJ barely got paid anything. But today, it's switched, the photographer barely gets paid anything, and the DJ demands a huge fee.

Also he told me that back in the day a live band was paid well, but now live bands barely find any work for weddings, and if they do barely get paid anything.

Comment Re: Isn't that the point? (Score 1) 70

It's important to know every "high level behavior" of what your code is doing.

For example, even if you write a simple "Hello World" app, there's many layers of processing. Even if you write your "Hello World" app in assembler, there's a ton of various OS subsystems and hardware firmwares and microcontrollers involved. But at the end of the day, you trust your OS and hardware, and understand that your "Hello World" app will most likely just output "Hello World", but there's a always possibility of rare quirks. For example if a solar flare happens when you run your Hello World app, and the solar flare interrupts a boolean logic operation, then your "Hello World" app crashes, which is generally accepted as it's rare.

But if you don't understand the "high level behavior", then that's a problem.

Comment Re:Just give unlimited testing time to everyone! (Score 1) 238

(I teach CS in college and grad school.)

You can't practically give unlimited time. An unproctored test will see massive cheating on the test. So if you want the output of the test to somewhat resemble the skill of the student, you need a proctor. And that proctor needs to go home eventually.
By the constraint of my university, most of my test are 75 minutes long. The way my tests are built, you probably should not need more than 45 minutes to answer everything. Yet, I always have students staying the entire time that is available.
During exam week, we have to give a full 150 minutes. Usually A students leave within 30-50 minutes. B students tend to leave within 40-60 minutes. C students will stay about an hour and a half. And D and F student will stay the entire time staring at their exam without having written anything on it for the last hour and a half; but still they will stay another 30 minute.

So unlimited testing time is just adding expenses and inconvenience without benefiting students at all.

For me, as an adult, I found that taking vitamin D, and magnesium threonate really helps with my memory and speed. I remember a CS teacher of mine said that for me, I was the opposite of most other students. I would be the first student to quickly grasp algorithms, and make connections and such, but I needed to improve on my code organization and syntax. One job I had a coworker that was the other way around, as he had a dual major in CS and English. We worked great together. I would come up with elegant ideas, and he would help organize them.

Comment Just give unlimited testing time to everyone! (Score 3, Interesting) 238

I always struggled with timed tests. I had a lot of childhood trauma living in section 8 housing and my family being a victim of many various crimes at a very young age, so I've always had a ton of anxiety. I was that kid in the hallway still doing my advanced math test in the hallway as I needed 3 times the time to finish, but always got an A. I also was afraid of submitting any answer unless I checked it forwards, backwards, and thought of multiple ways of solving it. In my real job I'm an IT architect\engineer. I have worked on systems that affect 100s of millions of people. I also worked on hospital systems, where messing up IT could affect real people lives. You want someone like me who takes time to triple check before risking peoples lives, or causing millions of dollars in outages or data loss.

Comment solution (Score 1) 43

If connected to the internet, wouldn't the below stop 99% of these issues:
Auth1: restrict connections by source IPv4 or IPv6 of the vendor (if vendor managed). The customer could add their own HQ IPv4 or IPv6 source addresses.
Auth2: require a legit client certificate when connecting to them that's signed by the vendor (if vendor managed). The customer could also add their own client cert from their internal CA.
Auth3: require username\password

Only if all 3 auth layers pass can you connect.

Comment Depends on how deep you go in research (Score 1) 61

I research various human cellular pathways and treatments as a hobby.

AI seems to not "piece" ideas together.

For example, let's say:
* paper #1 suggests that compound X activates pathway A
* paper #2 suggests that activation of pathway A will then also activate pathway B.

If I ask AI, what compounds activate pathway B, it is very unlikely to tell me compound X as a possibility.
(bringing together research from both papers)

Comment Re:This is not a new phenomenon (Score 1) 61

Cashier: That comes to $7.85

Me: OK, here's $8.10

Cashier (confused): But... why the extra $0.10?

People stopped doing mental arithmetic once calculators were everywhere.

In the example, giving $8.10 makes sense in case they want change of a quarter, instead of a dime and a nickel (along with the dime already in their pocket). Most people rather have larger value coins than an array of a bunch of small value coins. A handful of dozens of pennies in change would be rather annoying to most people.

Comment Outcome of the Electronic Spreadsheet Revolution (Score 1) 178

AI will probably decrease menial\redundant work, and will probably actually increase jobs, as organizations will just demand more. Similar to what the invention of spreadsheets did to the accountant field.

How The Electronic Spreadsheet Revolutionized Business
https://www.npr.org/2015/02/27...
---
GOLDSTEIN: When the software hit the market under the name VisiCalc, Sneider became the first registered owner, spreadsheet user number one. The program could do in seconds what it used to take a person an entire day to do. This of course, poses a certain risk if your job is doing those calculations. And in fact, lots of bookkeepers and accounting clerks were replaced by spreadsheet software. But the number of jobs for accountants? Surprisingly, that actually increased. Here's why - people started asking accountants like Sneider to do more.

SNEIDER: You could play the what-if game, you know, what if I did this instead of that?
---

Comment Re: What? Fuel inequality? (Score 1) 93

I don't understand why anyone doesn't get a perfect score on the ACT test. I took it as a kid, and it was long, but very easy. SAT on the other hand has questions that you wouldn't know in real life. For the SAT they might as well be asking you what's 1,000 digits of pie, that is something you wouldn't know unless you studied for it.

Slashdot Top Deals

The world is no nursery. - Sigmund Freud

Working...