drblast

56 ms·

481.
by drblast 16y ago
Or maybe that brand new thing the kids are all excited about is the same old thing re-hashed...and the old folks know it. What we really need to do is go watch Spinal Tap one more time: Limo Driver: But it's...it's a passing thing...it's uh
482.
by drblast 16y ago
I have a personal project I've been working on for years, mostly in pen and paper. Every once in a while I'll get motivated and start coding it up. I'll start to think "I didn't think I could do it that way when planning it on paper, but I
483.
by drblast 16y ago
I used to get this a lot when I led a division of about 20 people. We'd usually discuss some aspect of leadership, and the classic question is asked: "Would you rather go to a doctor who has great bedside manner, but isn't very good at med
484.
by drblast 16y ago
I just got a part time job teaching college algebra at a school that mostly teaches nursing and massage therapy. The pay is ok. The reason I got the job is that the state and regional accreditation boards require that anyone teaching colle
485.
by drblast 16y ago
I read this in high school and a few times since. It should be required reading, and it's a shame it's not in print any longer. (last I checked) At first blush it's a standard communism vs. capitalism / freedom vs. security hero story. Wha
486.
by drblast 16y ago
Monopoly is a great game if you play by the rules. Nobody does, however, and then they complain that it's boring and takes too long. It's not, unless you ruin the game with the $500 every time you land on Free Parking rule. A great way to
487.
by drblast 16y ago
There is a PS3 version, it was a downloadable launch title. I'm sure it's still available, and for 5 or 10 bucks. Really, really fun; they added some great challenges like a mode where everything is dark except for some candlelit areas.
488.
by drblast 16y ago
It's hard to draw conclusions about the desktop Linux market since it's so vanishingly small. I'd happily buy games for Linux. But I don't normally buy games at all; I buy maybe one a year. If I'm a typical case, a company could produce a
489.
by drblast 16y ago
Of all the literature produced by the current system in the last century, how much of it is actually valuable in the sense that having it is a great boon to society? How much of that would not have been produced had the publishing industry
490.
by drblast 16y ago
Possibility spaces was a great suggestion. It led me to look up and figure out for myself a scientifically important long-standing question I had not answered: Does the option to switch cases at the end of Deal or No Deal mirror the Monty H
491.
by drblast 16y ago
When I think debugger, I think gdb, which is fine to a point. But after a while, its interactivity becomes a liability. I don't want to have to set the same breakpoints and watches after a recompile, every time. The integrated debuggers i
492.
by drblast 16y ago
A great programmer writes Lisp programs to generate code in the languages he doesn't like but is forced to use :-)
493.
by drblast 16y ago
This is a good presentation. Unfortunately I'm not able to listen to it but the slides are informative. Colin, at about 26 minutes in your "DO" code is comparing the computed MAC with itself. I don't think that's what you want.
494.
by drblast 16y ago
That's one way to do it. Another way is to divide the screen into halves or thirds, then divide those into halves or thirds, and so on until you reach a minimum tile size. Whenever an object moves, you calculate recursively the smallest ti
495.
by drblast 16y ago
The ads and sitcoms aren't targetting men. That's why they don't care if you're annoyed. The commercials say a lot more about women than they do about men. Watching the commercials, it's hard to deny that a lot of women must like feeling s
496.
by drblast 16y ago
I love these competitions, and have been captivated by them since I was a kid after seeing a PBS special on MIT's Woody Flowers, who organized them. And in high school, I designed a project for a state-wide King of the Hill type contest by
497.
by drblast 16y ago
I wonder about the "value of degree" graphs in these articles. I don't think they tell the whole story. In particular, over a person's working life they'll typically increase income by gaining experience and probably jump jobs a few times
498.
by drblast 16y ago
Let's talk about the problems in the Navy. I'm an officer. I don't agree that all of the best officers are leaving. Some are, but probably not in greater percentages than the mediocre and bad ones. The promotion system is as horrible a
499.
by drblast 16y ago
I can't remember which dialog it is in Windows, but the most hideous example uses the standard Yes/No/Cancel buttons out of context but explains beforehand what each one does, like this: -To continue closing the program and save the doc
500.
by drblast 16y ago
About a year ago there was a rash of pessimistic opinion articles on how technology has done little to nothing to further education in the U.S., and that attempts to modernize schools have mostly failed. But a couple of months ago I came ho
501.
by drblast 16y ago
Jericho was a fantastic TV series about this very thing. It only lasted a season and a half, however. It wasn't completely realistic, but most of the shows were about things the survivors had to do afterward to deal with contamination, bre
502.
by drblast 16y ago
This made a lot of sense when the PS3 first came out, but since then we've gotten low-power architectures and extremely powerful and cheap GPU's. http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_72770.html Those, for example, are dirt cheap and have simil
503.
by drblast 16y ago
US Census data is multiple gigabytes, and well documented. If you want to run a database through its paces beyond the point where all the data fits in memory, that's a good place to start.
504.
by drblast 16y ago
Well, if this proves anything, it proves that not even three languages cover every problem. Which is strange. In most other endeavors you'd think being fluent in three similar ways of doing something would be enough. FWIW, I'd choose Lisp,
505.
by drblast 16y ago
I can't answer for the parent poster, but one thing specifically irked me about Python and that was the variable scoping rules and the lack of forced declaration. The result was that any misspelling of variables could result in extremely di
506.
by drblast 16y ago
There's got to be a happy medium here. I don't want to be owned by my stuff, but I also think that anyone who says that material things can't make you happy hasn't owned a Mustang GT or a Fender Stratocaster. If you don't have either of th
507.
by drblast 16y ago
This doesn't really address the problem; the "life skills" grade isn't standardized and will be meaningless for just about anything beyond the report card. Its value is as a signal to parents. So why not have a comments section? Is it too
508.
by drblast 16y ago
"Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?" Because it would be tremendously
509.
by drblast 16y ago
He's making the (correct) assumption that the speculative stock market where active investors expect to make their money is a zero-sum game. For there to be winners in "buy low, sell high" there have to be an equal amount of losers. So, if
510.
by drblast 16y ago
But people love to give advice. Look at the topics here. The ones that get huge responses ask a question that allows anyone with even limited experience to weigh in. Want to see pages and pages of comments? Post to a forum where parent

More ›