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Slashback: Hoaxery, New Math, Gestures
At least the jurors don't get to set the value of Pi. openbear writes: "According to a story at c|net the jurors meant for MP3.com to pay $3 million and not $300,000 in the court decision made last week. This may sound bad for MP3.com, but considering that TVT was originally going for $8.5 million I suppose that $3 million still looks like a good ruling. Espically since they have $42.9 million set aside for damage awards in pending suits."
(Here are some other articles about MP3.com as well.)
Parroting the (ORA, ActiveState, etc.) company line: rjoseph writes: "Perl.com's managing editor Simon Cozens has written a quick article on O'Reilly.com that explains the April Fools joke of the faked colaboration between Perl and Python to produce Parrot. He explains how the most interesting aspect about the whole affair is the fact that, to pull it off succesfully, the Perl and Python communities had to work together more than they had in a long time!"
Humor may suffer from analysis, but this is a cool explanation of what it took to pull off what turned out to be probably the most convincing Fool of the year, at least for those in the very small Venn diagram with the background and motivation to care about open-source programming languages and their creators;) Of course, now no one will believe it when the two do actually merge. (For a while I thought that the talk of "Python 3000" was a joke, too.)
Small steps on tiny machines n7lyg writes: "IEEE Computer has an article this month about a prototype PDA developed at Compaq's Western Research Labs: Itsy: Stretching the Bounds of Mobile Computing. Itsy has been through two implementations and has several unique features, including using MEMS accelerometers to implement a gesture interface (Rock'n'Scroll). This is all just research, but it does show promise for Linux-based PDA's. Itsy runs the X Window System and Qt Palmtop. The WRL website for Itsy is here."
This is really cool background material; now the earlier Itsy work has led to Linux on the iPAQ, I wish Compaq would actually sell a PDA with the size and shape of the Itsy itself. And tiny accelerometers for gesture-control would be welcome on my visor as well, and surely for small video game systems.
Big Blue, Big Blue, your transmission is fading, please say again, over. An Onymous Coward writes: "This sucks. At LWCE there was a big display at the KDE booth using ViaVoice to control KDE apps through Qt. Now it looks like the project is dead in the water, according to this article at Newsforge -- maybe lack of interest from IBM?"
What with the billion dollars that IBM has pledged to spend on Linux-related projects, and the fact that ViaVoice has shipped for a while with the high-end boxed version of Mandrake, hopefully this is just an oversight. ViaVoice is a cool technology -- but if things don't work out between Qt and IBM, perhaps KDE (and GNOME, and others, level playing field here!) can work on integration with Sphinx. An Apache-style license should be all-around friendly, right?
It's kinda sad that the best april fools joke (Parrot) was ruined by too many stupid april fools jokes on slashdot.
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2384/LWD010410maccomme nts/
You know, Linus Torvalds said April 8 that reports of him trashing the new Mac OS X are simply misquotes, as he has "never commented on OS X."
But, this is slashdot. Suggest that something said about THE CREATOR was wrong? *gasp*
They've got less than 20,000 active users for their my.mp3.com service, and the number of *paying* users is a hall of a lot less. Supposedly they had 500,000 sign ups initially, but everyone stopped using it after they encoutnered the licensing problems.
Considering they spent >100 million on the licenses for beam-it that works out at $5,000 per user.
Meanwhile, Musicbank Just closed its Doors today, another company that licensed stuff from the music business. These guys Never got round to Launching a product though.
Which leaves myplay.com as the only music service provider looking healthy, it must be cheaper to buy all that disk storage than it is to pay those label licenses.....
Beats me if unions are good or bad in the case of teachers, but my counterpoint to yours would be this:
A) Teaching is a very, very political profession. School board elections are notorious for being low-turnout, low-interest. It makes it relatively simple for right-wing wack jobs to get into office (this is/was, in fact, a Christian Coalition political tactic, to "infiltrate" these low-level elected positions and build from there). Once they're in office they could, if not for the teachers unions, do pretty much whatever they like. The union is the most effective tool the teachers have to exert influence back up the chain of command.
B) It's not like teachers can just go get another job. Think about it... if you're a teacher and you get into a scrape with the school officials, where do you go? How many other school districts might there be within a commuting distance? Pretty much, you have to sell your house and move. OK, so that's not so bad, it's a small point, but:
C) At least where I grew up, teaching was a motherfuckin' thankless job. All anyone in my town could do was bitch and piss and moan about how "rich" the teachers were, and how they had it made, and they don't even work all year! If not for the union, the people of my town would've only elected school board members who promised to cut teacher's pay to $12,000/year or something. Now, you think teachers are stupid now - and brother, I hear you and agree - try paying them poverty level wages and see what shakes out of the gene pool.
Thankfully, I live in a place where education is given priority... but you better believe there are vast freakin' swaths of this country where people would LOVE to see teachers get paid minimum wage... and five'll get ya ten, they're the same right-wing wackos who'll grassroots themselves a Christian Coalition school board.
So... the unions maybe do suck and let bad teachers stay in positions where they don't belong, but on the other hand, maybe they do help good teachers stay in bad places. There's always bad employees in any organization... maybe there'd be fewer bad teachers without the unions, and maybe there'd be fewer good teachers, too.
Pure speculation on my part, just based on my experiences...
Oh man, you have never taught. Granted, there's teachers that are flakes, but there's lots that aren't, too, and to be even a barely competent teacher, you have to:
Doing this well, heck, even doing it passably, is really, really hard. It's such an important job that lots of people are willing to do it despite the fact that it's such hard work for (usually) such low pay. And there are rewards, for example when you get to see someone learn a difficult new idea. But don't ever say it's easy till you've spent a year or two trying it. You've got no idea.
--Bruce Fields
The very first post on Slashdot set the tone for all of April Fool's. LZip with compression down to %0 of the file size. That ruined any possibility of anything being taken seriously. The ensuing crap that followed didn't help either. I would have thought that intelligent people could have had better execution than on the site that pathetic day.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Was that joke about Tim Berners-Lee and some MIT guy creating a new scripting language (like we need another) called CURL except they want to charge people up the ass to use it....haahahhahahha. Yeah right....oh wait......
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Basic problem: pointing in free space is not a good way to do input. It gets tiring fast, and it's not very accurate. This is partly why glove-type input devices never caught on. The GyroMouse people have found a niche market as a mouse replacement for people giving PowerPoint presentations, but that's about as useful as it gets.
and what did the guy behind the counter say? Did he try to talk you into keeping it?
"Helloooo, Polly.." (whap, whap, whap)
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
At least the jurors don't get to set the value of Pi. openbear writes: "According to a story at c|net the jurors meant for MP3.com to pay $3 million and not $300,000 in the court decision made last week.
In Indiana, there used to be a law setting pi equal to 4 instead of the more common value of 3.141592653589793238462650133. It was repealed, though. More info here.
---
The AOL-Time Warner-Microsoft-Intel-CBS-ABC-NBC-Fox corporation:
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Linuxtoday has Linus dispelling the flamewar zdnet tried to brew between our two camps. http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2384/LWD010410maccomme nts/
Shame on slashback for not noticeing. I get my newz from www.macsurfer.com
:)
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get jiggy w/ ayn rand!
Now that they have PDA's that can detect acceleration, how long before they have airbags in 'em? Your days of painful collisions with other angry pedestrians while playing tetris would be over.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Unions have nothing to do with it
Ok, well, sure they could. But they don't. Why? Because teaching sucks no one wants to teach, not anyone in their right minds anyhow. Basicly you have to take shity wages for the privilages of standing in front of a class room full of bitter, hostile, and (more and more frequently) armed teenagers with unstable hormonal ballances.
Small wonder there's a teacher shortage. Which is why we have so many shitty teachers. Something is better than nothing. That's why we have football coaches teaching history. That's why any nimrod can get a job teaching your children.
Now you'd think that supply and demand would catch up with this system, but it hasn't yet. I for the life of me can't figgure out why. If you started paying teachers 45,000 to 50,000 a year you could start demanding a hell of a lot more of them. More to the point, there are a lot of people who have teaching cirtificates as a "backup" who might make awsome teachers. Start paying a reasonably sane wage and they might go ahead and give it a try. Can't hurt.
Of course, the final problem is the fact that teachers have to deal with parrents. Seriously, you go the the doctor, he diagnoses that pain in your ear as an ear infection, gives you antibiodics. You take them... why? Cause he's a doctor, he knows what he's talking about right? Same thing if your lawyer tells you that clause in your will is full of holes, you fix it. Why? Cause he's a lawyer, he knows his shit. But when a teacher tells you that you need to spend more time reading to your kid and helping him with his homework, or that your kid might have a learning disability... that's for some reason unaccecptable. People actualy go off a teachers for this sort of thing. Teachers have lost their jobs (yes I know people this happened to) for this stuff.
You've REALLY gotta love those kids to put up with that shit. That's the argument for keeping the job horrid. Of course, you might not love them, you might just be a lazy bastard that dosn't want to have to strain intelectualy. Sounds like we've encountered both kinds. I'm open to any solution, but I've yet to hear one that will be 100% effective.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.