Install a screen reader and get the experience of a blind person using a computer. If you're the type of person who writes software or designs websites, you may gain a few insights into your job.
Or try writing something that requires a lot of focus. Some writers suggest turning off the screen to help maintain focus on the writing process (avoid premature editing, formatting, layout, etc.).
Yeah, I know these are just "interesting" experiments. But at least you have a bit of motivation to try them.
A few years back, I saw an article in my university's faculty paper. It was talking about how one of their campuses was built for tele-learning, with everything from TVs in lecture halls, TV recording studios, and so-forth. But hey, they said, the failure of tele-learning wasn't a total loss. They had a lot of infrastructure that could be modified for e-learning. The wiring for computer networks could be routed where the old wiring for television networks was placed. Television studios are easily modified into computer labs. And maybe some other stuff.
I pointed out to a few people that it was ironic that they thought that e-learning would succeed when tele-learning failed. Only one person got it. So I would expect that your argument is going to fall on deaf ears.
There are a lot of reasons why this is the case, and a lot of people have pointed out those reasons. But I think it ultimately reduces to one thing: do we want our universities to be educational institutions, or do we want them to be credential mills. There is a tonne of learning that can only be conveyed effectively socially, acquiring social skills in a discipline is an essential part of the educational process, and some parts of the educational process is only effective when resources are shared.
> Had the authorities simply disagreed with him, they would have been wholly in the right. As you say, earthquake prediction is a pretty fuzzy art at present, and evacuations of any nontrivial length are seriously impractical.
It depends upon how the predictions were presented and the proposed plan of action. After all, very little in science is an absolute so the only responsible way of making a prediction is by including the uncertainties. For example: he could have said that there is an X percent chance of a magnitude Y earthquake on the date Z. People are strongly advised to prepare for this event by taking the following actions: blah, blah, and blah.
People deal with this sort of prediction all of the time. It is called watching the weather forecast or listening to weather advisories. Weather forecasting is frequently incorrect, but few people will complain if their emergency preparedness actions were in vain. Assuming, of course, those actions were reasonable. Evacuating a city is not reasonable, but perhaps evacuating buildings that are not up to earthquake codes is.
While it is fair to consider yourself (as a presumed IT professional) an expert in the hardware and software that he runs, you have to keep in mind that you are not an expert in the operations of his business. There are a variety of reasons why this person may want a long lived system. Hardware, software, and retraining costs may be among those reasons. Then again, he may have some other factors in mind. I can't presume what those implications are because I am not the one operating his business.
On the whole, I do agree with the assessment that it is not reasonable to expect modern hardware to operate for 10 to 15 years. And I do agree that virtualization is probably the best solution given the customers demands, since that will allow him to run the same software that he has run for the past 15 years into the indefinite future. After all, people usually care more about their interaction with software than they care about their interactions with the hardware. So it may be worthwhile asking the customer if that is an option in his mind.
I've been having a hard time getting CAPTCHA to work the first time.
And the secondtime . And the third time. And the fourth. And the....
I was having trouble too, until I found this awesome piece of software that solves CAPTCHAs for me. It even automatically finds the CAPTCHA image and text entry field so that I don't even have to be bothered by it.;)
Ever try to share a 2 Mb/s connection with a town of 1200 people? Point is, not everyone in the world can have high speed because not everyone in the world has access to high speed. Even if you do have high speed, you may not be able to install an X server or VNC client on someone else's machine while travelling -- but chances are that you can still run PuTTY. I've heard of people running ssh clients on mobile devices, where bandwidth may be a wee bit expensive.
And then there are the people who run mc because they just happen to prefer it.
I'm fairly certain that I'm not the only person who reflects this demographic:
Virtually all of my games were purchases second hand. This is mostly true of console games, where about half were bought used; and it is almost entirely true of PC game, where only two titles were bought new. There are a few reasons for that. Cost is certainly one of those reasons, but the importance of games in my life (or lack thereof) is the biggest reason.
Simply put, those of us who don't think of gaming as the end-all and be-all in life would never have purchases the required hardware and the associated games unless we knew that there was a source of inexpensive games. We would not buy the consoles because they wouldn't be worth they money for a handful of games. We probably wouldn't buy the games on the PC either, because we wouldn't be in the mindset where gaming is something that we would want to do with our entertainment dollars. (Besides which, you usually need to invest money in upgrading hardware if you want to play the latest games.)
Now as a publisher, it's probably easy to ignore people in my demographic because I'm not a big spender. On the other hand, people like myself are spenders. We may only buy a couple of new games per year, but we still contribute to the bottom line.
Even if you aren't represented by a union, chances are that unions that represent campus employees will pay attention to pet causes such as academic freedom. They may even fight for your cause, since it will affect all employees on campus.
If none of the academic employees on your campus are unionized, talk whichever body represents your faculty. They may be very keens to find out that the university is attempting to claim the IP rights of the faculty. Which is what they're doing since funding almost always comes from a faculty member's own grants, as well as funding that the student may bring with them. (All that the university does is print the cheques, and asks other people for the money for those cheques.)
It is probably not worth the time to talk the the university administration about this directly. I've tried to do so on matters that outright violated their own policies and they ignored me outright.
> The punishment should be based on an act, not on somebody's reaction to that act. Either an action 'ABC' is a crime or it is not - that should not depend on someone's reaction to 'ABC'.
I would argue otherwise. Think of it this way: an adult is bullying a minor. The adult has enough life experience to tell her that she is causing mental duress to another person. Even if she was not aware that her victim was suffering from depression, she should have been aware that socially isolating an individual can lead to depression, and that depression can lead to anything from substance abuse to death. On the other hand, you have a victim that does not have much life experience. That lack of life experience may mean that she isn't aware that *some* people are assholes and that *most* people are not assholes. Her social network is probably limited to school environments (which tend to be cliquish) and by a shorter life (so she probably had few, if any, longstanding friends). To her, hell may have been just another synonym for life.
In other words, the context of the crime is extraordinarily important in order to determine a suitable punishment. While I do agree that murder is somewhat overstated, she was definitely an accessory in the death.
As an added note: as someone who works with children and teens, I find such behavior from an adult around minors to be beyond despicable. After all, that parent was sanctioning bullying. Bullying and other forms of social isolation is a big problem in most schools, and a huge problem in many schools. Many schools try to combat bullying, and I doubt that any parent would want to see their children as a victim of bullying. Yet here is an example of a parent who's behavior is counterproductive in combating the problem.
> The advantage of 3D graphics, even without zooming the camera, is that it means you've gone away from the limits of the sprite sets. Consider how silly top-down flying games like Star Control looked when the ships could only point in eight directions. (...) IF this ship were rendered, you would have a true 360 degrees of rotation without creating an intolerable number of bitmaps.
Actually, 3-D gives you 4*pi steradians of rotation.
As someone previously mentioned, it is possible to "render" in 2-D as well as 3-D. Though I find the term rendering misleading because it carries a lot of modern baggage with it. The same transformations that are used on verticies in 3-D graphics can be reduced to 2-D verticies, while the coordinate positions of pixels can be reduced to verticies. This is the sort of thing users of Photoshop do almost every day. It is also fairly efficient if you use trig lookup tables, so no GPU is required.
So why was the use of sprites at each angle common. Two reasons. A big reason is image quality. Old games had small sprites on low resolution displays, so rotated sprites at funky angles would look bad. The computers weren't fast enough to interpolate pixels either. Yet speed and resolution do not blight modern computers. (It is also worth noting that 3-D graphics would look terrible on those low resolution displays, and real-time rendering meant that they were often limited to hideous looking polygons or wire-frame.)
The second reason for multiple sprites is artistic control. Do you want to simulate a light source in a 2-D environment? You can't do that by simply rotating a sprite. You would need multiple sprites. Do you want the sprite to do something special when it's pointing a certain way, well you can do that too.
"There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."
It is so easy to read that in two contradictory ways. While Gates was probably referring to anti-IP sentiment being an anti-property sentiment (hence communist), it is also possible to read it another way. All because of that word "incentive" and the quote's obvious link to copyright law rather than patent law. While IP may encourage people to create something in the first place, he is completely ignoring the bit that IP reduces the incentive to continue creating since the creator shifts into a protectionist mode. Not only does this protectionist mode reduce their own desire to innovate, but it reduces the desire of others to innovate (since you never know when you are going to be sued).
It is also worth noting that the word "communist" doesn't mean anything when it comes from Gates' mouth, since he doesn't seem to be able to differentiate between a communist and a libertarian.
The institutions that I have attended and worked for clearly stated that the copyrights belong to the student. End of story.
Yet the university may have the right to prevent publication on other grounds. Even though the aforementioned universities said that the students own the rights to their own work, they also claimed that worked created using their computing facilities could only be used for the advancement of the university's mission. Those policies aren't there to force students to forefit their rights. They are there to prevent the abuse of limited resources. (And, as someone previously mentioned, the university may have contractual obligations through software licensing agreements.) So while the university's assertion does seem to be unreasonable in this context, it is quite probably reasonable under most circumstances.
If the students did, and can prove, that the game was entirely created with their own computing resources (i.e. they did not use school computers, or software that was licensed to them through the school), it is quite probable that the school wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Unfortunately, even if that was the case, it would be quite difficult to prove.
Well, there are a lot of people who work with open source technologies for the money. In that respect, there will be a bit of a shake-up. Some of the failures will be very high profile, and may even convince people that open source is falling apart. That's what the public picture is going to look like.
Behind the scenes it will be quite different because, as you and others have said, not everyone works on open source for money. And even those who do it for the money will have much greater flexibility than the commercial software titans. After all, companies like Canonical and Red Hat have been dealing with far more competitive markets than Microsoft has been dealing with. They are the ones who have had to fight to sell their products, and to distinguish their products from competitors who can pretty much re-badge what they produce. The knowledge that they have gained over the years will be of tremendous value in tough economic times.
Of course not. But you will have heavily armed tactical squads breaking down the doors of schools every week in order to arrest teachers and students who violate copyright laws.
I can't really tell you how to teach this course, but I can suggest that you find some sort of underlying idea around which you will structure the course. For example: it sounds like you are trying to make a course that could just as well be called "Introduction to Computer Programming for the MySpace Generation." What does this mean? Well, according to my philosophy:
With respect to students, it could mean that you are dealing with students with zero programming knowledge and zero programming interest. They were just told that they had to be there if they wanted a well paying career in software engineering (or whatever). This will very much affect their attitudes towards the course. It may mean that you have to pull up MySpace on the first day and ask questions like, "how does this work," just so that they have a motivation hook. It may also serve as the motivational hook for your entire course.
On a technical front, it could mean that this is a course about client/server programming. How do you get computers to talk with each other so that people can talk to each other? This means that you will probably have to make a mini-MySpace, because you can only really see client side stuff otherwise. You may want to show them the multitude of languages involved here: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the client side. Maybe you'll have PHP and SQL on the server side. Going deep into algorithms at this point, or even properly structured programming or things like psuedo code, is probably a bad idea. After all, you aren't dealing with teaching a single language here. It is more like teaching about complex systems that are tied together by a lot of programming glue. Doing things the right way can enter the picture once they understand what that involves.
(For those hard-core programmers who think that theory leads to solid programming skills: how many of you started out with theory, and how many of you started out by trying random things on your computer? Without worrying about all of the principles of software engineering. I'm willing to bet that the latter is going to be more typical.)
Try to consider the social angle too. A lot of students really don't know why they are there. If they do know why they are there, they may not fully understand the process that leads them towards achieving their goals. Anything that you can do to help them understand that, without dumbing down the course, will ultimately make everyone happy. You'll be happier because you'll have a bunch of happier students who aren't approaching you to bitch and moan about grades. The students will be happier, and even take more responsibility (1), because they see where this is leading towards.
(1) This is unbelievably true. I've done courses where student attitudes flipped 180 degrees just because they could see where things were leading.
A lot of people have already displayed this sentiment by proposing demonstrations. But it is important to have something that the children can interact with in a meaningful way.
A Hopper Nanosecond is one example, where you can show them something, hand it around, and have them hold something meaningful. It may also be relevant to what your work, since the network is just a bunch of wires. An old EPROM with the crystal window, or an old 486 or 68040 with the silicon exposed, is neat too because they can see the insides of a computer chip. Simply popping open a computer or a hard drive is pretty cool too. Particularly the hard drive, if you can have it running, but the open computer is cool too since very few of them would have seen the insides. If you do any programming on the job, maybe show them (and the teacher) Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) since that is something a 10 year old can play with. It is also very visual.
This is probably outside of your line of work, but something that really snags their interest is showing them sound and letting them make the sounds that they will see. Squeak will allow you to show them voice prints or a fast fourier transform (they do start talking about frequency at that grade level, as pitch, so it's neat to see the pitch of a boy's, a girl's, a man's, and a woman's voice).
If you're in a classroom with a reading area (a.k.a. the carpet), asking the teacher to have them sit there (rather than in desks) is handy. It cuts back on the number of distractions, and they seem less likely to drift off. Some will chat though, but I wouldn't worry about that too much if they are chatting about things you pass around.
But most of all, just try to have fun yourself. Kids that age seem to respond positively if other people think something is fun or interesting. (Alas, the opposite is true too.)
You see, there is a fundamental problem in science and the problem can be summarized as this: how do you get the right results in order to optimize the grants that you receive. Spreadsheets are ideal for this purpose for two reasons. First of all, they are designed to handle financial data. This is great because financial data are what grants are all about. For example: will result X allow for a conference in Hawaii or California this year.
The other big reason to use spreadsheets is that they make data more maluable. Normal scientific tools make it difficult to micromanage the data that you acquire, partially because the people who produce that software have this mistaken notion that data has to be managed in a consistent way. So you're usually stuck doing the same thing to an entire dataset, and it's even difficult to treat different datasets in different way. But spreadsheets expose all of that data, so it is easy to tweak an observation here and a variable there to get the desired result to maximize your grant.
So you see, spreadsheets are a tremendously valueable tool for scientists. It is the best tool for the job.
> A better analogy would be formatting a disk so that it's ext3 and NTFS *at the same time*.
A better analogy would be formatting a disk so that it can be used in a plain old audio CD player and DVD video player.
When you look at a Commodore 64 and a PC floppy diskette, it isn't so much the file systems are different (they are different, but that is beside the point here) but how the bits are encoded on disk.
Even though we like to think of computers as digital systems, they are intrinsically analog. That is to say that the most digital parts of the disk are the heads and the tracks. After that, it is an analog signal that is being read from the media. Certain patterns in that analog signal are interpreted to mean certain things in the digital domain by the electronics, which is how it is translated into a digital form.
The problem is that most jobs expect credentials anyway, so unionizing probably wouldn't change that anyway. Even if it did, it would only change in union shops. Non-unionized shops wouldn't have to fret over such things.
A lot of it would also depend upon the people who are running the union. Some unions are simply there to negotiate collective agreements and handle grievances. Those are probably the good ones to be a part of. Other unions are driven by ideology and an incredibly distorted world view about entitlement. Those are the scary ones. The latter would probably depend upon credentials and senority because it re-enforces the old-boys club. The former would probably give the employer more leeway to terminate bad employees, partially because they would reflect the union poorly anyway.
I'm not a big fan of unions and, unlike many folk, I speak as someone who is a part of a union and who has attended union meetings. But I do believe that organized labour does have a purpose. Think of it this way: an employee is an individual, while a business is an organization. Because of that, the business has more power over the employee. Very large businesses or businesses in fields where there is little competition will have almost complete control over the employee. Unions are there in order to maintain some semblance of balance.
That being said, unions do very stupid things. There are certain things that unions should not have any input over, such as managerial functions that do not affect the employee; they have a tendency to support ideological causes that should be outside of their mandate; and, in some industries, they have way too much power. But maybe rationalized IT unions can fix those problems. After all, a lot of IT workers seem to be a tad more rational than the average Joe.
Some of the people around here seem to believe that it is okay to break the law and not pay the consequences. Well, that is sheer nonsense for a couple of reasons:
1. People stop fighting the bad laws because unenforced laws don't affect them (until it does). Yes, some laws are bad. Yet they will remain on the books if you indiscriminantly break them rather than try to fix them.
2. People don't understand the rationale behind the law, and break them with detrimental consequences. Some laws exist to ensure public safety against not so visible threats. I'm not talking about stuff like murder or theft here. I'm talking about stuff that can be public health threats, like dog shit and dumping cleaners into store sewers.
The final thing that I would like to add is a comment about social responsibility. If someone breaks the law, you are responsible for reporting it, else everyone will pay the price. If a government passes a bad law, you are responsible for opposing it, else everyone will pay the price. But reporting a law breaker is not going to bring on the society depicted in 1984, and screaming "this is big brother, this is 1984" is not going to prevent the society depicted in 1984 from developing (indeed, it may encourage that society to develop because those who love freedom will be perceived as nutbars by society at large).
... cameras dressed up as crime-fighting ninjas in my head.
Seriously though, cameras don't fight crime. At best, they are used to convict the people who commit the crime. In a few cases, they may be used to identify a perp who is known to the police. At worst, they drive crime to other areas (and probably residential areas, since those are the people who have the least ability to lobby for similar "protection").
But ultimately they fail because this is a technical solution to a social problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Install a screen reader and get the experience of a blind person using a computer. If you're the type of person who writes software or designs websites, you may gain a few insights into your job.
Or try writing something that requires a lot of focus. Some writers suggest turning off the screen to help maintain focus on the writing process (avoid premature editing, formatting, layout, etc.).
Yeah, I know these are just "interesting" experiments. But at least you have a bit of motivation to try them.
A few years back, I saw an article in my university's faculty paper. It was talking about how one of their campuses was built for tele-learning, with everything from TVs in lecture halls, TV recording studios, and so-forth. But hey, they said, the failure of tele-learning wasn't a total loss. They had a lot of infrastructure that could be modified for e-learning. The wiring for computer networks could be routed where the old wiring for television networks was placed. Television studios are easily modified into computer labs. And maybe some other stuff.
I pointed out to a few people that it was ironic that they thought that e-learning would succeed when tele-learning failed. Only one person got it. So I would expect that your argument is going to fall on deaf ears.
There are a lot of reasons why this is the case, and a lot of people have pointed out those reasons. But I think it ultimately reduces to one thing: do we want our universities to be educational institutions, or do we want them to be credential mills. There is a tonne of learning that can only be conveyed effectively socially, acquiring social skills in a discipline is an essential part of the educational process, and some parts of the educational process is only effective when resources are shared.
> Had the authorities simply disagreed with him, they would have been wholly in the right. As you say, earthquake prediction is a pretty fuzzy art at present, and evacuations of any nontrivial length are seriously impractical.
It depends upon how the predictions were presented and the proposed plan of action. After all, very little in science is an absolute so the only responsible way of making a prediction is by including the uncertainties. For example: he could have said that there is an X percent chance of a magnitude Y earthquake on the date Z. People are strongly advised to prepare for this event by taking the following actions: blah, blah, and blah.
People deal with this sort of prediction all of the time. It is called watching the weather forecast or listening to weather advisories. Weather forecasting is frequently incorrect, but few people will complain if their emergency preparedness actions were in vain. Assuming, of course, those actions were reasonable. Evacuating a city is not reasonable, but perhaps evacuating buildings that are not up to earthquake codes is.
While it is fair to consider yourself (as a presumed IT professional) an expert in the hardware and software that he runs, you have to keep in mind that you are not an expert in the operations of his business. There are a variety of reasons why this person may want a long lived system. Hardware, software, and retraining costs may be among those reasons. Then again, he may have some other factors in mind. I can't presume what those implications are because I am not the one operating his business. On the whole, I do agree with the assessment that it is not reasonable to expect modern hardware to operate for 10 to 15 years. And I do agree that virtualization is probably the best solution given the customers demands, since that will allow him to run the same software that he has run for the past 15 years into the indefinite future. After all, people usually care more about their interaction with software than they care about their interactions with the hardware. So it may be worthwhile asking the customer if that is an option in his mind.
I've been having a hard time getting CAPTCHA to work the first time.
And the secondtime . And the third time. And the fourth. And the....
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Ever try to share a 2 Mb/s connection with a town of 1200 people? Point is, not everyone in the world can have high speed because not everyone in the world has access to high speed. Even if you do have high speed, you may not be able to install an X server or VNC client on someone else's machine while travelling -- but chances are that you can still run PuTTY. I've heard of people running ssh clients on mobile devices, where bandwidth may be a wee bit expensive.
And then there are the people who run mc because they just happen to prefer it.
I'm fairly certain that I'm not the only person who reflects this demographic:
Virtually all of my games were purchases second hand. This is mostly true of console games, where about half were bought used; and it is almost entirely true of PC game, where only two titles were bought new. There are a few reasons for that. Cost is certainly one of those reasons, but the importance of games in my life (or lack thereof) is the biggest reason.
Simply put, those of us who don't think of gaming as the end-all and be-all in life would never have purchases the required hardware and the associated games unless we knew that there was a source of inexpensive games. We would not buy the consoles because they wouldn't be worth they money for a handful of games. We probably wouldn't buy the games on the PC either, because we wouldn't be in the mindset where gaming is something that we would want to do with our entertainment dollars. (Besides which, you usually need to invest money in upgrading hardware if you want to play the latest games.)
Now as a publisher, it's probably easy to ignore people in my demographic because I'm not a big spender. On the other hand, people like myself are spenders. We may only buy a couple of new games per year, but we still contribute to the bottom line.
Even if you aren't represented by a union, chances are that unions that represent campus employees will pay attention to pet causes such as academic freedom. They may even fight for your cause, since it will affect all employees on campus.
If none of the academic employees on your campus are unionized, talk whichever body represents your faculty. They may be very keens to find out that the university is attempting to claim the IP rights of the faculty. Which is what they're doing since funding almost always comes from a faculty member's own grants, as well as funding that the student may bring with them. (All that the university does is print the cheques, and asks other people for the money for those cheques.)
It is probably not worth the time to talk the the university administration about this directly. I've tried to do so on matters that outright violated their own policies and they ignored me outright.
> The punishment should be based on an act, not on somebody's reaction to that act. Either an action 'ABC' is a crime or it is not - that should not depend on someone's reaction to 'ABC'.
I would argue otherwise. Think of it this way: an adult is bullying a minor. The adult has enough life experience to tell her that she is causing mental duress to another person. Even if she was not aware that her victim was suffering from depression, she should have been aware that socially isolating an individual can lead to depression, and that depression can lead to anything from substance abuse to death. On the other hand, you have a victim that does not have much life experience. That lack of life experience may mean that she isn't aware that *some* people are assholes and that *most* people are not assholes. Her social network is probably limited to school environments (which tend to be cliquish) and by a shorter life (so she probably had few, if any, longstanding friends). To her, hell may have been just another synonym for life.
In other words, the context of the crime is extraordinarily important in order to determine a suitable punishment. While I do agree that murder is somewhat overstated, she was definitely an accessory in the death.
As an added note: as someone who works with children and teens, I find such behavior from an adult around minors to be beyond despicable. After all, that parent was sanctioning bullying. Bullying and other forms of social isolation is a big problem in most schools, and a huge problem in many schools. Many schools try to combat bullying, and I doubt that any parent would want to see their children as a victim of bullying. Yet here is an example of a parent who's behavior is counterproductive in combating the problem.
> The advantage of 3D graphics, even without zooming the camera, is that it means you've gone away from the limits of the sprite sets. Consider how silly top-down flying games like Star Control looked when the ships could only point in eight directions. (...) IF this ship were rendered, you would have a true 360 degrees of rotation without creating an intolerable number of bitmaps.
Actually, 3-D gives you 4*pi steradians of rotation.
As someone previously mentioned, it is possible to "render" in 2-D as well as 3-D. Though I find the term rendering misleading because it carries a lot of modern baggage with it. The same transformations that are used on verticies in 3-D graphics can be reduced to 2-D verticies, while the coordinate positions of pixels can be reduced to verticies. This is the sort of thing users of Photoshop do almost every day. It is also fairly efficient if you use trig lookup tables, so no GPU is required.
So why was the use of sprites at each angle common. Two reasons. A big reason is image quality. Old games had small sprites on low resolution displays, so rotated sprites at funky angles would look bad. The computers weren't fast enough to interpolate pixels either. Yet speed and resolution do not blight modern computers. (It is also worth noting that 3-D graphics would look terrible on those low resolution displays, and real-time rendering meant that they were often limited to hideous looking polygons or wire-frame.)
The second reason for multiple sprites is artistic control. Do you want to simulate a light source in a 2-D environment? You can't do that by simply rotating a sprite. You would need multiple sprites. Do you want the sprite to do something special when it's pointing a certain way, well you can do that too.
"There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."
It is so easy to read that in two contradictory ways. While Gates was probably referring to anti-IP sentiment being an anti-property sentiment (hence communist), it is also possible to read it another way. All because of that word "incentive" and the quote's obvious link to copyright law rather than patent law. While IP may encourage people to create something in the first place, he is completely ignoring the bit that IP reduces the incentive to continue creating since the creator shifts into a protectionist mode. Not only does this protectionist mode reduce their own desire to innovate, but it reduces the desire of others to innovate (since you never know when you are going to be sued).
It is also worth noting that the word "communist" doesn't mean anything when it comes from Gates' mouth, since he doesn't seem to be able to differentiate between a communist and a libertarian.
The institutions that I have attended and worked for clearly stated that the copyrights belong to the student. End of story.
Yet the university may have the right to prevent publication on other grounds. Even though the aforementioned universities said that the students own the rights to their own work, they also claimed that worked created using their computing facilities could only be used for the advancement of the university's mission. Those policies aren't there to force students to forefit their rights. They are there to prevent the abuse of limited resources. (And, as someone previously mentioned, the university may have contractual obligations through software licensing agreements.) So while the university's assertion does seem to be unreasonable in this context, it is quite probably reasonable under most circumstances.
If the students did, and can prove, that the game was entirely created with their own computing resources (i.e. they did not use school computers, or software that was licensed to them through the school), it is quite probable that the school wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Unfortunately, even if that was the case, it would be quite difficult to prove.
Well, there are a lot of people who work with open source technologies for the money. In that respect, there will be a bit of a shake-up. Some of the failures will be very high profile, and may even convince people that open source is falling apart. That's what the public picture is going to look like.
Behind the scenes it will be quite different because, as you and others have said, not everyone works on open source for money. And even those who do it for the money will have much greater flexibility than the commercial software titans. After all, companies like Canonical and Red Hat have been dealing with far more competitive markets than Microsoft has been dealing with. They are the ones who have had to fight to sell their products, and to distinguish their products from competitors who can pretty much re-badge what they produce. The knowledge that they have gained over the years will be of tremendous value in tough economic times.
Of course not. But you will have heavily armed tactical squads breaking down the doors of schools every week in order to arrest teachers and students who violate copyright laws.
I can't really tell you how to teach this course, but I can suggest that you find some sort of underlying idea around which you will structure the course. For example: it sounds like you are trying to make a course that could just as well be called "Introduction to Computer Programming for the MySpace Generation." What does this mean? Well, according to my philosophy:
With respect to students, it could mean that you are dealing with students with zero programming knowledge and zero programming interest. They were just told that they had to be there if they wanted a well paying career in software engineering (or whatever). This will very much affect their attitudes towards the course. It may mean that you have to pull up MySpace on the first day and ask questions like, "how does this work," just so that they have a motivation hook. It may also serve as the motivational hook for your entire course.
On a technical front, it could mean that this is a course about client/server programming. How do you get computers to talk with each other so that people can talk to each other? This means that you will probably have to make a mini-MySpace, because you can only really see client side stuff otherwise. You may want to show them the multitude of languages involved here: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the client side. Maybe you'll have PHP and SQL on the server side. Going deep into algorithms at this point, or even properly structured programming or things like psuedo code, is probably a bad idea. After all, you aren't dealing with teaching a single language here. It is more like teaching about complex systems that are tied together by a lot of programming glue. Doing things the right way can enter the picture once they understand what that involves.
(For those hard-core programmers who think that theory leads to solid programming skills: how many of you started out with theory, and how many of you started out by trying random things on your computer? Without worrying about all of the principles of software engineering. I'm willing to bet that the latter is going to be more typical.)
Try to consider the social angle too. A lot of students really don't know why they are there. If they do know why they are there, they may not fully understand the process that leads them towards achieving their goals. Anything that you can do to help them understand that, without dumbing down the course, will ultimately make everyone happy. You'll be happier because you'll have a bunch of happier students who aren't approaching you to bitch and moan about grades. The students will be happier, and even take more responsibility (1), because they see where this is leading towards.
(1) This is unbelievably true. I've done courses where student attitudes flipped 180 degrees just because they could see where things were leading.
A lot of people have already displayed this sentiment by proposing demonstrations. But it is important to have something that the children can interact with in a meaningful way.
A Hopper Nanosecond is one example, where you can show them something, hand it around, and have them hold something meaningful. It may also be relevant to what your work, since the network is just a bunch of wires. An old EPROM with the crystal window, or an old 486 or 68040 with the silicon exposed, is neat too because they can see the insides of a computer chip. Simply popping open a computer or a hard drive is pretty cool too. Particularly the hard drive, if you can have it running, but the open computer is cool too since very few of them would have seen the insides. If you do any programming on the job, maybe show them (and the teacher) Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) since that is something a 10 year old can play with. It is also very visual.
This is probably outside of your line of work, but something that really snags their interest is showing them sound and letting them make the sounds that they will see. Squeak will allow you to show them voice prints or a fast fourier transform (they do start talking about frequency at that grade level, as pitch, so it's neat to see the pitch of a boy's, a girl's, a man's, and a woman's voice).
If you're in a classroom with a reading area (a.k.a. the carpet), asking the teacher to have them sit there (rather than in desks) is handy. It cuts back on the number of distractions, and they seem less likely to drift off. Some will chat though, but I wouldn't worry about that too much if they are chatting about things you pass around.
But most of all, just try to have fun yourself. Kids that age seem to respond positively if other people think something is fun or interesting. (Alas, the opposite is true too.)
> Do they have a spielchucker?
Thankfully not. It would be awfully hard to write a grant proposal in the cells of a spreadsheet if they did include a spielchucker.
You see, there is a fundamental problem in science and the problem can be summarized as this: how do you get the right results in order to optimize the grants that you receive. Spreadsheets are ideal for this purpose for two reasons. First of all, they are designed to handle financial data. This is great because financial data are what grants are all about. For example: will result X allow for a conference in Hawaii or California this year.
The other big reason to use spreadsheets is that they make data more maluable. Normal scientific tools make it difficult to micromanage the data that you acquire, partially because the people who produce that software have this mistaken notion that data has to be managed in a consistent way. So you're usually stuck doing the same thing to an entire dataset, and it's even difficult to treat different datasets in different way. But spreadsheets expose all of that data, so it is easy to tweak an observation here and a variable there to get the desired result to maximize your grant.
So you see, spreadsheets are a tremendously valueable tool for scientists. It is the best tool for the job.
> A better analogy would be formatting a disk so that it's ext3 and NTFS *at the same time*. A better analogy would be formatting a disk so that it can be used in a plain old audio CD player and DVD video player. When you look at a Commodore 64 and a PC floppy diskette, it isn't so much the file systems are different (they are different, but that is beside the point here) but how the bits are encoded on disk. Even though we like to think of computers as digital systems, they are intrinsically analog. That is to say that the most digital parts of the disk are the heads and the tracks. After that, it is an analog signal that is being read from the media. Certain patterns in that analog signal are interpreted to mean certain things in the digital domain by the electronics, which is how it is translated into a digital form.
The problem is that most jobs expect credentials anyway, so unionizing probably wouldn't change that anyway. Even if it did, it would only change in union shops. Non-unionized shops wouldn't have to fret over such things.
A lot of it would also depend upon the people who are running the union. Some unions are simply there to negotiate collective agreements and handle grievances. Those are probably the good ones to be a part of. Other unions are driven by ideology and an incredibly distorted world view about entitlement. Those are the scary ones. The latter would probably depend upon credentials and senority because it re-enforces the old-boys club. The former would probably give the employer more leeway to terminate bad employees, partially because they would reflect the union poorly anyway.
I'm not a big fan of unions and, unlike many folk, I speak as someone who is a part of a union and who has attended union meetings. But I do believe that organized labour does have a purpose. Think of it this way: an employee is an individual, while a business is an organization. Because of that, the business has more power over the employee. Very large businesses or businesses in fields where there is little competition will have almost complete control over the employee. Unions are there in order to maintain some semblance of balance.
That being said, unions do very stupid things. There are certain things that unions should not have any input over, such as managerial functions that do not affect the employee; they have a tendency to support ideological causes that should be outside of their mandate; and, in some industries, they have way too much power. But maybe rationalized IT unions can fix those problems. After all, a lot of IT workers seem to be a tad more rational than the average Joe.
Some of the people around here seem to believe that it is okay to break the law and not pay the consequences. Well, that is sheer nonsense for a couple of reasons:
1. People stop fighting the bad laws because unenforced laws don't affect them (until it does). Yes, some laws are bad. Yet they will remain on the books if you indiscriminantly break them rather than try to fix them.
2. People don't understand the rationale behind the law, and break them with detrimental consequences. Some laws exist to ensure public safety against not so visible threats. I'm not talking about stuff like murder or theft here. I'm talking about stuff that can be public health threats, like dog shit and dumping cleaners into store sewers.
The final thing that I would like to add is a comment about social responsibility. If someone breaks the law, you are responsible for reporting it, else everyone will pay the price. If a government passes a bad law, you are responsible for opposing it, else everyone will pay the price. But reporting a law breaker is not going to bring on the society depicted in 1984, and screaming "this is big brother, this is 1984" is not going to prevent the society depicted in 1984 from developing (indeed, it may encourage that society to develop because those who love freedom will be perceived as nutbars by society at large).
... cameras dressed up as crime-fighting ninjas in my head.
Seriously though, cameras don't fight crime. At best, they are used to convict the people who commit the crime. In a few cases, they may be used to identify a perp who is known to the police. At worst, they drive crime to other areas (and probably residential areas, since those are the people who have the least ability to lobby for similar "protection").
But ultimately they fail because this is a technical solution to a social problem.
> REMAP IT TO A USEFUL KEY. And how am I supposed to remap every keyboard on the planet so that *other* people cannot post in all caps?
I would really like to be rid of that key for once and for all.