It's actually even more difficult than that. The infected file isn't an actual help file, it's an extra file that's not even supposed to be there, and isn't linked or referenced anywhere in VS.NET. They'd have to install IE 5.5 over IE 6 and browse to the directory the help files are kept in and actively search for and open the infected file.
Really, it's a close to harmless as you can get, considering the astronomical improbability of someone executing the infected file by accident. Of course, one should never underestimate the ingenuity of fools, so I have no doubt that it will happen.
On the whole, I have to give MS credit for the way they are handling this. They are offering free clean replacements to everyone who has an infected copy, they have a patch out, and they are spreading the news so that people are informed and thus able to fix the problem. I'm a little curious about the "patch", but I suppose it's a more reliable solution than just telling people to delete the file.
Yes, I am pointing and laughing at MS right now, I am typically an MS basher after all, but at the end of the day I have to say that I wish they would deal with more of their problems as honorably as they've dealt with this one. It would have been really easy for them to sweep this under the rug and pretend it never existed.
One would think that advertising companies would try to keep something like adcritic afloat, but apparently that wasn't the case. Apparently it's been bought by Ad Age, and will be relaunched some time in the future, but why they ever let it go down in the first place is a mystery to me.
In every comparison I've seen Linux has proven to be more tollerant of hardware faults that Windows. My personal experience is that I can take a stick of RAM with a bad address that crashes Win2k about every hour, and use it without issue under Linux thanks to memtest86 and badram. Granted, that's fairly annecdotal, but certainly something to think about.
I believe it was just TV companies. They're the ones selling the ad space, after all. AFAIK, advertising companies are customers in this market, or at best middle men. They create the ad, obviously, and the more the ad is seen the more effective it will be, which will reflect well on the ad company and probably bring them more business in the future.
The product company, of course, should be thrilled to have their ad being seen by as many people as possible.
This is just my logical analasys of the situation, though. I'm not involved with the advertising market in any way, and people, especially business people who have lawyers, tend to do really strange, illogical, and self-defeating things.
Being a Nevada City native, my first thought on getting to the web page was "My God! Somebody listens to KVMR enough to post it on their web site!" My second thought was "My God! KVMR has a webcast!"
Anyway, check it out if you want to listen to a seriously strange mix of radio. Don't get discouraged if you hear a show you like and can't find it next week, as their schedule is pretty bizzare. "Every third Wednesday, 4-7AM" is par for the course.
Re:Don't read here much, do you?
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P2P Television?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Wasn't there some company that was rebroadcasting US TV over the internet in Canada a few years ago? I don't recall the details, but I remember them being sued. I'd guess that was the end of them, or I'd probably be able to remember the name.
Personally, I buy CDs because of the quality difference. This really only applies to certain types of music. VNV Nation, for example, sounds just fine on mp3. The Pixies, on the other hand, sound like shit on mp3. To be fair, though, I would probably buy a VNV Nation CD if I could actually find one for sale. Who knows, maybe there is a significant difference in quality there as well, and I've only noticed it with The Pixies because I had listened to their CDs for years before ripping them to mp3. I doubt that's the case, but you never know.
In my experience, mp3s sound crappy if the source isn't electronic in nature. By that I mean the various genres of "electronic music"; techno, industrial, synthpop, etc. Music that derives its "feel" from texture and harmonic interaction don't transfer well. This includes most classical, as well as more modern music like that from The Pixies, Bauhaus, or Jimi Hendrix. Those types of music depend greatly on the "unhearable" parts of the music that mp3 strips out.
I don't consider myself an audiophile. I find the hiss and pop "warmth" of vinyl annoying, and I think tubes should only be used when one intends to have distortion (and even then they can often be replaced by other voltage-driven devices, like certain FETs, without a noticable difference). I can definately hear the difference with mp3s, though. For that reason alone mp3s will never be a replacement for CDs.
The guy is an economist who released a paper detailing how download should be hurting record sales. All logic supports that conclusion, but apparantly there is more at play here than logic, because after spending more time with the numbers, this same economist says that there is effectively no damage done.
Specifically, he says world-wide music downloads are 1.5 times world-wide music sales, or 5 times US music sales, and yet the reduction in CD sales has only been about 5%. If downloads actually hurt sales, the damage should be undeniable given the scale, but this is so small as to be indistinguishable from the effects of an economic recession. Being, as we are, in an actual economic recession, that's as close as an economist who values his integrity can come to saying music downloads don't hurt music sales.
Let me reiterate that these are the conclusions of an actual economist after reviewing the actual, real world data.
One should never need a calculator in a math class. Math instructors should never encourage the use of calculators.
Think about it for a minute; in math classes where you're working with numbers the purpose is to learn the mechanics of working with numbers. Once you get to Algebra, you should have learned those fundamentals and you are now on to working symbolically. There is no reason to allow calculators for symbolic math. When numbers are used at that level, there's no reason for them not to be nice, convenient, easy to deal with numbers. The kind of numbers that can be manipulated in ones head.
Engineering and science classes are different. In those classes math is just a tool. A calculator is useful because those classes often deal with "real world" numbers, which are never convenient to work with. The point of these classes is not to teach math, but to teach the concepts of torque, friction, charge cpacitance, etc. The calculator is not a substitute for that knowledge, and thus there's no real reason not to use one in that context.
As far as visualization, plotting points by hand helps a lot more than seeing a surface generated by a machine. Seeing the machine generate the surface involves only one sense; sight. Doing it by hand involves sight, motor skills, and the mental effort of working out the equation and transaling those numbers into a visual representation. The first requires only passive observation, the second active understanding. The difference in the amount of information retained, or even understood, is staggering.
At most, if a calculator is being used in a math class to help with visualisation of new concepts, it should be used by the teacher only and hooked up to a projector. Really, the machine is useful for verification, but it should serve no other purpose in a math class.
I'm curious, though, if you have a TI-89, why on earth do you have a TI-83? I can totally understand the -86 backup, and the slide-rules and abacus are just cool, but the -83? What do you use that for?
Well put. I would like to suggest a modification to that last sentence which would fit better in this context, though:
Regardless of how expert you become at the use of a tricycle, you shouldn't pretend that it is in some way an adequate substitute for learning how to walk.
If these kids will always have the calculator, then why do they need to learn the math?
GIGO
It's an old CS term meaning "Garbage In, Garbage Out". A calculator is just a dumb machine that does what it's told. As such, it's only as good as it's user. One who learns math on a calculator doesn't learn math, they learn calculator. Since they don't know math, they have no way of knowing whether the answer the calculator is giving them is correct. All they have is trust in the calculator.
My 12 year old little brother is a prime example. His teachers let him use a calculator, and he has become totally dependent on it. He punches numbers in and, right or wrong, he writes down whatever it spits out.
More importantly, though, math isn't a requirement because people use it. The fact is that most don't. It's pretty damned unlikely that you will ever need to figure out the maximum area that can be enclosed with 20 meters of chain-link fence, but that isn't why you have to figure it out in class. Math, and especially algebra, is more like a language that is specialized for solving problems. It's the ability to solve problems in a logical, rational way that is the most important thing gained from taking those classes. Sure, there are other ways to teach those skills, but there are none more efficient or formalized.
To focus on getting the answer, which is what one does when using a calculator, is to totally miss the point. The answer is incidental, merely a gauge of success, it's the process that's really important.
I hope that clarifies my position somewhat. Let me know if there's anything unclear. abreauj and canadian_right make excellent points as well, so consider this in that context.
I'm perfectly aware of how things are done in the real world, thank you.
You seem to have confused "college" with "trade school". A trade school is about job training, and teaches specific skills for a specific job. A college teaches concepts, wth specifics being thrown in mostly for demonstration. A trade school education gives you the skills to do the job they trained you for, a college gives you the skills to do whatever job you end up in. A trade school puts out MCSEs, a college puts out computer scientists.
Think about that for a moment, and perhaps you'll realize why, as a tutor, I don't give a rats ass about how it's done in "the real world". My job as a math tutor is not to teach people how to balance their checkbook using quicken, my job is to teach them math!
Maybe you don't agree with my beliefs or methods, but in over 2 years they've proven effective in over 90% of cases. The simple fact is that you can't use the tools effectively if you don't understand the math, and you will never learn the math if you are given the tools from the get-go.
Maybe the programming you do doesn't require a lot of math. Having taken both myself, I have to say the calculus classes were much more useful. The lessons of the algorithms class are much more obvious and directly applicable, but the concepts of calculus are much more versatile. Trade school vs. college.
Any teacher teaching a calculator based algebra class is an asshole and deserves to get their ass beat. A little harsh, perhaps, but that teacher is doing their students a disservice.
I've certainly had classes where a calculator was required, and for the same reasons you list, but they were physics and engineering classes. They weren't about the math so much as they were about getting the right answer by whatever means available.
That's beside the point, though. No math class (or instructor) should ever require a calculator, nor should their use be encouraged.
I agree to a point. I found my graphing calculator extremely helpful when I was going through calc, but mostly just as a way to check my answers or to do the "clean up" work of plugging in the numbers at the end. It's not difficult to structure a calculus class so that a graphing calculator is of minimal use, and that's why I think they should be allowed at that level.
The simple fact is that kids who use calculators don't learn math. They learn how to perform basic operations on a calculator, and that's about it. I suggest you try doing a few years of tutoring like I have, and then we'll see if still feel the same.
And yes, a kid can visualize vector operations, geometric properties, etc. I did, and so did most of my friends.
Instead of suing them for 'monopoly practices', which will be next-to-impossible to prove in court
Which Microsoft Anti-trust trial have you been watching? Microsoft has already been found guilty of abusive monopoly prcatices, and the case didn't even deal with their most damaging practices; their OEM agreements. In fact, their appeal has nothing to do with overturning that verdict, that appeal was rejected. This one is about trying to reduce the punishment.
All my profs allowed graphing calculators, but they weren't really of much use beyond checking if your graph was right. As you said, everyhting was variables. By the time you reach Calculus, you should know math well enough that the calculator is a tool, not a crutch.
Now Statics, on the other hand, there was a class where I really needed my calculator. Mostly because the prof assumed you had one, and set up the problems in such a way that it was impossible to finish a test in time without one. I know that from experience. My calculator died the morning of a Statics test, and I only managed to get through the first problem and halfway through the second (out of four) in the aloted hour, and I'm pretty fast at working stuff out by hand.
Actually, at the early level is when calculators and other graphing aids are *most* useful.
I'm a college level math tutor, and I can't even begin to say how wrong that is. Kids don't learn math by using a calculator any more than they learn to spell by using a spell checker or learn grammar through a grammar checker. I've tutored countless students who's teachers thought as you do, and none of them knew a god damned thing about math, despite the fact that they got 'A's all through high school.
When kids are first learning math is exactly the time when you absolutely don't want them using calculators! They need to learn how to do things by hand first, without having to rely on anything else to do it. Then, when you hand them a calculator, it's just a way to do things faster, to get the busy work out of the way so they can focus on more advanced concepts.
In my opinion, graphing calculators should be allowed only at the calculus level and above. Below that level, they can only be a crutch. Scientific calculators should be allowed for Trigonometry and intermediate Algebra, and absolutely no calculators at all at a lower level than that.
Since Ukranian artists cannot make money selling their albums, they are forced to give endless concerts to survive.
I guess I should feel bad... except that this is the situation for all musicians everywhere, regardless of piracy. Musicians don't make money selling albums. Period. Especially musicians who have signed a recording contract.
Having been a musician myself, I have only one response to Katya Cilly: If you hate playing music so much, go get a real job.
I don't support piracy, but honestly, I never cared about it with regard to my own stuff. The point of recording music is so that other people can hear it and enjoy it when I can't be there to play it live. If somebody bought my CD and made copies for all their friends, great! Maybe all their friends would come to my next show. Nothing compares to playing a live show. That's what being a musician (or any kind of performance artist) is all about. If you don't like doing it, then being an artist is not the profession for you, and you should look for something else.
You can't abandon a car, you'll eventually be tracked down and made to pay for proper disposal.
Not true. I've abandoned my share of cars, and I've never been tracked down and made to pay for it. Why? Because cars are disposed of by junkyards, and junkyards make their money by selling peoples abandoned junk. The city calls up the junkyard and says "Hey, there's an abandoned car over here. Could you please haul it away?" The junkyard sends out it's truck, brings it back to the yard, pulls parts it can sell, crushes the rest to sell as scrap metal.
As far as your real property example, you wouldn't be tracked down for abandoning the property, you'd be tracked down for illegally disposing of toxic waste.
Unless you are comparing software to toxic waste, I don't see how either of these examples has any bearing at all on software.
A better example would be if I write a short story, don't copyright it, and leave copies at various coffee shops. I'm perfectly within my rights to do that. The coffee shop owner might be annoyed at having something else to throw away, but that's the most harm that would possibly be done. People could sit down and read it with their cup of coffee, take it with them when they leave, make copies of it for their friends, put it in an anthology they're putting together, put their own name on it, rewrite it, whatever.
Maybe it's pornographic, or contains dangerous, subversive ideas, but that's the chance you take when you pick up some random peice of paper and start reading it. At least with code you (should) have the opportunity to check it out (by looking at the source code) before it has an opportunity to do damage. Anybody using public domain software where they can't look at the source is a fool, anyway, on the order of someone who goes spelunking without a flashlight.
However, by not releasing a patch and instead just removing Gopher support, MS is leaving millions of people still open to vulnerabilities!
Not everyone who uses IE is going to upgrade to the next version of IE which will have no Gopher support.
Yeah, but those are the same people who wouldn't install the patch, so what difference does it make?
Actually, it's much more likely that people will install the new version of MSIE than that they will install a patch.
I agree that it's a cop-out, and probably indicative of MS' security future, despite all their lip-service to the contrary, but lets be honest here; people are stupid, so there will be millions left vulnerable no matter what MS does because those millions are too ignorant to protect themselves.
The only thing they could do that would actually make a difference is release the patch as a worm that would patch it's own exploit after emailing itself to your whole address book.
I'm not surprised at their lack of response. Solidworks is a sweet package, and it's really easy to use, but they don't give a rats ass about their user's opinions. That's pretty crappy when you consider that the users are paying as much as $9k per seat for the privilege of being ignored.
Also, SolidWorks is very tightly integrated with Excel and is scriptable in VBA. Until Excel and VBA are officially supportewd on Linux there is not a chance in hell that you will see SolidWorks for Linux.
Conversely, Pro-E has had a Unix version available for some time now, or at least that's what I've been told. I imagine it wasn't that big of a leap for them to get it running on Linux.
Like just about everything else in computing, worms were also invented in Unix. There's a good reason we haven't heard of any in the last 10 years or so. It seems to be time for you to bone up on your history of computing.
We deny eachother the most simple pleasures in life in favor of the artificial ones.
Or often in favor of none at all. Colleges are breeding grounds for cults, and many cults a quite restrictive, telling their members what movies they can see, what books the can read, what TV shows or channels they can watch, etc. Also, there are a lot of people who come from heavily religeous, sheltered backgrounds who go into a state of shock when they get to college. They either embrace the worst of the insanity, or the lash out against it, clinging to their misguided upbringing as if it were a life raft on a stormy sea. There are those who spend the first few years living the college party lifestyle and end up regretting it and turning to religeon, and we all know there is no one a self-righteous as a born-again.
The real problem is that the people who are most likely to be "offended" are not really offended by the material itself as they are offended that someone else is enjoying something they consider sinful. It becomes their mission as good christians to save you from yourself and bring you into the grace of god. In order to be saved you must first "realize" that what you're doing is "wrong", and the best way to do that is through punishment. Getting you kicked out of the computer lab, for instance, might be first step on your road to repentance!
It is indeed a sad state of affairs when people can't just mind their own business and keep their nose out of other peoples lives. On the other hand, though, I think it's equally sad that people have to shove their lives in other people's faces and blatantly advertise everyhting that they are (or wish they were).
"Don't ask, don't tell" always seemed like a very sane policy to me, and more people should adopt it in their daily lives.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually even more difficult than that. The infected file isn't an actual help file, it's an extra file that's not even supposed to be there, and isn't linked or referenced anywhere in VS.NET. They'd have to install IE 5.5 over IE 6 and browse to the directory the help files are kept in and actively search for and open the infected file.
Really, it's a close to harmless as you can get, considering the astronomical improbability of someone executing the infected file by accident. Of course, one should never underestimate the ingenuity of fools, so I have no doubt that it will happen.
On the whole, I have to give MS credit for the way they are handling this. They are offering free clean replacements to everyone who has an infected copy, they have a patch out, and they are spreading the news so that people are informed and thus able to fix the problem. I'm a little curious about the "patch", but I suppose it's a more reliable solution than just telling people to delete the file.
Yes, I am pointing and laughing at MS right now, I am typically an MS basher after all, but at the end of the day I have to say that I wish they would deal with more of their problems as honorably as they've dealt with this one. It would have been really easy for them to sweep this under the rug and pretend it never existed.
One would think so, but it's hard to say.
One would think that advertising companies would try to keep something like adcritic afloat, but apparently that wasn't the case. Apparently it's been bought by Ad Age, and will be relaunched some time in the future, but why they ever let it go down in the first place is a mystery to me.
If you find a place where you can get a Mac with OS X for $300, let me know, because I would love to have one to play with.
In every comparison I've seen Linux has proven to be more tollerant of hardware faults that Windows. My personal experience is that I can take a stick of RAM with a bad address that crashes Win2k about every hour, and use it without issue under Linux thanks to memtest86 and badram. Granted, that's fairly annecdotal, but certainly something to think about.
I believe it was just TV companies. They're the ones selling the ad space, after all. AFAIK, advertising companies are customers in this market, or at best middle men. They create the ad, obviously, and the more the ad is seen the more effective it will be, which will reflect well on the ad company and probably bring them more business in the future.
The product company, of course, should be thrilled to have their ad being seen by as many people as possible.
This is just my logical analasys of the situation, though. I'm not involved with the advertising market in any way, and people, especially business people who have lawyers, tend to do really strange, illogical, and self-defeating things.
Being a Nevada City native, my first thought on getting to the web page was "My God! Somebody listens to KVMR enough to post it on their web site!" My second thought was "My God! KVMR has a webcast!"
Anyway, check it out if you want to listen to a seriously strange mix of radio. Don't get discouraged if you hear a show you like and can't find it next week, as their schedule is pretty bizzare. "Every third Wednesday, 4-7AM" is par for the course.
Wasn't there some company that was rebroadcasting US TV over the internet in Canada a few years ago? I don't recall the details, but I remember them being sued. I'd guess that was the end of them, or I'd probably be able to remember the name.
Personally, I buy CDs because of the quality difference. This really only applies to certain types of music. VNV Nation, for example, sounds just fine on mp3. The Pixies, on the other hand, sound like shit on mp3. To be fair, though, I would probably buy a VNV Nation CD if I could actually find one for sale. Who knows, maybe there is a significant difference in quality there as well, and I've only noticed it with The Pixies because I had listened to their CDs for years before ripping them to mp3. I doubt that's the case, but you never know.
In my experience, mp3s sound crappy if the source isn't electronic in nature. By that I mean the various genres of "electronic music"; techno, industrial, synthpop, etc. Music that derives its "feel" from texture and harmonic interaction don't transfer well. This includes most classical, as well as more modern music like that from The Pixies, Bauhaus, or Jimi Hendrix. Those types of music depend greatly on the "unhearable" parts of the music that mp3 strips out.
I don't consider myself an audiophile. I find the hiss and pop "warmth" of vinyl annoying, and I think tubes should only be used when one intends to have distortion (and even then they can often be replaced by other voltage-driven devices, like certain FETs, without a noticable difference). I can definately hear the difference with mp3s, though. For that reason alone mp3s will never be a replacement for CDs.
Perhaps you should try reading the article.
The guy is an economist who released a paper detailing how download should be hurting record sales. All logic supports that conclusion, but apparantly there is more at play here than logic, because after spending more time with the numbers, this same economist says that there is effectively no damage done.
Specifically, he says world-wide music downloads are 1.5 times world-wide music sales, or 5 times US music sales, and yet the reduction in CD sales has only been about 5%. If downloads actually hurt sales, the damage should be undeniable given the scale, but this is so small as to be indistinguishable from the effects of an economic recession. Being, as we are, in an actual economic recession, that's as close as an economist who values his integrity can come to saying music downloads don't hurt music sales.
Let me reiterate that these are the conclusions of an actual economist after reviewing the actual, real world data.
One should never need a calculator in a math class. Math instructors should never encourage the use of calculators.
Think about it for a minute; in math classes where you're working with numbers the purpose is to learn the mechanics of working with numbers. Once you get to Algebra, you should have learned those fundamentals and you are now on to working symbolically. There is no reason to allow calculators for symbolic math. When numbers are used at that level, there's no reason for them not to be nice, convenient, easy to deal with numbers. The kind of numbers that can be manipulated in ones head.
Engineering and science classes are different. In those classes math is just a tool. A calculator is useful because those classes often deal with "real world" numbers, which are never convenient to work with. The point of these classes is not to teach math, but to teach the concepts of torque, friction, charge cpacitance, etc. The calculator is not a substitute for that knowledge, and thus there's no real reason not to use one in that context.
As far as visualization, plotting points by hand helps a lot more than seeing a surface generated by a machine. Seeing the machine generate the surface involves only one sense; sight. Doing it by hand involves sight, motor skills, and the mental effort of working out the equation and transaling those numbers into a visual representation. The first requires only passive observation, the second active understanding. The difference in the amount of information retained, or even understood, is staggering.
At most, if a calculator is being used in a math class to help with visualisation of new concepts, it should be used by the teacher only and hooked up to a projector. Really, the machine is useful for verification, but it should serve no other purpose in a math class.
I'm curious, though, if you have a TI-89, why on earth do you have a TI-83? I can totally understand the -86 backup, and the slide-rules and abacus are just cool, but the -83? What do you use that for?
Well put. I would like to suggest a modification to that last sentence which would fit better in this context, though:
Regardless of how expert you become at the use of a tricycle, you shouldn't pretend that it is in some way an adequate substitute for learning how to walk.
If these kids will always have the calculator, then why do they need to learn the math?
GIGO
It's an old CS term meaning "Garbage In, Garbage Out". A calculator is just a dumb machine that does what it's told. As such, it's only as good as it's user. One who learns math on a calculator doesn't learn math, they learn calculator. Since they don't know math, they have no way of knowing whether the answer the calculator is giving them is correct. All they have is trust in the calculator.
My 12 year old little brother is a prime example. His teachers let him use a calculator, and he has become totally dependent on it. He punches numbers in and, right or wrong, he writes down whatever it spits out.
More importantly, though, math isn't a requirement because people use it. The fact is that most don't. It's pretty damned unlikely that you will ever need to figure out the maximum area that can be enclosed with 20 meters of chain-link fence, but that isn't why you have to figure it out in class. Math, and especially algebra, is more like a language that is specialized for solving problems. It's the ability to solve problems in a logical, rational way that is the most important thing gained from taking those classes. Sure, there are other ways to teach those skills, but there are none more efficient or formalized.
To focus on getting the answer, which is what one does when using a calculator, is to totally miss the point. The answer is incidental, merely a gauge of success, it's the process that's really important.
I hope that clarifies my position somewhat. Let me know if there's anything unclear. abreauj and canadian_right make excellent points as well, so consider this in that context.
I'm perfectly aware of how things are done in the real world, thank you.
You seem to have confused "college" with "trade school". A trade school is about job training, and teaches specific skills for a specific job. A college teaches concepts, wth specifics being thrown in mostly for demonstration. A trade school education gives you the skills to do the job they trained you for, a college gives you the skills to do whatever job you end up in. A trade school puts out MCSEs, a college puts out computer scientists.
Think about that for a moment, and perhaps you'll realize why, as a tutor, I don't give a rats ass about how it's done in "the real world". My job as a math tutor is not to teach people how to balance their checkbook using quicken, my job is to teach them math!
Maybe you don't agree with my beliefs or methods, but in over 2 years they've proven effective in over 90% of cases. The simple fact is that you can't use the tools effectively if you don't understand the math, and you will never learn the math if you are given the tools from the get-go.
Maybe the programming you do doesn't require a lot of math. Having taken both myself, I have to say the calculus classes were much more useful. The lessons of the algorithms class are much more obvious and directly applicable, but the concepts of calculus are much more versatile. Trade school vs. college.
Any teacher teaching a calculator based algebra class is an asshole and deserves to get their ass beat. A little harsh, perhaps, but that teacher is doing their students a disservice.
I've certainly had classes where a calculator was required, and for the same reasons you list, but they were physics and engineering classes. They weren't about the math so much as they were about getting the right answer by whatever means available.
That's beside the point, though. No math class (or instructor) should ever require a calculator, nor should their use be encouraged.
I agree to a point. I found my graphing calculator extremely helpful when I was going through calc, but mostly just as a way to check my answers or to do the "clean up" work of plugging in the numbers at the end. It's not difficult to structure a calculus class so that a graphing calculator is of minimal use, and that's why I think they should be allowed at that level.
The simple fact is that kids who use calculators don't learn math. They learn how to perform basic operations on a calculator, and that's about it. I suggest you try doing a few years of tutoring like I have, and then we'll see if still feel the same.
And yes, a kid can visualize vector operations, geometric properties, etc. I did, and so did most of my friends.
Instead of suing them for 'monopoly practices', which will be next-to-impossible to prove in court
Which Microsoft Anti-trust trial have you been watching? Microsoft has already been found guilty of abusive monopoly prcatices, and the case didn't even deal with their most damaging practices; their OEM agreements. In fact, their appeal has nothing to do with overturning that verdict, that appeal was rejected. This one is about trying to reduce the punishment.
I agree about not buying their software, though.
All my profs allowed graphing calculators, but they weren't really of much use beyond checking if your graph was right. As you said, everyhting was variables. By the time you reach Calculus, you should know math well enough that the calculator is a tool, not a crutch.
Now Statics, on the other hand, there was a class where I really needed my calculator. Mostly because the prof assumed you had one, and set up the problems in such a way that it was impossible to finish a test in time without one. I know that from experience. My calculator died the morning of a Statics test, and I only managed to get through the first problem and halfway through the second (out of four) in the aloted hour, and I'm pretty fast at working stuff out by hand.
Actually, at the early level is when calculators and other graphing aids are *most* useful.
I'm a college level math tutor, and I can't even begin to say how wrong that is. Kids don't learn math by using a calculator any more than they learn to spell by using a spell checker or learn grammar through a grammar checker. I've tutored countless students who's teachers thought as you do, and none of them knew a god damned thing about math, despite the fact that they got 'A's all through high school.
When kids are first learning math is exactly the time when you absolutely don't want them using calculators! They need to learn how to do things by hand first, without having to rely on anything else to do it. Then, when you hand them a calculator, it's just a way to do things faster, to get the busy work out of the way so they can focus on more advanced concepts.
In my opinion, graphing calculators should be allowed only at the calculus level and above. Below that level, they can only be a crutch. Scientific calculators should be allowed for Trigonometry and intermediate Algebra, and absolutely no calculators at all at a lower level than that.
From page 7 of the IFPI document:
Since Ukranian artists cannot make money selling their albums, they are forced to give endless concerts to survive.
I guess I should feel bad... except that this is the situation for all musicians everywhere, regardless of piracy. Musicians don't make money selling albums. Period. Especially musicians who have signed a recording contract.
Having been a musician myself, I have only one response to Katya Cilly: If you hate playing music so much, go get a real job.
I don't support piracy, but honestly, I never cared about it with regard to my own stuff. The point of recording music is so that other people can hear it and enjoy it when I can't be there to play it live. If somebody bought my CD and made copies for all their friends, great! Maybe all their friends would come to my next show. Nothing compares to playing a live show. That's what being a musician (or any kind of performance artist) is all about. If you don't like doing it, then being an artist is not the profession for you, and you should look for something else.
You can't abandon a car, you'll eventually be tracked down and made to pay for proper disposal.
Not true. I've abandoned my share of cars, and I've never been tracked down and made to pay for it. Why? Because cars are disposed of by junkyards, and junkyards make their money by selling peoples abandoned junk. The city calls up the junkyard and says "Hey, there's an abandoned car over here. Could you please haul it away?" The junkyard sends out it's truck, brings it back to the yard, pulls parts it can sell, crushes the rest to sell as scrap metal.
As far as your real property example, you wouldn't be tracked down for abandoning the property, you'd be tracked down for illegally disposing of toxic waste.
Unless you are comparing software to toxic waste, I don't see how either of these examples has any bearing at all on software.
A better example would be if I write a short story, don't copyright it, and leave copies at various coffee shops. I'm perfectly within my rights to do that. The coffee shop owner might be annoyed at having something else to throw away, but that's the most harm that would possibly be done. People could sit down and read it with their cup of coffee, take it with them when they leave, make copies of it for their friends, put it in an anthology they're putting together, put their own name on it, rewrite it, whatever.
Maybe it's pornographic, or contains dangerous, subversive ideas, but that's the chance you take when you pick up some random peice of paper and start reading it. At least with code you (should) have the opportunity to check it out (by looking at the source code) before it has an opportunity to do damage. Anybody using public domain software where they can't look at the source is a fool, anyway, on the order of someone who goes spelunking without a flashlight.
However, by not releasing a patch and instead just removing Gopher support, MS is leaving millions of people still open to vulnerabilities!
Not everyone who uses IE is going to upgrade to the next version of IE which will have no Gopher support.
Yeah, but those are the same people who wouldn't install the patch, so what difference does it make?
Actually, it's much more likely that people will install the new version of MSIE than that they will install a patch.
I agree that it's a cop-out, and probably indicative of MS' security future, despite all their lip-service to the contrary, but lets be honest here; people are stupid, so there will be millions left vulnerable no matter what MS does because those millions are too ignorant to protect themselves.
The only thing they could do that would actually make a difference is release the patch as a worm that would patch it's own exploit after emailing itself to your whole address book.
I'm not surprised at their lack of response. Solidworks is a sweet package, and it's really easy to use, but they don't give a rats ass about their user's opinions. That's pretty crappy when you consider that the users are paying as much as $9k per seat for the privilege of being ignored.
Also, SolidWorks is very tightly integrated with Excel and is scriptable in VBA. Until Excel and VBA are officially supportewd on Linux there is not a chance in hell that you will see SolidWorks for Linux.
Conversely, Pro-E has had a Unix version available for some time now, or at least that's what I've been told. I imagine it wasn't that big of a leap for them to get it running on Linux.
Like just about everything else in computing, worms were also invented in Unix. There's a good reason we haven't heard of any in the last 10 years or so. It seems to be time for you to bone up on your history of computing.
We deny eachother the most simple pleasures in life in favor of the artificial ones.
Or often in favor of none at all. Colleges are breeding grounds for cults, and many cults a quite restrictive, telling their members what movies they can see, what books the can read, what TV shows or channels they can watch, etc. Also, there are a lot of people who come from heavily religeous, sheltered backgrounds who go into a state of shock when they get to college. They either embrace the worst of the insanity, or the lash out against it, clinging to their misguided upbringing as if it were a life raft on a stormy sea. There are those who spend the first few years living the college party lifestyle and end up regretting it and turning to religeon, and we all know there is no one a self-righteous as a born-again.
The real problem is that the people who are most likely to be "offended" are not really offended by the material itself as they are offended that someone else is enjoying something they consider sinful. It becomes their mission as good christians to save you from yourself and bring you into the grace of god. In order to be saved you must first "realize" that what you're doing is "wrong", and the best way to do that is through punishment. Getting you kicked out of the computer lab, for instance, might be first step on your road to repentance!
It is indeed a sad state of affairs when people can't just mind their own business and keep their nose out of other peoples lives. On the other hand, though, I think it's equally sad that people have to shove their lives in other people's faces and blatantly advertise everyhting that they are (or wish they were).
"Don't ask, don't tell" always seemed like a very sane policy to me, and more people should adopt it in their daily lives.