Is there anything wrong with HTML as a tool for e-learning? It's easy enough to set up a site with powerpoint slide style presentation (next and previous buttons) and once you post it on the web and get it indexed it can benefit people all over the world.
Nope, nothing at all wrong with HTML -- in many cases, HTML (with perhaps a little scripting thrown in) is an extremely good way to create online learning tools.
For learning something (an OS, a software package, etc.) that is complex and GUI-based, however, Flash can sometimes offer real advantages over HTML. Instead of having a.jpg screenshot with a text description of how to select the right item from a menu and change setting in the dialog box that appears, the user can actually do it -- and if they do something wrong in the process, the Flash movie can give them feedback: "You selected 'delete all' instead of 'backup data.' Please try again to go to the next step."
You also have the added benefit that unlike DHTML, which can sort of do many of the same things, Flash only requires that you have the plugin -- after that you don't encounter the nighmarish carnival of terror that is javascript/DHTML cross-incompatibility.
Flash tools can be a hell of a lot of work to create, so it certainly isn't the method of choice for all online instruction, but it's a good option to have.
What exactly does this prove? The guy's point was how easy it is to hand music to other people over the internet, and how simple it is for people to acquire things that have never before been so readily available.
I disagree. I think that the "point" of this example is vague, to begin with -- this was a publicity stunt for the Grammys, nothing more or less. The students could have spent the three days playing Unreal for all that it really matters.
In my opinion, the fact that no one is yet sure how the students got the music starts to get at the central issue. Did they get the songs "from easily accessible Web sites?" Did they get them via Napster or Gnutella? Did they get them from friends via AOL IM? Did they set up a public FTP server and have people transfer files? I don't know, and I don't think that it really matters.
What record companies would like is a return to the time when the content could not be separated from the physical artifact. You want to listen to the new Chuck Berry song? You buy the actual plastic record -- no other options available. From the industry perspective, this was the perfect arrangement
Since recording devices first became available to the consumer market, however, that arrangement has changed drastically. I myself once owned hundreds of 90 minute cassette tapes, filled with music that I may or may not have paid the record companies for.
Yes, technological developments (drag-and-drop CD ripping and burning, mpeg compression, a worldwide computer network) have made illegally duplicated music more readily available, but to use an often repeated phrase, we aren't going to be able to cram the genie back into the bottle now.
The various experiments with copy protected CDs, burners that won't write certain data, etc. seem thus far to indicate that a technological approach to restoring the content/artifact link may work in the short term, but that link will be broken again by future developments.
The record industry has to approach this situation from a realistic business perspective: it has been decades since it was possible to prevent people from copying and sharing content. It may be possible to minimise this sharing, but not to eliminate it. I have the suspicion that record companies have to take that fact into account (if they haven't already) and start working on building some business models that reflect the current reality.
The deal fell apart [list-news.com] after DoubleClick's stock price tanked, and NetCreations sold themselves instead to Seat Pagine Gaille.
Ah, memories...I was working for NetCreations' tech department at the time, and <disclaimer> while SPG's cash offer was clearly superior to the DoubleClick stock offer, that being the only issue involved in the decision to "opt out" of the DoubleClick offer </disclaimer>, there were plenty of other issues...
My favorite memory from that era is a very senior member of the tech staff, drunk off his ass, saying "look -- I know that they're assholes, but we could still have some fun with it. Try it for three months...if it sucks ass we'll all leave together and watch 'em squirm..."
Actually, if you hire good lawyers, the process goes more like this:
Step 1:
Hire lawyers. As many as you need.
Step 2:
There is no step two...
Seriously, any physical measures that you take to try to protect that information can be defeated. If you don't trust these people with the information (and you shouldn't), a lawyer is the only security tool that will make a difference.
It's likely that said lawyer would reiterate some of the earlier comments: the best answer is to not give them the information. If they're really interested, they will buy your technology outright, with appropriate guarantees written into the agreement (and this is really the meat of the matter). The agreement can then stipulate that final acceptance/payment are subject to the results of an evaluation and testing period of 45 days, with testing to determine whether your product works as stated in that very agreement.
If your product doesn't work as promised, turns out to be completely undocumented and unmaintainable, or turns out to be "hello world" with a really pretty interface, it will fail to meet the requirements set in the agreement and it's terminated. If your stuff does work, they are required to fulfill their part of the agreement, as you will have fulfilled your part.
This seal, which will appear in the top corner of the body of the message, will contain an encrypted digital signature along with information on the valid sender and recipient and the date and time. An appliance installed at the commercial emailer's location generates the digital signature. When the consumer clicks on the seal, they are connected to the Trusted Sender computer, which verifies the digital signature.
So it would appear that the desired chain of events circa 2006 goes something like this:
opens inbox Hmmm...1,422 new messages today...time to get to work on those...
opens message #1 Okay, this one has the ePrivacy seal...
clicks on ePrivacy seal Wow, that ePrivacy seal links to www.weight-loss-and-hot-teen-sluts.com, I guess it's a fake...
deletes message
opens message #2 Okay, this one has the ePrivacy seal...
clicks on ePrivacy seal digital signature verified Hey, this one's real! It's an ad for www.weight-loss-and-hot-teen-sluts.com! That's one to bookmark!
opens message #3 Okay, this one has the ePrivacy seal...
SGI were doing it in at least 1993 - Filesystem Navigator (fsn) was available for free for the SGI Indigo. It's the thing with all the little cubes and spotlights for navigating files that you see in Jurassic Park.
More recently, there has been a plain-X11 version of a similar thing, but with really nicely done labelling, and good speed (no GL). I wish I could remember what it was called though! I think it was French.
There are a number of tools out there to provide 3D views of your machine's filesystem:
FSV is pretty cool looking, looking something like a model of a city, with directories and files being the "buildings."
If you want something a little more scifi, check out TDFSB, which offers a more first-person view and a tron-esque landscape filled with a wide variety of different shapes (actual images of image files, etc.). Note: you'll be much happier running TDFSB if you have a beefy video card...it sucks to have a visible frame rate when you ls -a:)
One of its notable features is that it had a sophisticated legal system but no executive government, which makes it a magnet for political theorists -- if you search the web for information on medieval Iceland, you'll find a running fight between the libertarians and anarchists over who can best claim it as an exemplum.
Yes, indeed...it's entertaining to read swashbuckling epics that spend a great deal of time discussing property rights, the complications of joint ownership, legal machinations surrounding property...some selections from Njal's Saga:
"There was a man called Mord Fiddle, who was the son of Sighvat the Red. Mord was a powerful chieftain, and lived at Voll in the Rangriver Plains. He was also a very experienced lawyer..."
"Thorarin lived at Varmabrook, which he owned in common with Glum, who had spent many years trading abroad. Glum was tall and strong and very handsome. The third brother, Ragi, was a great warrior. The three brothers jointly owned Eng Isle and Laugarness, in the south."
"At the Thingskalar Assembly in the autumn, Kilskegg made his claim to the land at Moeidarknoll; Gunnar named witnesses and offered to compensate the people of Thrihyrning with money or another piece of land lawfully assessed at the same value. Thorgeir then named witnesses and charged Gunnar with breaking their settlement.
And you thought that Monty Python was making all that stuff up...:)
Not quite what you describe, but rather similar in principle, is Vipul's Razor -- mentioned here a day or two ago.
From the project site:
Vipul's Razor is a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network. Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalogue of spam in propagation. This catalogue is used by clients to filter out known spam. On receiving a spam, a Razor Reporting Agent (run by an end-user or a troll box) calculates and submits a 20-character unique identification of the spam (a SHA Digest) to its closest Razor Catalogue Server. The Catalogue Server echos this signature to other trusted servers after storing it in its database. Prior to manual processing or transport-level reception, Razor Filtering Agents (end-users and MTAs) check their incoming mail against a Catalogue Server and filter out or deny transport in case of a signature match. Catalogued spam, once identified and reported by a Reporting Agent, can be blocked out by the rest of the Filtering Agents on the network.
Last summer (the last time it was rumored that this new iMac would be introduced at the upcoming expo), one person did a mockup of what a flatscreen Imac might look like.
They'd be kind of like the old "pizza box" performas, the way this guy envisioned them.:)
As far as I know, there's no real information anywhere about what the form factor would be. Apple's gotten pretty touchy about unauthorized relase of info, so there probably won't be any dependable info until the actual expo rolls around...
It's true that this has been rumored for quite some time, and nothing has come of the rumors. The key reason that Apple Insider seems inclined to believe it this time is essentially that:
It's no surprise that a major change to the iMac is coming. What has been difficult to nail down is exactly what will be changed, and when these changes will occur. What has precluded this product from being introduced is component availability and prices: AppleInsider sources have revealed, however, that the prices of key components has reached an acceptable level at which Apple can sell the new iMac at a price palatable to consumers and still retain profitability on its most popular line.
Yeah, happened to me a couple of times, too...sucks and all, but the FAQ explanation makes a great deal of sense. Bunch of different people reading different groupings of submissions at different times, in different moods, under different circumstances:
A lot of times, we don't use a particular story on a particular day, but at some later point, someone else submits it, and it ends up getting used. We have 4 to 6 guys working together to post things on Slashdot. What one of us finds stupid, the others might find interesting. Or it just might be the rest of the stuff that's going on that day. There are a variety of factors: the personality of the post, the quality of the submission, or even the quantity of stories already posted when your submission entered the queue.
But take heart -- you can always whore for (+1, informative) even if they reject your submissions...:)
Is it just me, or does the majority of the comments made by the author point out rudimentary common sense ideas?
Okay, maybe we need to sometimes be reminded about these, but I think that (and granted, I haven't read this yet so I can't be TOO judgemental) this book isn't for anyone other than relative web-design newbies.
I think that Nielsen would agree with you that he promotes design based on commonsense principles. The problem is that we obviously need to be reminded of them far more often than one would hope. The corporate sites that he analyzes in the book certainly weren't created by "relative web-design" newbies, and yet most of them ignore some (or all) of those commonsense principles.
It sometimes seems that web-design newbies actually do a better job of keeping to commonsense design: they don't have the skills to create complex Web pages, so their sites can end up being easy to understand and navigate just by default.
For that matterNielsen's own site looks kind of like it was created by somebody who just set up their first MSN dialup account a few days ago...:)
Kids should learn how to program. OK, I'm with you most of the way on this one, but I might say that all kids should be *exposed* to programming; I see no reason why every kid should be forced to program (especially since most of them will be *terrible* programmers). Yes, programming can be a tool rather than an end in itself (to introduce kids to formal logic, say), but it will not be the best tool to teach every kid.
Teachers should learn to program and learn to teach how to program. Why should a history teacher, French teacher, or English teacher learn how to program or try to teach others that skill? You're probably doing more damage by getting a huge number of incompetent "Literature/C++" teachers who give kids poor information and convince them that programming is utterly incomprehensible.
The kids, which will be educated in programming in highschools, are the future programmers, who will go on and become the professionals of the future. They might want to write open source software again. But you're also educating the future doctors, bakers, writers, historians, ethicists, and mechanics; what is it about programming that means we should teach kids the skills of of programmer rather than a doctor, baker, writer, historian, ethicist, or mechanic? Are you sure that the skill you propose is the most valuable?
I actually agree that Red Hat's proposal is a good one for schools, but I don't think that's because "Linux=programming." Even in the the techno-centric future that we keep hearing about, only a relatively small part of the population is going to be programmers; a large number, however, will use computers in one form or another on a daily basis. With MS' preferred deal, we're looking at about 17 computers per school, where the Red Hat software takes that number to about 70. 70 computers, regardless of what OS they're running, isn't really enough for most high schools these days, but it's better than 17.
The whole reason these numbers were put in the emails was because spammers WANT people to call them. Most of these numbers are just automated machines with menus you have to endlessly punch through before you can get to a real person.
Yeah...ok...but I believe that tthe point is that they're 800 numbers, so these companies will *pay* for that call whether or not you talk to a real person.
Re:Forget the concise OED: get the full deal for $
on
Geek Gift Ideas 2001
·
· Score: 1
Building Oracle web sites (Prentice Hall)
SPECIAL SALE, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $35.00
SALE, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $35.95
USED, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $27.00
BUILDING ORACLE XML APPLICATIONS (O'Reilly)
USED, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $31.50
SPECIAL SALE, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $38.00
NEW, TRADE PAPER, $44.95
Forget the concise OED: get the full deal for $390
on
Geek Gift Ideas 2001
·
· Score: 1
[...] Get him a Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
Forget about those tiny little dictionaries -- get some deserving word geek a copy of the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition. They may at first be speechless with joy, but your gift will allow them to find the exact word to express their feelings, with quotes to illustrate how the meaning of that word evolved over time.:)
Give them a copy of The Professor and the Madman at the same time; it's the story behind the creation of the OED, and an excellent book in its own right.
Buy them from Powell's City of Books. I now live in NYC, but even here there is nothing that can compare to the wonder that is Powell's. Hallelujah.
However, when you get down to it, it is about money. They don't really give a shit about Linux itself. They don't have feelings for it. Don't forget that. It is about the money.
Well, yes...?
[Insert any company name here] is actually more concerned about finding an effective, sustainable way to reduce their operating costs than about the social, spiritual, and aesthetic qualities of they tools that they employ to achieve that reduction.
I may be interpreting webwords' comment incorrectly, but it sounds to me like "don't trust those corporate drones, they're only using Linux 'cause it's practical...they *should* be committed to Linux regardless of any financial considerations."
If a major corporation makes the decision to switch to Linux because it is the cheapest and most effective solution for them, it means that those people who do "have feelings for" that operating system are doing their job...making the operating system an justifiable option for the many, many people who just want an OS that allows them to run their business effectively.
Happily, info and resources for SSH appear to be increasingly commonplace. Haven't looked at the email link posted above, but just to be sure that you have more information than you want...the OpenBSD journal also recently pointed to an article here:
I am only not forced to use MS software because I can get away with telling people to print out copies of Word docs that they send me for me
Actually, OpenOffice does a pretty reasonable job of dealing with Word documents...available for Windows as well as Linux; if you're on a mac, icWord will allow you to view and print (but not edit) Word documents, or the program MacLink plus will allow you translate documents back and forth between MS Word and AppleWorks format.
I'd get pretty tired of having to deal with printouts, myself...there are other options available to you...
I think that before this happens you're going to need to sit down, spend some time in your local technical library researching voice, image, pattern recognition algorithms.. I'd love to be able to type:
[...]
I'd love to be able to type:
voice2text -mp3 woz.mp3 woz_interview.text
and get a transcribed version of a speech, or lecture notes..
I'd love that too, but I also think that it's going to take a *lot* of time and reasearch before voice2text even gets to the alpha stage...the last time I checked, speech recognition was still a buggy proposition at the best of times. Most solutions required a significant amount of "training" with the user who's speech they are to recognize -- a pretty large step away from recognizing, interpreting, and correctly attributing the speech of two (or more) people during a recorded interview.
When you add in the editing issues (on the most basic level, is your program even smart enough to consistently determine from context whether the speaker said "there," their," or "they're"), you've got a project that is rather chunky to say the least.
Very interesting, yes, but it reminds me a lot of the meetings with my CEO that start with the words "I've had a really exciting new idea, and your guys are all going to be really excited about it..."
hypocrisy n 1: an expression of agreement that is not supported by real conviction [syn: {lip service}] 2: insincerity by virtue of pretending to have qualities or beliefs that you do not really have
It seems pretty clear to me that unless Cmdr. Taco uses Open Source, he is in danger of having his opinions disregarded. And his site disregarded.
Interesting perspective. I would agree that if he started writing closed source software his actions would have a fair amount of explaining to do, but using closed source seems to me a very different issue.
Promoting, evangalizing for, or waxing poetic about open source software does not imply that you should never again use a closed source product. I do believe that you are obligated to let the developers of the closed source products that you use know your position -- that they have developed a fine product, but that you would prefer to use an open source tool...that you will start using an open source tool as soon as a comparable one becomes available...(and if you're capable of it) that you will actively contribute to projects aiming to develop such a tool...
Yes, collaborative art has always been possible; as noted elsewhere, a variation of this idea was practiced enthusiatically by the dadaists in the 1920s and 30s; yes, there are also quite a few examples of collaborative art already on the Web...TOO MANY TO LIST, really...
But my real interest in this is that "MAIL ARTISTS" have been creating similar works offline for decades, and online for virtually as long as the medium has been available to the general public. The very premise of mail art (for most participants) is that the process of exchange/collaborative creation is as important as the resulting objects.
Me? I think that mail art should attempt to create event/objects (formed through an individual's encounter with an unanticipated situation or object). As a side note, the Web is still an excellent medium for creating THESE SORTS OF ENCOUNTERS, but not necessarily a qualitatively different medium. But nobody's really interested in my aesthetic theories...:)
Garcia also said that downloading and installing the software over the net is too difficult for anyone over 30 years old to install.
Doesn't anyone else find this disturbing?
I'm less than three months away from my 30th birthday, and it's only now that I find out that come June 19th, 2001 my mental faculties will diminish to the point where I will no longer be able to comprehend the words "click here to download," and I will find my fingers so twisted by this mysterious affiliction that I will not be able to double-click an "install.exe" icon! And who know what other debilitating side effects this condition will bring!
Why has no one warned me about this?!?
Isn't there something I can do about it? Maybe there's some sort of experimental drug I can take, or groundbreaking research being done in some Scandinavian clinic?
We have to do something! Perhaps with the few precious months left to me I can set up some sort of foundation, or a telethon or something. Let us all join together to battle this crippling malady!
Its not cool, its boring and more than a little bit sad. Wow, a picture of a coffee machine! Err , and? Who the hell cares? Would anyone sit and watch a CCTV picture of a coffee machine?
Well, that seems like the point...
Would I sit at my desk today, staring at a picture of a coffee pot? No. Did I, in 1994 or 95, find myself really struck by the fact that a cheap little Mac was showing me (almost) real-time images from England? Yes, I did.
Was I, after watching the coffee pot for a while, happy to realize there were people all over the world who were interested in what you could do with these machines, and didn't care whether the end result was "important" or not? Absolutely!
Did I then spend too much time visiting the Web-enabled refrigerator, the site that let you display messages on an LED board, the Abductalizer, and Web cams in a wide variety of uninteresting places? Well...yes. And I'll admit, that part was a little pathetic.
Oh, well. I for one will be sorry to see the coffee pot go...
Slashdot Mirror
Is there anything wrong with HTML as a tool for e-learning? It's easy enough to set up a site with powerpoint slide style presentation (next and previous buttons) and once you post it on the web and get it indexed it can benefit people all over the world.
Nope, nothing at all wrong with HTML -- in many cases, HTML (with perhaps a little scripting thrown in) is an extremely good way to create online learning tools.
For learning something (an OS, a software package, etc.) that is complex and GUI-based, however, Flash can sometimes offer real advantages over HTML. Instead of having a .jpg screenshot with a text description of how to select the right item from a menu and change setting in the dialog box that appears, the user can actually do it -- and if they do something wrong in the process, the Flash movie can give them feedback: "You selected 'delete all' instead of 'backup data.' Please try again to go to the next step."
You also have the added benefit that unlike DHTML, which can sort of do many of the same things, Flash only requires that you have the plugin -- after that you don't encounter the nighmarish carnival of terror that is javascript/DHTML cross-incompatibility.
Flash tools can be a hell of a lot of work to create, so it certainly isn't the method of choice for all online instruction, but it's a good option to have.
What exactly does this prove? The guy's point was how easy it is to hand music to other people over the internet, and how simple it is for people to acquire things that have never before been so readily available.
I disagree. I think that the "point" of this example is vague, to begin with -- this was a publicity stunt for the Grammys, nothing more or less. The students could have spent the three days playing Unreal for all that it really matters.
In my opinion, the fact that no one is yet sure how the students got the music starts to get at the central issue. Did they get the songs "from easily accessible Web sites?" Did they get them via Napster or Gnutella? Did they get them from friends via AOL IM? Did they set up a public FTP server and have people transfer files? I don't know, and I don't think that it really matters.
What record companies would like is a return to the time when the content could not be separated from the physical artifact. You want to listen to the new Chuck Berry song? You buy the actual plastic record -- no other options available. From the industry perspective, this was the perfect arrangement
Since recording devices first became available to the consumer market, however, that arrangement has changed drastically. I myself once owned hundreds of 90 minute cassette tapes, filled with music that I may or may not have paid the record companies for.
Yes, technological developments (drag-and-drop CD ripping and burning, mpeg compression, a worldwide computer network) have made illegally duplicated music more readily available, but to use an often repeated phrase, we aren't going to be able to cram the genie back into the bottle now.
The various experiments with copy protected CDs, burners that won't write certain data, etc. seem thus far to indicate that a technological approach to restoring the content/artifact link may work in the short term, but that link will be broken again by future developments.
The record industry has to approach this situation from a realistic business perspective: it has been decades since it was possible to prevent people from copying and sharing content. It may be possible to minimise this sharing, but not to eliminate it. I have the suspicion that record companies have to take that fact into account (if they haven't already) and start working on building some business models that reflect the current reality.
The deal fell apart [list-news.com] after DoubleClick's stock price tanked, and NetCreations sold themselves instead to Seat Pagine Gaille.
Ah, memories...I was working for NetCreations' tech department at the time, and <disclaimer> while SPG's cash offer was clearly superior to the DoubleClick stock offer, that being the only issue involved in the decision to "opt out" of the DoubleClick offer </disclaimer>, there were plenty of other issues...
My favorite memory from that era is a very senior member of the tech staff, drunk off his ass, saying "look -- I know that they're assholes, but we could still have some fun with it. Try it for three months...if it sucks ass we'll all leave together and watch 'em squirm..."
Step 1:
Hire lawyers. As many as you need.
Step 2:
There is no step two...
Seriously, any physical measures that you take to try to protect that information can be defeated. If you don't trust these people with the information (and you shouldn't), a lawyer is the only security tool that will make a difference.
It's likely that said lawyer would reiterate some of the earlier comments: the best answer is to not give them the information. If they're really interested, they will buy your technology outright, with appropriate guarantees written into the agreement (and this is really the meat of the matter). The agreement can then stipulate that final acceptance/payment are subject to the results of an evaluation and testing period of 45 days, with testing to determine whether your product works as stated in that very agreement.
If your product doesn't work as promised, turns out to be completely undocumented and unmaintainable, or turns out to be "hello world" with a really pretty interface, it will fail to meet the requirements set in the agreement and it's terminated. If your stuff does work, they are required to fulfill their part of the agreement, as you will have fulfilled your part.
From the article:
This seal, which will appear in the top corner of the body of the message, will contain an encrypted digital signature along with information on the valid sender and recipient and the date and time. An appliance installed at the commercial emailer's location generates the digital signature. When the consumer clicks on the seal, they are connected to the Trusted Sender computer, which verifies the digital signature.
So it would appear that the desired chain of events circa 2006 goes something like this:
opens inbox
Hmmm...1,422 new messages today...time to get to work on those...
opens message #1
Okay, this one has the ePrivacy seal...
clicks on ePrivacy seal
Wow, that ePrivacy seal links to www.weight-loss-and-hot-teen-sluts.com, I guess it's a fake...
deletes message
opens message #2
Okay, this one has the ePrivacy seal...
clicks on ePrivacy seal
digital signature verified
Hey, this one's real! It's an ad for www.weight-loss-and-hot-teen-sluts.com! That's one to bookmark!
opens message #3
Okay, this one has the ePrivacy seal...
SGI were doing it in at least 1993 - Filesystem Navigator (fsn) was available for free for the SGI Indigo. It's the thing with all the little cubes and spotlights for navigating files that you see in Jurassic Park.
More recently, there has been a plain-X11 version of a similar thing, but with really nicely done labelling, and good speed (no GL). I wish I could remember what it was called though! I think it was French.
There are a number of tools out there to provide 3D views of your machine's filesystem:
FSV is pretty cool looking, looking something like a model of a city, with directories and files being the "buildings."
If you want something a little more scifi, check out TDFSB, which offers a more first-person view and a tron-esque landscape filled with a wide variety of different shapes (actual images of image files, etc.). Note: you'll be much happier running TDFSB if you have a beefy video card...it sucks to have a visible frame rate when you ls -a :)
Come on, now...I'll restrain myself from pointing out that MySQL isn't Linux, and...oh, wait...sorry about that...
One of its notable features is that it had a sophisticated legal system but no executive government, which makes it a magnet for political theorists -- if you search the web for information on medieval Iceland, you'll find a running fight between the libertarians and anarchists over who can best claim it as an exemplum.
Yes, indeed...it's entertaining to read swashbuckling epics that spend a great deal of time discussing property rights, the complications of joint ownership, legal machinations surrounding property...some selections from Njal's Saga:
"There was a man called Mord Fiddle, who was the son of Sighvat the Red. Mord was a powerful chieftain, and lived at Voll in the Rangriver Plains. He was also a very experienced lawyer..."
"Thorarin lived at Varmabrook, which he owned in common with Glum, who had spent many years trading abroad. Glum was tall and strong and very handsome. The third brother, Ragi, was a great warrior. The three brothers jointly owned Eng Isle and Laugarness, in the south."
"At the Thingskalar Assembly in the autumn, Kilskegg made his claim to the land at Moeidarknoll; Gunnar named witnesses and offered to compensate the people of Thrihyrning with money or another piece of land lawfully assessed at the same value. Thorgeir then named witnesses and charged Gunnar with breaking their settlement.
And you thought that Monty Python was making all that stuff up... :)
Not quite what you describe, but rather similar in principle, is Vipul's Razor -- mentioned here a day or two ago.
From the project site:
Vipul's Razor is a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network. Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalogue of spam in propagation. This catalogue is used by clients to filter out known spam. On receiving a spam, a Razor Reporting Agent (run by an end-user or a troll box) calculates and submits a 20-character unique identification of the spam (a SHA Digest) to its closest Razor Catalogue Server. The Catalogue Server echos this signature to other trusted servers after storing it in its database. Prior to manual processing or transport-level reception, Razor Filtering Agents (end-users and MTAs) check their incoming mail against a Catalogue Server and filter out or deny transport in case of a signature match. Catalogued spam, once identified and reported by a Reporting Agent, can be blocked out by the rest of the Filtering Agents on the network.
Last summer (the last time it was rumored that this new iMac would be introduced at the upcoming expo), one person did a mockup of what a flatscreen Imac might look like.
They'd be kind of like the old "pizza box" performas, the way this guy envisioned them. :)
As far as I know, there's no real information anywhere about what the form factor would be. Apple's gotten pretty touchy about unauthorized relase of info, so there probably won't be any dependable info until the actual expo rolls around...
Apple Insider has a story on this, as well.
It's true that this has been rumored for quite some time, and nothing has come of the rumors. The key reason that Apple Insider seems inclined to believe it this time is essentially that:
It's no surprise that a major change to the iMac is coming. What has been difficult to nail down is exactly what will be changed, and when these changes will occur. What has precluded this product from being introduced is component availability and prices: AppleInsider sources have revealed, however, that the prices of key components has reached an acceptable level at which Apple can sell the new iMac at a price palatable to consumers and still retain profitability on its most popular line.
We'll see...
Yeah, happened to me a couple of times, too...sucks and all, but the FAQ explanation makes a great deal of sense. Bunch of different people reading different groupings of submissions at different times, in different moods, under different circumstances:
A lot of times, we don't use a particular story on a particular day, but at some later point, someone else submits it, and it ends up getting used. We have 4 to 6 guys working together to post things on Slashdot. What one of us finds stupid, the others might find interesting. Or it just might be the rest of the stuff that's going on that day. There are a variety of factors: the personality of the post, the quality of the submission, or even the quantity of stories already posted when your submission entered the queue.
But take heart -- you can always whore for (+1, informative) even if they reject your submissions... :)
Okay, maybe we need to sometimes be reminded about these, but I think that (and granted, I haven't read this yet so I can't be TOO judgemental) this book isn't for anyone other than relative web-design newbies.
I think that Nielsen would agree with you that he promotes design based on commonsense principles. The problem is that we obviously need to be reminded of them far more often than one would hope. The corporate sites that he analyzes in the book certainly weren't created by "relative web-design" newbies, and yet most of them ignore some (or all) of those commonsense principles.
It sometimes seems that web-design newbies actually do a better job of keeping to commonsense design: they don't have the skills to create complex Web pages, so their sites can end up being easy to understand and navigate just by default.
For that matterNielsen's own site looks kind of like it was created by somebody who just set up their first MSN dialup account a few days ago... :)
OK, I'm with you most of the way on this one, but I might say that all kids should be *exposed* to programming; I see no reason why every kid should be forced to program (especially since most of them will be *terrible* programmers). Yes, programming can be a tool rather than an end in itself (to introduce kids to formal logic, say), but it will not be the best tool to teach every kid.
Teachers should learn to program and learn to teach how to program.
Why should a history teacher, French teacher, or English teacher learn how to program or try to teach others that skill? You're probably doing more damage by getting a huge number of incompetent "Literature/C++" teachers who give kids poor information and convince them that programming is utterly incomprehensible.
The kids, which will be educated in programming in highschools, are the future programmers, who will go on and become the professionals of the future. They might want to write open source software again.
But you're also educating the future doctors, bakers, writers, historians, ethicists, and mechanics; what is it about programming that means we should teach kids the skills of of programmer rather than a doctor, baker, writer, historian, ethicist, or mechanic? Are you sure that the skill you propose is the most valuable?
I actually agree that Red Hat's proposal is a good one for schools, but I don't think that's because "Linux=programming." Even in the the techno-centric future that we keep hearing about, only a relatively small part of the population is going to be programmers; a large number, however, will use computers in one form or another on a daily basis. With MS' preferred deal, we're looking at about 17 computers per school, where the Red Hat software takes that number to about 70. 70 computers, regardless of what OS they're running, isn't really enough for most high schools these days, but it's better than 17.
Yeah...ok...but I believe that tthe point is that they're 800 numbers, so these companies will *pay* for that call whether or not you talk to a real person.
New oracle book 29.95.
Which book?
Advanced Oracle PL/SQL :programming with packages (O'Reilly)
NEW, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $42.95
SHORT DISCOUNT, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $42.95
USED, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $25.75
USED, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $30.00
Advanced Oracle tuning and administration (Osbourne)
NEW, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $34.95
USED MARKDOWN, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $20.00
USED, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $21.00
Building Oracle web sites (Prentice Hall)
SPECIAL SALE, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $35.00
SALE, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $35.95
USED, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $27.00
BUILDING ORACLE XML APPLICATIONS (O'Reilly)
USED, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $31.50
SPECIAL SALE, SOFTCVR W/COMP MEDIA, $38.00
NEW, TRADE PAPER, $44.95
ESSENTIAL ORACLE8I DATA WAREHOUSING 2ND EDITION (John Wiley & Sons)
NEW, TRADE PAPER, $44.99
USED, TRADE PAPER, $38.50
Forget about those tiny little dictionaries -- get some deserving word geek a copy of the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition. They may at first be speechless with joy, but your gift will allow them to find the exact word to express their feelings, with quotes to illustrate how the meaning of that word evolved over time. :)
Give them a copy of The Professor and the Madman at the same time; it's the story behind the creation of the OED, and an excellent book in its own right.
Buy them from Powell's City of Books. I now live in NYC, but even here there is nothing that can compare to the wonder that is Powell's. Hallelujah.
However, when you get down to it, it is about money. They don't really give a shit about Linux itself. They don't have feelings for it. Don't forget that. It is about the money.
Well, yes...?
[Insert any company name here] is actually more concerned about finding an effective, sustainable way to reduce their operating costs than about the social, spiritual, and aesthetic qualities of they tools that they employ to achieve that reduction.
I may be interpreting webwords' comment incorrectly, but it sounds to me like "don't trust those corporate drones, they're only using Linux 'cause it's practical...they *should* be committed to Linux regardless of any financial considerations."
If a major corporation makes the decision to switch to Linux because it is the cheapest and most effective solution for them, it means that those people who do "have feelings for" that operating system are doing their job...making the operating system an justifiable option for the many, many people who just want an OS that allows them to run their business effectively.
Agreed. Bad telnet. Bad, bad telnet.
Happily, info and resources for SSH appear to be increasingly commonplace. Haven't looked at the email link posted above, but just to be sure that you have more information than you want...the OpenBSD journal also recently pointed to an article here:
http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Artic leID=21992
...that walks through setting up OpenSSH on a Win2k box.
Actually, OpenOffice does a pretty reasonable job of dealing with Word documents...available for Windows as well as Linux; if you're on a mac, icWord will allow you to view and print (but not edit) Word documents, or the program MacLink plus will allow you translate documents back and forth between MS Word and AppleWorks format.
I'd get pretty tired of having to deal with printouts, myself...there are other options available to you...
I think that before this happens you're going to need to sit down, spend some time in your local technical library researching voice, image, pattern recognition algorithms.. I'd love to be able to type:
[...]
I'd love to be able to type:
voice2text -mp3 woz.mp3 woz_interview.text and get a transcribed version of a speech, or lecture notes..
I'd love that too, but I also think that it's going to take a *lot* of time and reasearch before voice2text even gets to the alpha stage...the last time I checked, speech recognition was still a buggy proposition at the best of times. Most solutions required a significant amount of "training" with the user who's speech they are to recognize -- a pretty large step away from recognizing, interpreting, and correctly attributing the speech of two (or more) people during a recorded interview.
When you add in the editing issues (on the most basic level, is your program even smart enough to consistently determine from context whether the speaker said "there," their," or "they're"), you've got a project that is rather chunky to say the least.
Very interesting, yes, but it reminds me a lot of the meetings with my CEO that start with the words "I've had a really exciting new idea, and your guys are all going to be really excited about it..."
From WordNet (r) 1.6 [wn]:
hypocrisy n 1: an expression of agreement that is not supported by real conviction [syn: {lip service}] 2: insincerity by virtue of pretending to have qualities or beliefs that you do not really have
It seems pretty clear to me that unless Cmdr. Taco uses Open Source, he is in danger of having his opinions disregarded. And his site disregarded.
Interesting perspective. I would agree that if he started writing closed source software his actions would have a fair amount of explaining to do, but using closed source seems to me a very different issue.
Promoting, evangalizing for, or waxing poetic about open source software does not imply that you should never again use a closed source product. I do believe that you are obligated to let the developers of the closed source products that you use know your position -- that they have developed a fine product, but that you would prefer to use an open source tool...that you will start using an open source tool as soon as a comparable one becomes available...(and if you're capable of it) that you will actively contribute to projects aiming to develop such a tool...
* * *
Yes, collaborative art has always been possible; as noted elsewhere, a variation of this idea was practiced enthusiatically by the dadaists in the 1920s and 30s; yes, there are also quite a few examples of collaborative art already on the Web...TOO MANY TO LIST, really...
But my real interest in this is that "MAIL ARTISTS" have been creating similar works offline for decades, and online for virtually as long as the medium has been available to the general public. The very premise of mail art (for most participants) is that the process of exchange/collaborative creation is as important as the resulting objects.
Me? I think that mail art should attempt to create event/objects (formed through an individual's encounter with an unanticipated situation or object). As a side note, the Web is still an excellent medium for creating THESE SORTS OF ENCOUNTERS, but not necessarily a qualitatively different medium. But nobody's really interested in my aesthetic theories... :)
At any rate, you might take a look at the "Exquisite Squares" project, which sounds rather similar to the project under discussion: http://www.geocities.com/satpostman/index.html
* * *
Doesn't anyone else find this disturbing?
I'm less than three months away from my 30th birthday, and it's only now that I find out that come June 19th, 2001 my mental faculties will diminish to the point where I will no longer be able to comprehend the words "click here to download," and I will find my fingers so twisted by this mysterious affiliction that I will not be able to double-click an "install.exe" icon! And who know what other debilitating side effects this condition will bring!
Why has no one warned me about this?!?
Isn't there something I can do about it? Maybe there's some sort of experimental drug I can take, or groundbreaking research being done in some Scandinavian clinic?
We have to do something! Perhaps with the few precious months left to me I can set up some sort of foundation, or a telethon or something. Let us all join together to battle this crippling malady!
* * *
Well, that seems like the point...
Would I sit at my desk today, staring at a picture of a coffee pot? No. Did I, in 1994 or 95, find myself really struck by the fact that a cheap little Mac was showing me (almost) real-time images from England? Yes, I did.
Was I, after watching the coffee pot for a while, happy to realize there were people all over the world who were interested in what you could do with these machines, and didn't care whether the end result was "important" or not? Absolutely!
Did I then spend too much time visiting the Web-enabled refrigerator, the site that let you display messages on an LED board, the Abductalizer, and Web cams in a wide variety of uninteresting places? Well...yes. And I'll admit, that part was a little pathetic.
Oh, well. I for one will be sorry to see the coffee pot go...
* * *