Most modern browsers will automatically redirect you to www.whatever.com, so you may not notice even if it happens to you. I can tell you I've seen it happen several times myself. The most annoying is when whatever.com comes up with *something*, but the wrong something, like an error message or the default "Welcome to your website", which would lead you to believe the site's down when www. works fine.
Personally, I try a.invalid address, postmaster@127.0.0.1, postmaster@companyname and somesuch first, but some companies have filters that reject those. They REQUIRE entering a real-looking address to be spammed. Try anything@example.com. Example.com is reserved by the IANA in RFC 2606, so it's guaranteed not to resolve to a real address but it will fool most filters. My personal favorite though is support@yourcompany.com.
So if the UK iPhone ends up costing more than today's top end UK Video iPod then they can stick their shiny iPhone where the sun doesn't shine, and to hell with them. Well, the cheapest iPhone (4gb) is $500 US and the most expensive iPod (80gb) is $350, sooo.. that seems pretty likely. The 80gb iPod sells for £269 from Apple's store, so if you figure the same "Greedy-Corporate-UK-exchange-rate-tax", you would expect to pay around £370 for the iPhone.
It took two years and the cheaper iPod Mini before Apple sold a million iPods. In comparison, Jobs expects to sell 10 million iPhones in 2007. That's just not going to happen. Apple might yet turn it around with a cheaper second edition akin to the iPod Mini, but there is no possible way the first version is going to live up to the hype.
Actually, it's more like Cingular bought AT&T. Cingular bought AT&T Wireless in 2004, which had been spun off as a separate company from AT&T. Later in a separate move, SBC (Cingular's parent) bought AT&T, taking the name for themselves.
The ROKR was a Motorola phone using their OS and an iTunes-branded MP3 player. The mobile version of iTunes was written in Java and is likely completely custom. The ROKR was discontinued and replaced with the SLVR L7, a bar phone version of the RAZR. SLVRs purchased through Cingular or Rogers Wireless in Canada still come with iTunes, although Apple officially stopped supporting it in September and new music purchases won't play back. Phones sold elsewhere come with a Motorola-branded MP3 player instead of iTunes.
Long story short, Apple has yet to sell a single cell phone. Frankly, I'm all with you on the Newton analogy. Once Apple dries up the supply of people who will buy anything with an Apple logo, I don't think the iPhone is going to sell very well at all.
since 1 + 0.4 + 0.4^2 + 0.4^3 +... = 1.66667 Obviously it's the sum of the geometric series. It may be a little less surprising if you look at it like this: Money after taxes = money promised = M M = money promised * constant - taxable money * tax rate M = M * k - (M * k) * x 1 = k * (1 - x) k = 1 / (1 - x)
Bah. This is pile-on bashing of Wikipedia for no good reason. Any well-written Wikipedia article* will be appropriately referenced to reliable sources. All you have to do is look up the sources the article uses and cite those instead of the article itself. On Wikipedia, "they" are the journal of Science, the CDC, the UN, etc.
Cell phone companies are willing to provide incentives to acquire customers. The value of these incentives are frequently upwards of $300, given in exchange for a two year contract (some of that incentive will go to your sales rep as commission). What difference does it make to Cingular if they give this incentive as a service discount, or as a phone subsidy? The incentive here is "you get an iPhone". No upfront discount, no service discount. Cingular pockets your $300. It's still subsidized in that Cingular would otherwise charge you $800 for the phone without a contract to cover their profit margin.
Remember, if the phone is sold without subsidy, it is also sold without a contract. Jobs' keynote speech introducing the iPhone noted explicitly that it will require a two year contract. (evidence)
This is all just a play on words from Mac fanboys to distract from the sticker shock and make Apple look "revolutionary". The bottom line is that it will be subsidized by your back-end service fees just like every other phone on the market.
So again: take away the calculator at the lower levels, but by the time you're doing real math it's not about the calculations anymore. Exactly, which is why you can simplify the arithmetic to avoid using a calculator without affecting the subject area you're trying to test. No, it's not truly realistic to use simple numbers, but not talking to your neighbor isn't realistic either.
Most obviously, programmable calculators can be used to cheat in numerous ways. Many modern calculators include functions that do exactly what you're supposed to be learning. (The TI-89 can do closed-form integregation, for example.) Students regularly store notes, formulas, constants, and even step-by-step solution instructions in their calculators, though that might not be considered cheating by some.
Another reason is that students tend to automatically trust any result that comes from a calculator without considering the process used to arrive at that answer. (3/4)*cos(45)=0.393991492 probably won't look wrong if you don't realize your calculator is using radians. Remembering instead that cos(45) is sqrt(2)/2 will save you from making a mistake and help you avoid decimals in your solution.
In my own experience in higher math, physics, and engineering classes, calculators were typically either banned or mostly unnecessary anyway. Professors mostly chose figures that would cancel out or were simple enough to calculate in your head. Indeed, having decimals or terms that didn't cancel was usually a good way to tell you're on the wrong track.
I'd for example like to see a teaching system in say, Software Engineering or Comp. Sci. where students are made to develop some software during the first term and then develop it further the second term adding features and complexity. They would quickly realize as the project becomes more complex why things like clean, well structured code UML diagrams code documentation and good initial design are important. Seek and ye shall find. Cal Poly has a two course series (CSC 308/309) that's pretty much exactly what you're talking about. You start off in the first quarter preparing your requirements and design documents, implement some basic features, then develop it further in the second quarter with formalized QA and testing. At least that's what's supposed to happen.
In general, what I saw at Cal Poly was a very strong emphasis on training the students according to industry expectations. It's not just vocational training because clearly employers want people who can think and adapt to novel situations too. Cal Poly has a very tight connection with industry where key industry partners review the curriculum and suggest changes. Part of that is a new emphasis on software engineering, which is seen as more practical and business-oriented, compared to the more academic side of computer science.
Uhm. There are websites that have fewer customers than an average restaurant. There are restaurants that have more customers than most websites (eg, McDonald's). A brick-and-motar store using a centralized database for their customer info has practically all of the same problems as an online outfit.
Beyond that, the issue of scale was not the one you were addressing in the GP. You said, specifically:
I'll give you one aspect that is not covered by any real-world metaphor, yet is very important: If I go to a website and give it my credit card number, I have no assurance that they aren't doing stupid things with it. They aren't supposed to store it, but many sites, even large ones, have in the past and continue to do so. The waitress example clearly covers that aspect. From my perspective, you were either unaware of it or did not properly consider it in the context of your statement.
No, Joe's Pizza is not Amazon.com, but isn't that obvious? I don't deny that the situations are different, but there are a lot of similarities, too. I don't see why you are so eager to deny that they're at all similar. If the difference is important to the point you're trying to make, then just say so. (What are you trying to say, anyway?)
Computer networks aren't neighborhoods, superhighways, or libraries. They're a series of tubes, obviously.
(-1, too easy)
If I go to a website and give it my credit card number, I have no assurance that they aren't doing stupid things with it. ... That's an interesting question, but there's almost no real-world analog with modern credit card systems that don't have to record the full number. And please, don't try to shoehorn a metaphor onto this. I know you didn't want real-world analogy, but... you hand your credit card to the waitress at a restaurant. She goes into the back to ring it up. You have no assurance that she isn't doing stupid things with it. She isn't supposed to make a carbon copy of your CC to sell to or be stolen by someone else, either. That's a pretty clear and not-at-all contrived analogy.
According to some reports he posted a couple messages on the website for the foundation created by his parents in his name. He used his captor's last name (as Shawn Devlin) and asked "How long are you planing (sic) to look for your son?" It could have been Devlin himself, taunting the parents, but Devlin would have been unlikely to use Shawn's first name.
Other details in the AP article confirm that he was mostly free and had plenty of access to the outside world. Apparently Devlin even taught him how to drive and he was seen driving the truck unsupervised at least once. Stockholm just seems too easy or too simple of an explanation.
I'm willing to accept the possibility that perhaps Celsius is easier to understand if you're not familiar with either, but there's no real way to find out. If it is any better, the distinction is very, very small and not worth changing if you're already used to Fahrenheit. The same holds true in the reverse: there's also a possibility that Fahrenheit is objectively better, but we have no real way to know. 0-100 F being roughly the range of temperatures observed in nature seems very reasonable to me.
28 F is clearly below freezing to me, but understanding that 40 C is fucking hot takes more mental legwork (or Google's unit conversion). Your perception of "small numbers" is entirely subjective: 38 F is a small number that makes it clear it's fucking cold to me. Fahrenheit causes problems for you because your brain is wired for Celsius. Again, the same is true in reverse: Celsius causes problems for me because I'm wired for Fahrenheit. There is no distinction between them in that regard; neither system is going to "make sense" to those wired for the other.
It also merits noting that the relation between imperial units, while seemingly confusing (12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard), lends itself readily to fractions, making estimating and calculating easier. If something's about 2/3rds of a foot, it's eight inches. If I need six lengths of that, six times eight is 48 inches or four feet.
Farenheit, because of its smaller intervals, doesn't work as intuitively Come on. Don't make such blanket statements based on your own subjective experience, they really tend to put off the people you're trying to convince (the Fahrenheit-ists, Imperial-ists, Americans, whoever). Anyone who grew up with the one scale will tell you they find it much more intuitive than other, simply because that's what they grew up with. Even if there is some slight advantage to one method over the other, it's completely overwhelmed by the disadvantage of having to adapt to a new system. (Note that I did not say learn a new system. Most Americans do know the metric system. Everyone learns it in school. We just don't use it for everyday things.)
You go on to say 10 degrees Celsius is a "very nice" interval, and contrast that to a similar interval in Fahrenheit, which you peg at 15 degrees, clear evidence that Fahrenheit is broken. Except that you picked your Fahrenheit interval because it's approximately equivalent your Celsius interval, when those accustomed to Fahrenheit would likely say that 10 F is a good interval. (Putting 50 F and 66 F in the same range seems a bit odd to me in particular.) Further, the claim that "0 F" is worthless is really silly; it shouldn't take too many extra brain cells to remember that "stuff happens at 32 F" instead. 0 F is also fairly symmetric with 100 F, in that temperatures at or exceeding the extremes are about equally common in nature.
The basic thing the metric folks need to accept is that "it makes more sense" is not a reason why metric is better, because, duh, Imperial makes sense to us too. Besides that, the minute gains in consistency and interoperability are completely irrelevant in everyday applications. If you're working with complex math and you need high precision, then yeah, metric is probably a good idea. But if you're just guesstimating the temperature outside, building a shed in your back yard, or cooking dinner, the only thing that really matters is what you're used to.
Even right now, China is a member of the Human Rights Council. The UN cannot function under the weight of its own political correctness and the weight of its member states violating its own declarations.
The de facto standard for human rights these days is worse than China. If some small country is oppressing freedom of speech or imprisoning political dissidents, the UN has to compare it with China's behavior before condemning it. Any declaration that would apply equally to China would be completely unenforceable and would threaten the legitimacy of the UN.
Where OSX Intel and OS PowerPC do have much (most things) in common. Linux in the OpenWRT project is just as much "Linux" as the Intel "Linux" in my server.
The analogy with Linux falls apart because we routinely use "Linux" to refer to both to the set of userland operating systems ("distros") and the Linux kernel itself. Such is not the case with OS X. The term "OS X" does not refer to the XNU kernel, which can be ported to different platforms and appear vastly different in different implementations as you suggest. OS X is instead a userland operating system with a certain interface and recognizable features. It's more of a marketing and branding issue; the deep-down guts aren't that important. In that sense, even if the iPhone does turn out to share code with the "real" OS X, I think the Windows : WinCE:: OS X : iPhone OS X comparison is pretty much accurate.
Not to get too nerdy here in the wee hours of Christmas morning, but Star Trek ships use an "Electro-Plasma System" for power. The explanation is that the ship's devices require so much power that standard electrical wiring isn't enough. So they run super-heated plasma all over the place and wonder the people in red shirts keep dying.
If you want a real Star Trek UI problem, how about the fact that any screen anywhere can take control of the Enterprise if you press the right three-button combination? At the rate the Enterprise gets taken over every few weeks, you'd think they'd fix that sort of thing.
I live in California and I graduated from a CSU. I have to say, when I saw "CSU" in the article, my first thought is that had to refer to something other than the California State University. People don't usually refer to the California State University, preferring to reference a specific campus. I think the author was probably confused and thought Sac State was the California State University.
As for the CSU/UC distinction, CSUs historically didn't grant graduate degrees at all, but they're giving out more and more Masters now. They can grant certain doctorates (EdD mostly), but not PhDs directly. They do offer "joint degrees" with other PhD-granting universities, though. See Wikipedia's article for more info. For the record, there are actually three systems when you count the community colleges. IMO, the three-tier system works pretty well as far as making education available at all levels.
Simple solution: During lectures, the computers are locked or just plain off. Students have to pay attention because there's nothing else to do. During an instructional session related to the computers, use should be limited to the apps they need and NO internet. *If* they have some research to do that requires internet access, *then* you turn it on. It can be as simple as plugging and unplugging the uplink port at the switch in the back of the room.
There is a famous case involving a cow that was supposed to be sterile but had a calf a few months after the purchase. I forget the name of it. The seller thought he was selling a sterile cow and priced it accordingly. When he found out it wasn't, he asked for more money. When the buyer refused saying, "Hey, I thought the cow was sterile too. Tough luck." So the seller sued and won.
That's a horrible example that frankly pisses me off a little. Imagine if the situation were reversed: the cow is sold at the going rate for a fertile cow. Later, the buyer discovers that the cow is sterile. The seller would claim the cow was sold "as-is" or some nonsense and chances are the court would decide in the seller's favor. If you've ever bought a car only to have repair something a month later, you know what I mean. If you're citing the case correctly, I think it was a completely screwed up decision.
Slashdot Mirror
Most modern browsers will automatically redirect you to www.whatever.com, so you may not notice even if it happens to you. I can tell you I've seen it happen several times myself. The most annoying is when whatever.com comes up with *something*, but the wrong something, like an error message or the default "Welcome to your website", which would lead you to believe the site's down when www. works fine.
It took two years and the cheaper iPod Mini before Apple sold a million iPods. In comparison, Jobs expects to sell 10 million iPhones in 2007. That's just not going to happen. Apple might yet turn it around with a cheaper second edition akin to the iPod Mini, but there is no possible way the first version is going to live up to the hype.
Actually, it's more like Cingular bought AT&T. Cingular bought AT&T Wireless in 2004, which had been spun off as a separate company from AT&T. Later in a separate move, SBC (Cingular's parent) bought AT&T, taking the name for themselves.
The ROKR was a Motorola phone using their OS and an iTunes-branded MP3 player. The mobile version of iTunes was written in Java and is likely completely custom. The ROKR was discontinued and replaced with the SLVR L7, a bar phone version of the RAZR. SLVRs purchased through Cingular or Rogers Wireless in Canada still come with iTunes, although Apple officially stopped supporting it in September and new music purchases won't play back. Phones sold elsewhere come with a Motorola-branded MP3 player instead of iTunes.
Long story short, Apple has yet to sell a single cell phone. Frankly, I'm all with you on the Newton analogy. Once Apple dries up the supply of people who will buy anything with an Apple logo, I don't think the iPhone is going to sell very well at all.
Money after taxes = money promised = M
M = money promised * constant - taxable money * tax rate
M = M * k - (M * k) * x
1 = k * (1 - x)
k = 1 / (1 - x)
Bah. This is pile-on bashing of Wikipedia for no good reason. Any well-written Wikipedia article* will be appropriately referenced to reliable sources. All you have to do is look up the sources the article uses and cite those instead of the article itself. On Wikipedia, "they" are the journal of Science, the CDC, the UN, etc.
* There are 1,219 featured articles and 1,637 good articles. They are easily distinguished from the poorly-written ones, typically by the level of sourcing.
This is all just a play on words from Mac fanboys to distract from the sticker shock and make Apple look "revolutionary". The bottom line is that it will be subsidized by your back-end service fees just like every other phone on the market.
Most obviously, programmable calculators can be used to cheat in numerous ways. Many modern calculators include functions that do exactly what you're supposed to be learning. (The TI-89 can do closed-form integregation, for example.) Students regularly store notes, formulas, constants, and even step-by-step solution instructions in their calculators, though that might not be considered cheating by some.
Another reason is that students tend to automatically trust any result that comes from a calculator without considering the process used to arrive at that answer. (3/4)*cos(45)=0.393991492 probably won't look wrong if you don't realize your calculator is using radians. Remembering instead that cos(45) is sqrt(2)/2 will save you from making a mistake and help you avoid decimals in your solution.
In my own experience in higher math, physics, and engineering classes, calculators were typically either banned or mostly unnecessary anyway. Professors mostly chose figures that would cancel out or were simple enough to calculate in your head. Indeed, having decimals or terms that didn't cancel was usually a good way to tell you're on the wrong track.
In general, what I saw at Cal Poly was a very strong emphasis on training the students according to industry expectations. It's not just vocational training because clearly employers want people who can think and adapt to novel situations too. Cal Poly has a very tight connection with industry where key industry partners review the curriculum and suggest changes. Part of that is a new emphasis on software engineering, which is seen as more practical and business-oriented, compared to the more academic side of computer science.
Beyond that, the issue of scale was not the one you were addressing in the GP. You said, specifically: I'll give you one aspect that is not covered by any real-world metaphor, yet is very important: If I go to a website and give it my credit card number, I have no assurance that they aren't doing stupid things with it. They aren't supposed to store it, but many sites, even large ones, have in the past and continue to do so. The waitress example clearly covers that aspect. From my perspective, you were either unaware of it or did not properly consider it in the context of your statement.
No, Joe's Pizza is not Amazon.com, but isn't that obvious? I don't deny that the situations are different, but there are a lot of similarities, too. I don't see why you are so eager to deny that they're at all similar. If the difference is important to the point you're trying to make, then just say so. (What are you trying to say, anyway?)
(-1, too easy) If I go to a website and give it my credit card number, I have no assurance that they aren't doing stupid things with it.
That's an interesting question, but there's almost no real-world analog with modern credit card systems that don't have to record the full number. And please, don't try to shoehorn a metaphor onto this. I know you didn't want real-world analogy, but
According to some reports he posted a couple messages on the website for the foundation created by his parents in his name. He used his captor's last name (as Shawn Devlin) and asked "How long are you planing (sic) to look for your son?" It could have been Devlin himself, taunting the parents, but Devlin would have been unlikely to use Shawn's first name.
Other details in the AP article confirm that he was mostly free and had plenty of access to the outside world. Apparently Devlin even taught him how to drive and he was seen driving the truck unsupervised at least once. Stockholm just seems too easy or too simple of an explanation.
I'm willing to accept the possibility that perhaps Celsius is easier to understand if you're not familiar with either, but there's no real way to find out. If it is any better, the distinction is very, very small and not worth changing if you're already used to Fahrenheit. The same holds true in the reverse: there's also a possibility that Fahrenheit is objectively better, but we have no real way to know. 0-100 F being roughly the range of temperatures observed in nature seems very reasonable to me.
28 F is clearly below freezing to me, but understanding that 40 C is fucking hot takes more mental legwork (or Google's unit conversion). Your perception of "small numbers" is entirely subjective: 38 F is a small number that makes it clear it's fucking cold to me. Fahrenheit causes problems for you because your brain is wired for Celsius. Again, the same is true in reverse: Celsius causes problems for me because I'm wired for Fahrenheit. There is no distinction between them in that regard; neither system is going to "make sense" to those wired for the other.
It also merits noting that the relation between imperial units, while seemingly confusing (12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard), lends itself readily to fractions, making estimating and calculating easier. If something's about 2/3rds of a foot, it's eight inches. If I need six lengths of that, six times eight is 48 inches or four feet.
You go on to say 10 degrees Celsius is a "very nice" interval, and contrast that to a similar interval in Fahrenheit, which you peg at 15 degrees, clear evidence that Fahrenheit is broken. Except that you picked your Fahrenheit interval because it's approximately equivalent your Celsius interval, when those accustomed to Fahrenheit would likely say that 10 F is a good interval. (Putting 50 F and 66 F in the same range seems a bit odd to me in particular.) Further, the claim that "0 F" is worthless is really silly; it shouldn't take too many extra brain cells to remember that "stuff happens at 32 F" instead. 0 F is also fairly symmetric with 100 F, in that temperatures at or exceeding the extremes are about equally common in nature.
The basic thing the metric folks need to accept is that "it makes more sense" is not a reason why metric is better, because, duh, Imperial makes sense to us too. Besides that, the minute gains in consistency and interoperability are completely irrelevant in everyday applications. If you're working with complex math and you need high precision, then yeah, metric is probably a good idea. But if you're just guesstimating the temperature outside, building a shed in your back yard, or cooking dinner, the only thing that really matters is what you're used to.
Even right now, China is a member of the Human Rights Council. The UN cannot function under the weight of its own political correctness and the weight of its member states violating its own declarations.
The de facto standard for human rights these days is worse than China. If some small country is oppressing freedom of speech or imprisoning political dissidents, the UN has to compare it with China's behavior before condemning it. Any declaration that would apply equally to China would be completely unenforceable and would threaten the legitimacy of the UN.
Where OSX Intel and OS PowerPC do have much (most things) in common. Linux in the OpenWRT project is just as much "Linux" as the Intel "Linux" in my server.
:: OS X : iPhone OS X comparison is pretty much accurate.
The analogy with Linux falls apart because we routinely use "Linux" to refer to both to the set of userland operating systems ("distros") and the Linux kernel itself. Such is not the case with OS X. The term "OS X" does not refer to the XNU kernel, which can be ported to different platforms and appear vastly different in different implementations as you suggest. OS X is instead a userland operating system with a certain interface and recognizable features. It's more of a marketing and branding issue; the deep-down guts aren't that important. In that sense, even if the iPhone does turn out to share code with the "real" OS X, I think the Windows : WinCE
Not to get too nerdy here in the wee hours of Christmas morning, but Star Trek ships use an "Electro-Plasma System" for power. The explanation is that the ship's devices require so much power that standard electrical wiring isn't enough. So they run super-heated plasma all over the place and wonder the people in red shirts keep dying.
If you want a real Star Trek UI problem, how about the fact that any screen anywhere can take control of the Enterprise if you press the right three-button combination? At the rate the Enterprise gets taken over every few weeks, you'd think they'd fix that sort of thing.
I live in California and I graduated from a CSU. I have to say, when I saw "CSU" in the article, my first thought is that had to refer to something other than the California State University. People don't usually refer to the California State University, preferring to reference a specific campus. I think the author was probably confused and thought Sac State was the California State University.
As for the CSU/UC distinction, CSUs historically didn't grant graduate degrees at all, but they're giving out more and more Masters now. They can grant certain doctorates (EdD mostly), but not PhDs directly. They do offer "joint degrees" with other PhD-granting universities, though. See Wikipedia's article for more info. For the record, there are actually three systems when you count the community colleges. IMO, the three-tier system works pretty well as far as making education available at all levels.
Simple solution: During lectures, the computers are locked or just plain off. Students have to pay attention because there's nothing else to do. During an instructional session related to the computers, use should be limited to the apps they need and NO internet. *If* they have some research to do that requires internet access, *then* you turn it on. It can be as simple as plugging and unplugging the uplink port at the switch in the back of the room.
That's a horrible example that frankly pisses me off a little. Imagine if the situation were reversed: the cow is sold at the going rate for a fertile cow. Later, the buyer discovers that the cow is sterile. The seller would claim the cow was sold "as-is" or some nonsense and chances are the court would decide in the seller's favor. If you've ever bought a car only to have repair something a month later, you know what I mean. If you're citing the case correctly, I think it was a completely screwed up decision.