It's not the shortage of teaching material but the fact that it must follow the curriculum. i.e. the state says what students should learn at certain ages and subjects and the course, books and teacher's guide is shaped around it. So typically school books are monopolized by a few publishers which go to the effort to produce suitable books and get them endorsed.
Anyway I have no problem with that. More insidious however are the constant revisions which render them worthless after a year or two, or even worse "work books". Work books are the kind where the child writes answer into the page in thereby making it impossible to reuse.
Here in Ireland almost all the primary school books are like this and the cost of books could be 100 per annum per child. The state could ban the practice in an instant and save parents a lot of money but for some reason they won't.
No it doesn't. Even in the US there are laws that limit "free speech" such as malicious slander. So I can't go around saying you raped a kid when I know you did not.
As for Germany, I expect their limits on particular forms of speech have a little something to do with them underpinning and justifying the systematic slaughter of millions of people. They're probably just a tad sensitive to people perpetuating the same ideas which arguably are malicious slander against an entire culture. Racist attacks and neo-Nazi movements are still a real problem for the country. Even this week a neo-Nazi "kill squad" is on trial for the murdering 10 people.
More likely it's the devices that devs own and reasonably expect the os to work on. It'd be nice to sport CM10 on my HTC desire but if it's even possible I suspect it would be impossibly tight and would still necessitate smearing firmware across an SD partition.
I played Everquest a lot back in the day. Not hardcore amounts of hours but maybe 2 hours in an evening. Like most MMOs the game starts off with easy quests and lots of exploring but as it progressed levelling up really began to drag. By level 20 it might take 2 weeks to level up. I found myself camping more often. I found myself repeating the same damned action over and over - Meditate, Buff, Kill, Retreat to safe area, Meditate, Buff, Kill etc. For variety I might stand in the tunnel attempting to auction jewellery. A good session might see the blue xp bar advance a few pixels. A bad session end with a fraught corpse dragging expedition (or two) and less xp. Hauling ass over the map might take an hour. Boats might take 20 minutes to appear. Spawns might happen once a day and of course were camped out.
And I put up with this bullshit because the transition from fun to grind was so gradual I did not see it happen. So there I was paying subscribing to a game I didn't enjoy. Fortunately for me Verant intervened with their own ineptitude. The Shadows of Luclin expansion was bugged to high fuck which meant the server crashed, the client crashed, the content was bugged out and this went on for weeks. It gave me the time to realise I wasn't enjoying this.
So I let my subscription expire and I quit. It was a wrench to abandon the "investment" I made in the character but it just wasn't fun any more. On the plus side, it trained me to recognize grind and skinner box style gameplay that virtually all MMOs since have used to string people along - long travel distances, infrequent spawns, equipment that degrades, time sinks everywhere. I played other MMOs - Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars Galaxies, A Tale in the Desert and they all suffered from them. Ultimately I quit them all because they were the same damned thing - sucking $15 out of you each month in return for anti-fun.
That said, with the change to free-to-play model has made some MMOs fun again. Lord of the Rings Online for example has been aggressively cutting the grind all over the place - adding fast travel, instant looting, less maintenance, out of combat healing, NPC radar etc. Presumably in the FTP model it pays to get people to progress more quickly rather than have them fuck around looting corpses or recoup lost xp. It's also a very beautiful game with the lore to support it. I've been playing LOTRO for 18 months in the FTP model and must have bought about $50 of points on it, most of that still remaining to be spent. If I don't feel like playing I'm not losing out by not playing so it suits me a lot better. I can play it for 30 minutes during a bout of boredom and feel like I'm getting something from it.
I very much doubt 40% of Android devices in Russia are infected, although I can well believe the rates of infection are much higher in countries which have a culture of piracy over those that don't.
In fairness, there is malware on Android however I expect the risk for most people of catching it is pretty minimal. The Play market is proactively scanned and acts reactively to threats up to and including a remote kill capability. And in many cases those that do get infected have their own lack of sense to thank - installing pirated APKs, or dubious apps from untrusted sources and reaping the rewards.
If you like eating, especially if you like having any kind of variety in your diet, then you depend on honey bees. Even if you're allergic to all bee products, you still depend on bees. (never heard of anyone being allergic to honey - I just threw that out there)
Infants can't eat honey because it can contain bacteria that causes botulism.
Two pipes, one being a sheath over the other and drawn back using a rubber band such that when released it travels forward and a pin at its base strikes a round at the base of the inner pipe. It's quite feasible. If it were a.22 bullet it would probably work without any special effort. Aside from the pipe the person producing it might have to invest in some epoxy glue to secure the push pin, and perhaps masking tape to fashion a crude trigger / grip that's about it.
Whether its safe or not is another matter and the risks increase as the calibre and the number of shots fired goes up.
A typo invalidates my entire argument doesn't it? And yeah these whacky imaginary militias of yours would be reduced to the sort of activities you propose. And still losing.
As it is of assholes continuously pointing cameras at people during conversations, or while they're following someone up the street, or at the gym, or near a high school. Plus the 1000 and 1 abuses that are possible through apps that can record, transcribe, analyse or augment while they're doing it.
A militia armed with AR16s wouldn't get very far either. Remember those videos from Desert Storm showing Apache helicopters mowing down Iraqi soliders from 3 miles away? That's your militia, excepting that their enlarged girth would make them explode in a more amusing fashion.
You could probably make a gun out of a metal pipe, masking tape, a thumb tack and a rubber band. Basically something to strike the percussion cap and a tube to propel the bullet in a forward direction. You'd stand a good chance of blowing your hand off or shards perforating your head but it's still viable. I'm looking forward to the stories of exactly that happening from people attempting to print their own guns with 3D printers.
Unity spent at least 2 years with rough edges and even now arguably it's still seriously lacking as a desktop UI. In particular I think the global menus and the hover scrollbars might be reasonable compromises when someone has a low resolution screen and needs the space but they are serious usability problems on larger screens.
Unity itself is tolerable in most ways but when its compared to GNOME 3 (probably its closest counterpart) one wonders why it exists at all. GNOME 3 could be skinned to resemble Unity, probably almost exactly. Why bother maintaining two codebases at all?
Although git also does a great job of that with concurrent revisioning built in.
Git is a fine way to manage source code or perhaps semi-infrequently changing files like Word documents. It would be absolutely disastrous to use it to manage large binary blobs or log files or anything changes frequently. The reason for this is that a git project holds every version of the file ever and not necessarily as deltas either. Aside from that, the files have to be added and committed to the server before they're visible for pull which increases footprint size.
And the client side has to clone / pull every blob too. A clone can specify a depth to restrict the history of the clone, but it would still build up a history of cruft when perhaps you only want the latest version.
So while I use git in a lot of scenarios myself (mainly source control) I think it is not necessarily a substitute for either scp or rsync except for relatively sedentary directories where the corresponding git project isn't going to bloat out of control over time.
The Fedora 18 installer was pretty bad. It was like a dialog mated and a NeXT style shelf and created an unholy abomination. I hope with the time pressures gone, that they've fixed it. A lot of the confusion would be avoided if it worked like a wizard - i.e. a Next button at the bottom of each task and the final dialog that says Start Install. But the shelf could still remain so people who want to pick and choose what things to do could do so via that method. And also throw in some feedback to the user rather than "mystery time" where for 10-20 seconds after certain actions like disk formatting, the GUI would just sit there without yielding a clue as to what it was doing or what options were valid.
Red Hat also need to line up the people responsible for their Software Update and Add / Remove Programs tool and shoot one of them to motivate the others to create a UI which actually makes sense. Both are really untuitive and unhelpful. e.g. Software Update bounces its progress list around like it is possessed, and uses some really inscrutable generic icons for status.
Personally I pray that Slashdot will recognize the wisdom of tweaking their existing "Read the rest of this comment..." logic so it kicks in a lot sooner for 0 and -1 posts. e.g. a 0 post might show 10 lines, a -1 post only shows 2 lines with the link there to show the remainder.
Then this raving nutcase / troll can post his mind spool as much as he likes but its impact will be minimal.
I think it's a good reason to hate a bank. Most banking sites these days have seen the wisdom of using pure HTML, CSS and Javascript. I've seen sites which have used Java to fetch a certificate off the disk which is used in conjunction with authentication. Invariably this is a pain in the ass and immediately makes the site inconvenient to use from any platform / browser the bank hasn't "blessed" for that purpose and some banks will point blank refuse to work if your browser is "wrong".
I don't blame Java per se - the bank used Java because it was the only way to achieve what they wanted to do. The problem is that what they want to do is stupid and there are alternatives which don't involve so much hassle. e.g. instead of issuing a cert, banks could use a hard token or post out a one time pad book, or employ several layers security.
With a C++ program it is up to me, the programmer to make sure there are no exploits.
Which is why of course all those ActiveX controls running in IE, mostly written in C++ were so immune to exploitation. The security exceeded everybody's wildest expectations.
Well clearly it is in their control if they're shutting the account down. Though of course it could be the bank shutting them down. For example they may have decided that the account could be used for the purposes of laundering money and decided to act unilaterally to protect themselves.
Wayland is about making the desktop more efficient by reducing context switching and state duplication across processes. It won't stop you running "useful applications", nor make them less useful somehow. Indeed it will ultimately lead to a more responsive desktop.
Eye candy has little to do with it. Perhaps you also object to damage and compositors in X for similar reasons. After all, these were demoed with wibbly wobbly windows, rotating cubes etc. even the primary advantage of the extensions was to stop windows from trashing each other as the desktop was rearranged.
So what? It's Netflix problem, not the problem of the open web.
It sure is. And about 20 or 30 other established subscription / rental services. They'll simply keep on doing what they do now and use Flash or Silverlight or they'll ship a plugin. There is absolutely no chance ever of them streaming content unencrypted.
So it boils down to a very simple choice. Does a browser let the service implement an entire media framework and DRM on it's own or implement a common framework that DRM can be slotted into.
Do you really think X11 is much more efficient these days? Even with X render it's sending complex chains of drawing instructions with bi directional communication and much of the time it would be sending bitmaps anyway. A protocol purely using bitmaps could send deltas in a single direction and be just as efficient.
A window is just a surface. There is no reason it couldn't send a surface over the wire. And it's not "pure garbage" because it doesn't support what is nowadays a fairly esoteric feature and for which there are numerous solutions (e.g. run X over Wayland).
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway I have no problem with that. More insidious however are the constant revisions which render them worthless after a year or two, or even worse "work books". Work books are the kind where the child writes answer into the page in thereby making it impossible to reuse.
Here in Ireland almost all the primary school books are like this and the cost of books could be 100 per annum per child. The state could ban the practice in an instant and save parents a lot of money but for some reason they won't.
As for Germany, I expect their limits on particular forms of speech have a little something to do with them underpinning and justifying the systematic slaughter of millions of people. They're probably just a tad sensitive to people perpetuating the same ideas which arguably are malicious slander against an entire culture. Racist attacks and neo-Nazi movements are still a real problem for the country. Even this week a neo-Nazi "kill squad" is on trial for the murdering 10 people.
More likely it's the devices that devs own and reasonably expect the os to work on. It'd be nice to sport CM10 on my HTC desire but if it's even possible I suspect it would be impossibly tight and would still necessitate smearing firmware across an SD partition.
And I put up with this bullshit because the transition from fun to grind was so gradual I did not see it happen. So there I was paying subscribing to a game I didn't enjoy. Fortunately for me Verant intervened with their own ineptitude. The Shadows of Luclin expansion was bugged to high fuck which meant the server crashed, the client crashed, the content was bugged out and this went on for weeks. It gave me the time to realise I wasn't enjoying this.
So I let my subscription expire and I quit. It was a wrench to abandon the "investment" I made in the character but it just wasn't fun any more. On the plus side, it trained me to recognize grind and skinner box style gameplay that virtually all MMOs since have used to string people along - long travel distances, infrequent spawns, equipment that degrades, time sinks everywhere. I played other MMOs - Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars Galaxies, A Tale in the Desert and they all suffered from them. Ultimately I quit them all because they were the same damned thing - sucking $15 out of you each month in return for anti-fun.
That said, with the change to free-to-play model has made some MMOs fun again. Lord of the Rings Online for example has been aggressively cutting the grind all over the place - adding fast travel, instant looting, less maintenance, out of combat healing, NPC radar etc. Presumably in the FTP model it pays to get people to progress more quickly rather than have them fuck around looting corpses or recoup lost xp. It's also a very beautiful game with the lore to support it. I've been playing LOTRO for 18 months in the FTP model and must have bought about $50 of points on it, most of that still remaining to be spent. If I don't feel like playing I'm not losing out by not playing so it suits me a lot better. I can play it for 30 minutes during a bout of boredom and feel like I'm getting something from it.
I very much doubt 40% of Android devices in Russia are infected, although I can well believe the rates of infection are much higher in countries which have a culture of piracy over those that don't.
In fairness, there is malware on Android however I expect the risk for most people of catching it is pretty minimal. The Play market is proactively scanned and acts reactively to threats up to and including a remote kill capability. And in many cases those that do get infected have their own lack of sense to thank - installing pirated APKs, or dubious apps from untrusted sources and reaping the rewards.
If you like eating, especially if you like having any kind of variety in your diet, then you depend on honey bees. Even if you're allergic to all bee products, you still depend on bees. (never heard of anyone being allergic to honey - I just threw that out there)
Infants can't eat honey because it can contain bacteria that causes botulism.
Whether its safe or not is another matter and the risks increase as the calibre and the number of shots fired goes up.
A typo invalidates my entire argument doesn't it? And yeah these whacky imaginary militias of yours would be reduced to the sort of activities you propose. And still losing.
Which is why the rebels won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Oh wait they didn't.
As it is of assholes continuously pointing cameras at people during conversations, or while they're following someone up the street, or at the gym, or near a high school. Plus the 1000 and 1 abuses that are possible through apps that can record, transcribe, analyse or augment while they're doing it.
A militia armed with AR16s wouldn't get very far either. Remember those videos from Desert Storm showing Apache helicopters mowing down Iraqi soliders from 3 miles away? That's your militia, excepting that their enlarged girth would make them explode in a more amusing fashion.
You could probably make a gun out of a metal pipe, masking tape, a thumb tack and a rubber band. Basically something to strike the percussion cap and a tube to propel the bullet in a forward direction. You'd stand a good chance of blowing your hand off or shards perforating your head but it's still viable. I'm looking forward to the stories of exactly that happening from people attempting to print their own guns with 3D printers.
Thanks for the suggestion, I did just that.
Unity itself is tolerable in most ways but when its compared to GNOME 3 (probably its closest counterpart) one wonders why it exists at all. GNOME 3 could be skinned to resemble Unity, probably almost exactly. Why bother maintaining two codebases at all?
Although git also does a great job of that with concurrent revisioning built in.
Git is a fine way to manage source code or perhaps semi-infrequently changing files like Word documents. It would be absolutely disastrous to use it to manage large binary blobs or log files or anything changes frequently. The reason for this is that a git project holds every version of the file ever and not necessarily as deltas either. Aside from that, the files have to be added and committed to the server before they're visible for pull which increases footprint size.
And the client side has to clone / pull every blob too. A clone can specify a depth to restrict the history of the clone, but it would still build up a history of cruft when perhaps you only want the latest version.
So while I use git in a lot of scenarios myself (mainly source control) I think it is not necessarily a substitute for either scp or rsync except for relatively sedentary directories where the corresponding git project isn't going to bloat out of control over time.
Red Hat also need to line up the people responsible for their Software Update and Add / Remove Programs tool and shoot one of them to motivate the others to create a UI which actually makes sense. Both are really untuitive and unhelpful. e.g. Software Update bounces its progress list around like it is possessed, and uses some really inscrutable generic icons for status.
Then this raving nutcase / troll can post his mind spool as much as he likes but its impact will be minimal.
I don't blame Java per se - the bank used Java because it was the only way to achieve what they wanted to do. The problem is that what they want to do is stupid and there are alternatives which don't involve so much hassle. e.g. instead of issuing a cert, banks could use a hard token or post out a one time pad book, or employ several layers security.
With a C++ program it is up to me, the programmer to make sure there are no exploits.
Which is why of course all those ActiveX controls running in IE, mostly written in C++ were so immune to exploitation. The security exceeded everybody's wildest expectations.
Well clearly it is in their control if they're shutting the account down. Though of course it could be the bank shutting them down. For example they may have decided that the account could be used for the purposes of laundering money and decided to act unilaterally to protect themselves.
Eye candy has little to do with it. Perhaps you also object to damage and compositors in X for similar reasons. After all, these were demoed with wibbly wobbly windows, rotating cubes etc. even the primary advantage of the extensions was to stop windows from trashing each other as the desktop was rearranged.
So what? It's Netflix problem, not the problem of the open web.
It sure is. And about 20 or 30 other established subscription / rental services. They'll simply keep on doing what they do now and use Flash or Silverlight or they'll ship a plugin. There is absolutely no chance ever of them streaming content unencrypted.
So it boils down to a very simple choice. Does a browser let the service implement an entire media framework and DRM on it's own or implement a common framework that DRM can be slotted into.
Do you really think X11 is much more efficient these days? Even with X render it's sending complex chains of drawing instructions with bi directional communication and much of the time it would be sending bitmaps anyway. A protocol purely using bitmaps could send deltas in a single direction and be just as efficient.
A window is just a surface. There is no reason it couldn't send a surface over the wire. And it's not "pure garbage" because it doesn't support what is nowadays a fairly esoteric feature and for which there are numerous solutions (e.g. run X over Wayland).