My kid is into his second year of ICT at his secondary school (like High school for you American types), and I found to my horror that neither he, nor any of his friends who take that class even know what a sub folder is. Text files? A mystery, CLI? No idea...
What they do know is how to use Word, Powerpoint and (at a push) Excel. I hear they now use Dreamweaver instead of Frontpage. I see this as barely an improvement.
I think kids should spend a little time using computers that are as functional as the ones we used as kids (I'm from the Apple ][ Era myself), just so they can understand that a computer != a windows machine, and that there's more to it then the desktop and shortcuts. With the right teaching plan it would probably be a lot of fun.
I'm not proposing we throw out the modern PC, just that is be part of the process of learning about the computing subject, not the main focus.
in this case the criminalised group would be predominantly middle class, since that is the social group with the highest percentage of internet access.
No-one cares if you criminalise lower class/unemployed/homeless/poor people. Really, they don't. Its amazing how little people with even a little success care about people less well off then them. It sounds cynical, but I'm only being honest. How many friends do you have that aren't in or above your social class?
Criminalise people who are successful, have nice houses, jobs, and are otherwise highly respectable, and you have a potential storm on your hands.
No-one in their right mind would elect him to public office. Fantastically gifted coder he may be, a founder of open source he most certainly is, but another thing he is, is a zealot. That type of person rarely does well in a job where compromise is the order of the day. Not that its a bad thing he's so single minded. Open source wouldn't have its most important tool chain were it not for him, and the philosophy would have got nowhere but for his bull headedness on the issue. That said, I'd never vote to put him in public office, never in a million gazillion years.
the theory goes that if intellectual property can be protected totally, then money will be made in large amounts.
What it actually means is that as soon as profits are assured by this sort of action we will see distribution channels becoming more powerful, taking a bigger cut, and IP owners getting a smaller piece of the pie.
Not that it would work, no government that criminalises millions of its own citizens has done well in the long term.
You know what , I've looked at that book and wondered if I should buy it. By coincidence I put it in my Amazon basket a couple of weeks ago and agonised over it for two days (I had a gift voucher associated with a research grant).
As an undergraduate, and all through my phd I've been a committed C coder who doesn't like to stray beyond the console (GUIs just seem so wasteful, using up all those clock cycles), I have often thought I should persevere and see if I could grow to like Emacs. Not least because every other Stallman authored tool has been indispensable to me (especially the Stallman auto criticiser, aka splint), so I do sometimes think I'm missing out.
Its just getting past that feature abundance, it puts me off in a way that's hard to explain.
Africa is a pretty big place, and many parts of it are quite stable. The problem is that a lot of countries on the continent have an extremely unstable governmental situation.
The trend is definitely towards stability, but the effects of of colonialism continue to be felt. It was the restructuring after the largely unplanned collapse of colonialism that caused most of the present problems. The UK was, sad to say, responsible for a lot of the bad handling.
But, its easy to blame everything on Europe and its previous occupation of the troubled states, but the fact is we've been gone for quite some time, it's not all our fault.
The former colonial masters haven't got away scot free anyway, in the case of the UK we find ourselves still very much obliged to provide financial and military assistance to any country that used to be part of our empire.
The time will come when it will be possible to travel from one end of Africa to the other without fear of molestation, and the issues of war and mass starvation will be a distant memory, but we need to accept that such star-trek-esque idealism is a long way off right now.
I taught a short course on it once to first years. I tried to like it while I was preparing the course but I guess I'm just not that kind of coder. Some of my colleagues used it for everything, and I do mean everything, but I didn't get further then a little lisp and some C editing before heading back to Vim.
Stereotypical I know, doesn't stop it being true. I don't quite know what it is about it that puts me off, but something about the multitude of features rubs me up the wrong way.
I use lame too, but that's lame_enc.dll with goldwave. I've not tried to reduce file size, not when I have no storage issues. Possibly I'm being wasteful, but with 500Gb external HDs going for £60, I haven't seen the need.
Also, the new readings of the Dune books have a cast, and frequent bits of background music, so I put the encode rate up for those. It seems to work well.
I can't tell any difference between the original aa files and my rips.
I buy drm protected audiobooks from Audible, and intend to continue doing so, because their service is excellent. Their catalogue of audiobooks is the best I've found.
They actually provide a rip to cd thing with their software, so you can go direct to unprotected mp3. A lot of people miss this point.
I prefer to use goldwave to convert the files to mp3 as soon as I download them, mp3 album maker to join them into one big file, then audiobookcutter to split into ten minute chunks. All in all about ten minutes work. Certainly its equivilent to the time it takes to rip a bunch of cd's
That way I get the immense convenience of downloading my two audiobook fixes a month, and avoid most of the problems caused by drm.
I'm not sure that they approve of customers using goldwave. Ok, I know they don't, but they still get my money each month, and will continue to do so as long as they keep getting in books I want.
you can have all the high tech sophistication and innovation you want, but if a nimrod or klutz gets a hold of it, you can throw it out the window. Anybody who has ever had to deal with tech support can attest to that.
I did six months before I lost it down the phone over a fuckwit who refused to accept he had caps lock on after 20 minutes and three password resets. Never before had I actually walked out of a job in the middle of a shift.
While I see your point, I doubt individuals with such a low level of savvy would be allowed to steer an interstellar ship.
To any other race our planetary system would be a star, some gas giants, and a few tiny rocks that may or may not hold life.
You do realise that the outer edge of our solar system is almost a light year away don't you? Anyone capable of even getting from the edge of the solar system to us in reasonable time (weeks/months) would be hundreds if not thousands of years ahead of us. As for crossing space from their system to ours, well, anyone able to do that would be well versed in not crashing in the american mid-west by the time they got here.
Slashdot Mirror
Thinking I'm silly for not having a credit card.
I kind of need one nowadays, but this kind of thing scares me shartless. How easy would it be to get fiscally wiped out by this kind of thing?
It didn't even occur to me that he didn't know, since he was attending those classes.
Since then I have done just that.
I agree.
My kid is into his second year of ICT at his secondary school (like High school for you American types), and I found to my horror that neither he, nor any of his friends who take that class even know what a sub folder is. Text files? A mystery, CLI? No idea...
What they do know is how to use Word, Powerpoint and (at a push) Excel. I hear they now use Dreamweaver instead of Frontpage. I see this as barely an improvement.
I think kids should spend a little time using computers that are as functional as the ones we used as kids (I'm from the Apple ][ Era myself), just so they can understand that a computer != a windows machine, and that there's more to it then the desktop and shortcuts. With the right teaching plan it would probably be a lot of fun.
I'm not proposing we throw out the modern PC, just that is be part of the process of learning about the computing subject, not the main focus.
Dunno, but Linux can run the Apple ][
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openapple/
Warboating has already been done:
http://www.panbo.com/archives/2004/04/boats_wifi_warboating.html
Pushing a Trolley with intent?
He might try to make a run for it, That's a cop chase I'd like to see on TV....
If you're right, then why is it that a housewife got fined a quarter of a million dollars for sharing some mp3s?
It seems to me that a nation capable of doing that and thinking its right isn't trying to penalise the rich.
Inconceivable!
in this case the criminalised group would be predominantly middle class, since that is the social group with the highest percentage of internet access.
No-one cares if you criminalise lower class/unemployed/homeless/poor people. Really, they don't. Its amazing how little people with even a little success care about people less well off then them. It sounds cynical, but I'm only being honest. How many friends do you have that aren't in or above your social class?
Criminalise people who are successful, have nice houses, jobs, and are otherwise highly respectable, and you have a potential storm on your hands.
No-one in their right mind would elect him to public office.
Fantastically gifted coder he may be, a founder of open source he most certainly is, but another thing he is, is a zealot. That type of person rarely does well in a job where compromise is the order of the day.
Not that its a bad thing he's so single minded. Open source wouldn't have its most important tool chain were it not for him, and the philosophy would have got nowhere but for his bull headedness on the issue.
That said, I'd never vote to put him in public office, never in a million gazillion years.
the theory goes that if intellectual property can be protected totally, then money will be made in large amounts.
What it actually means is that as soon as profits are assured by this sort of action we will see distribution channels becoming more powerful, taking a bigger cut, and IP owners getting a smaller piece of the pie.
Not that it would work, no government that criminalises millions of its own citizens has done well in the long term.
I'm 42 and the near death star robots have yet to claim me, so I can't be old either.
Oh hang on, there's someone at the door...
You know what , I've looked at that book and wondered if I should buy it. By coincidence I put it in my Amazon basket a couple of weeks ago and agonised over it for two days (I had a gift voucher associated with a research grant).
As an undergraduate, and all through my phd I've been a committed C coder who doesn't like to stray beyond the console (GUIs just seem so wasteful, using up all those clock cycles), I have often thought I should persevere and see if I could grow to like Emacs. Not least because every other Stallman authored tool has been indispensable to me (especially the Stallman auto criticiser, aka splint), so I do sometimes think I'm missing out.
Its just getting past that feature abundance, it puts me off in a way that's hard to explain.
Africa is a pretty big place, and many parts of it are quite stable. The problem is that a lot of countries on the continent have an extremely unstable governmental situation.
The trend is definitely towards stability, but the effects of of colonialism continue to be felt. It was the restructuring after the largely unplanned collapse of colonialism that caused most of the present problems. The UK was, sad to say, responsible for a lot of the bad handling.
But, its easy to blame everything on Europe and its previous occupation of the troubled states, but the fact is we've been gone for quite some time, it's not all our fault.
The former colonial masters haven't got away scot free anyway, in the case of the UK we find ourselves still very much obliged to provide financial and military assistance to any country that used to be part of our empire.
The time will come when it will be possible to travel from one end of Africa to the other without fear of molestation, and the issues of war and mass starvation will be a distant memory, but we need to accept that such star-trek-esque idealism is a long way off right now.
I taught a short course on it once to first years. I tried to like it while I was preparing the course but I guess I'm just not that kind of coder. Some of my colleagues used it for everything, and I do mean everything, but I didn't get further then a little lisp and some C editing before heading back to Vim.
Stereotypical I know, doesn't stop it being true. I don't quite know what it is about it that puts me off, but something about the multitude of features rubs me up the wrong way.
Read the manual? of Emacs?
What, you think I have a year to spare?
It always does, for everything.
They actually provide a rip to cd thing with their software, so you can go direct to unprotected mp3.
So what's the point of the DRM?
I've wondered this myself. I'm guessing its to appease paranoid book rights holders, because it doesn't help the consumer in the slightest.
Given that they often get books before they appear elsewhere, it must be a strategy that works.
As I said above, the drm won't stop me buying their books, they have a good catalogue, but I'd like to see it gone all the same.
I've never tried aac, I might convert a book and see if I like it.
I use lame too, but that's lame_enc.dll with goldwave.
I've not tried to reduce file size, not when I have no storage issues. Possibly I'm being wasteful, but with 500Gb external HDs going for £60, I haven't seen the need.
Also, the new readings of the Dune books have a cast, and frequent bits of background music, so I put the encode rate up for those. It seems to work well.
I can't tell any difference between the original aa files and my rips.
the iPod doesn't use Ogg, and I see no advantage to using wma.
Besides, audiobooks are voice only, 32bit is more then adequate, and mp3 is fine.
Its not fraud to close a branch of a company.
Sure its annoying, but its perfectly legal.
I buy drm protected audiobooks from Audible, and intend to continue doing so, because their service is excellent. Their catalogue of audiobooks is the best I've found.
They actually provide a rip to cd thing with their software, so you can go direct to unprotected mp3. A lot of people miss this point.
I prefer to use goldwave to convert the files to mp3 as soon as I download them, mp3 album maker to join them into one big file, then audiobookcutter to split into ten minute chunks. All in all about ten minutes work. Certainly its equivilent to the time it takes to rip a bunch of cd's
That way I get the immense convenience of downloading my two audiobook fixes a month, and avoid most of the problems caused by drm.
I'm not sure that they approve of customers using goldwave. Ok, I know they don't, but they still get my money each month, and will continue to do so as long as they keep getting in books I want.
you can have all the high tech sophistication and innovation you want, but if a nimrod or klutz gets a hold of it, you can throw it out the window. Anybody who has ever had to deal with tech support can attest to that.
I did six months before I lost it down the phone over a fuckwit who refused to accept he had caps lock on after 20 minutes and three password resets. Never before had I actually walked out of a job in the middle of a shift.
While I see your point, I doubt individuals with such a low level of savvy would be allowed to steer an interstellar ship.
To any other race our planetary system would be a star, some gas giants, and a few tiny rocks that may or may not hold life.
You do realise that the outer edge of our solar system is almost a light year away don't you? Anyone capable of even getting from the edge of the solar system to us in reasonable time (weeks/months) would be hundreds if not thousands of years ahead of us.
As for crossing space from their system to ours, well, anyone able to do that would be well versed in not crashing in the american mid-west by the time they got here.