...when Bill Gates announced that henceforth Windows would be free and "insanely great" that the horrible truth behind the Corporate Personality Transfer Ray became apparent.
Dumb things down sufficiently (a la the Fisher-Price skin) and make it explicit that it's dumbed down, and maybe you can counteract "I don't read manuals" pridefulness with "I'm not a kid, you know" pridefulness.
Make the default interface suitable for a four year old and make it *look* like it's for a four year old. Maybe that'll encourage supposed adults to actually take a few minutes to learn how to use the thing properly. Learning through humiliation:-) Might be particularly effective if the adults are stuck using the Barney screen with big on-screen buttons with short words on them while their 4-year old is happily using the Advanced mode to set up prioritized season passes.
What I don't understand is why people buy something new with *new features* and don't bother to look at the manual. First thing I do when I buy a new piece of consumer electronics is to read the manual, usually even before I've plugged the thing in, because I want to know what it can *do*. People should expect that new features mean new things to be learned.
I've seen it. It's lousy. My wife had been using a Toshiba laptop with a Netgear (Prism) based card while sitting on the sofa in the livingroom, whlle the hub (Netgear MR314 combo firewall/router/hub thingy) was in the home office, with 2 rather thick steel/concrete walls in between. It received a good, strong signal.
When she replaced the Toshiba with a Powerbook Ti back in January, it was only able to get a signal if you held it at a particular angle and a particular height. Turn it even 10 degrees and it'd lose signal completely.
In the end I got around the problem by running 30ft of neatly stapled-down CAT5 from my main switch to a cheap Netgear ME102 AP which sits discreetly on top of a bookcase in the livingroom. The wiring's non-obtrusive, the cost of the extra access point is comparable to that of a WiFi card, and both the PowerBook and my Airport-equipped PowerMac seamlessly switch between the two APs depending upon which room they're used in. It's not a solution for everyone, but it worked for me.
Again, not the case for the original UK pilot. That had more of a soundtrack than just title music, running right through the show and into the end theme. It was by Midge Ure and Chris Cross of Ultravox, if I remember correctly.
And I thought the screen graphics in the original were better than what we did. For one
thing, they used/real/ vector graphics in the original.
Ah, but you've got to be careful with the original UK pilot show when it comes to what was/wasn't computer graphics.
There were computer graphics in there, but there was also a lot of work by Rod Lord, who also did the "computer graphics" in the book sequences on the _Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy_ TV show (out on DVD in the US yesterday, for those who're interested) which weren't computer generated at all. They're generally the ones that look too good to be computer graphics:-)
-Holds 20Gb of MP3 data (as opposed to iPod's 5 or 10GB).
There's also the upgrade route - not sure how big the drives used in the iPod go, but I've had a 30GB drive in my Nomad since last summer, and you can get 40GB or larger drives in that form factor too. You can get quite a lot of music in 30GB, even at 160kbps.
If my upgraded Nomad didn't already have a larger drive than the Nomad Jukebox 3 I'd be tempted by it - if only because of the Firewire download speeds. The size doesn't really bother me - I don't really use it as a portable unit and I generally run if off the AC adapter.
This isn't an example of that practice though. Disney's original, no-frills, poor quality DVD of _Tron_ came out three or so years ago, and it's been crying out for a decent transfer ever since.
I got my copy of the 20th Anniversary edition today. Not had a chance to look at it in detail yet, but the second disk has a lot of interesting stuff on it, the menus are gorgeous and the image quality is nice too.
Not this time. _Manos_ includes _Poopie_, the outtakes tape they did (the scene where Crow goes up in flames is in itself enough reason to buy this DVD) whereas _Mitchell_ includes the movie trailer. No uncut versions though.
Next up in the spring are _Red Zone Cuba_ and, uh, _I Accuse My Parents_, I think. What I'd love to see them do is take all three of the _Shorts_ tapes and put them out as a single DVD. Since they've put them out on VHS, they presumably have the rights.
Are you sure? I was pretty sure that it was the other recent Pratchett book, _The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents_ that was aimed at a younger audience? _The Last Hero_ is short and, as you say, lower key, however, it's aimed at the same audience as the rest of the books.
That said, did anyone else who has read _The Amazing Maurice_ find that, in some ways, it's about as dark as anything Pratchett's ever written?
While the reason for them going away was at least partly environmental, it has to be remembered that the reason they were there in the first place had a lot to do with the fact that two longboxed music CDs placed side by side fitted rather neatly into racks that had been designed to hold LPs, thereby eliminating the need for record stores to replace their fittings. As stores replaced fittings naturally over the course of time, the reason for longboxes existence evaporated. The pressure for the existence/removal of large packaging that existed for music just doesn't exist for software.
Then there's the security aspect - it's a lot easier for someone to slip a jewel case inside a jacket than something the size of a box of breakfast cereal, and boxing also makes it easier for them to put those little magnetic thingies that set off the door alarms inside the packaging, where they're harder for a thief to remove (anyone else noticed how those now appear *inside* DVD cases, too?)
It's still a waste, though - why they couldn't reduce the depth of packages from the current inch or more to half an inch, I don't know - they could retain the large form factor to give plenty of space for pretty pictures, the stores could get twice as many on the shelves, and they'd still be awkward enough to discourage theft.
I don't get it. You have a national broadcaster that is on the same channel wherever you go? You're talking about Channel 4 and 5 like they are national. Is this correct?
Yes, and Yes.
You've also got to remember that, until fairly recently, the five channels were all there was in the UK (and still are, I think, at least as far as conventional broadcast goes, and 4 and 5 only came along since the early 80s. My TV had 3 channel buttons on it when I was growing up, for BBC1, BBC2 and ITV.
In case anyone's wondering why no lithographs for the new Demotivators, I mailed them last week to ask. Apparently, something like 50% of the last batch accounted for 90% of their sales, so they're seeing what's popular amongst the new ones before producing the big lithographs.
On a totally unrelated note, check out this for a weird case. Not so much an Apple as a Bean.
Dumbest thing I've seen yet was in the local newspaper, which claimed that "some programmers" (*) considered 10th October 2000 to be a potential problem because that'd be 10/10/00 and "the computer might mistake it for a binary number".
Please, should any nuclear missiles launch mistakenly due to the Y2K bug, let them fall on the office of whoever made that claim. The gene pool won't miss them...
My personal favourite was GCU Ultimate Ship The Second. There's a full list of Banks' ship names to be found here. They make the naming conventions of ships in most SF series (including the various Treks) seems rather limp and uninspired.
I know it was a joke, but why would a old mind on a shiny, supply, firm new body by unpleasant?
Because the technique described is for a head swap, not a brain swap. I suspect the wiring for the latter would be considerably more complicated. Now conjure up the mental image of a 500 year old head on a 25 year old body...
While we're talking about Monty Python's Flying Circus and A&E, I see A&E will be releasing all the TV shows on DVD starting in September. So far they've announced four 2-disc sets, with each disc containing roughly four hours worth of stuff (difficult to say how much of it's original shows though, since they're adding all the usual DVD goodies).
Oh, and for that matter, the pseudo-movie "And Now For Something Completely Different" is due out on DVD on Monday.
They jettison CDNOW's distribution channel (which already ate the only other good online music store, Music Boulevard)
Unlikely. Columbia House already has a CDNow-like online store - it's called Total E. I've only ordered from them once to date, but when it arrived I mistook it for a CDNow order - same boxes, same return address, same stripey invoice. So they already use the same distribution center for domestic product, at least (Total E, last I checked, didn't carry imports). Oh, and ironically, the order from Total E shipped the same day I placed it and was in my hands three days later - something that can rarely be said for CDNow since the merger with Music Boulevard. If it wasn't for the more limited selection (not as limited as the Columbia House clubs, but domestic product only) I'd use it as often as CDNow.
I think people are jumping to conclusions and assuming that CDNow is going to metamorphose into something like the "buy 12CDs at 1c each and receive dozens of CDs you don't want because you forgot to say you didn't want them" Columbia House of old. OK, so I don't know exactly what's going to come out of this, but Columbia House aren't entirely inexperienced when it comes to running a CDNow-like store.
Guess what? If you have an IP, you can have a server because that machine will have a name. You just need to do a little extra work to find out what that name is.
None of which will do a blind bit of good if your ISP has the router that handles the DSL lines set up to block incoming port 80 (goodbye HTTP), incoming port 25 (farewall, SMTP) or incoming port 21 (FTP, adios). Which is exactly what some ISPs do. The ISP I work for offers 384K and 768K DSL, with residential and business options. The former is subject to exactly this type of filter so, yes, you can run servers, but no packets will ever reach them. If you want to run servers, you pay the business rate.
Remember that UK mpg and US mpg aren't the same thing, due to the difference in size between UK and US gallons. The 5 miles/liter figure quoted comes out as 22+ mpg when you use UK gallons. Still not wonderful, but not quite as bad as 19mpg.
I would be interested to hear from any UK posters whether this atmosphere has developed in schools there - it certainly didn't exist when I left school (12 years ago)
Maybe you were just lucky? It was certainly there to some extent when I was at High School, and I left 13 years ago. I was fortunate in escaping most of the casual humiliation (never did figure out why, to be honest, but I suspect it's because that while a nerd, I didn't diverge too far from the norm in appearance) but still had a hellish time, largely due to a value system that strongly valued athletic achievement over scholastic. So, while I was a very good student (typically in the top two or three in the year right through high school) the fact that I couldn't kick a ball to save my life made me a 2nd class citizen behind those who could.
There were a number of inconsistencies in school policy that made it worse. The school streamed heavily, which generally meant that you ended up in a class with people of similar ability. Not so games class, where everyone was thrown in together in the name of "team spirit", and folk who tripped over their own feet like myself were expected to compete against people who, in some sports, played at a national level.
Needless to say this was seen as "payback time" by some ("hey, it's kick the nerd time!"), and the teachers encouraged rather than discouraged this (in most cases, I suspect, because they'd done this themselves when they were kids - sorry, but at my school the P.E. teachers did nothing to dispel the usual stereotype). Just to make it more fun, P.E. was the only subject that was compulsory right through all six years of high school - the only way I escaped this particular torment was a nervous breakdown and suicide attempt at 16 after I couldn't take the combined taunting and verbal abuse of kids and teacher. Thereafter, while my grades stayed good, life became increasingly unpleasant as I was passed over and to some extent ostracized by the school itself - the P.E. department had a lot of influence in the running of the school, and anyone the P.E. department didn't like (I heard through a teacher that the department considered me "unstable and unsuitable for positions of responsibility" because of what happened) got ignored. Cue standard teen "school razed to ground" fantasies (although I'd like to stress that while the physical structure of the school was oft reduced to rubble in my dreams, I didn't harbour similar feelings regarding my fellow students - the worst offenders tended to drop out at 16, and the teacher who'd induced my breakdown seemed to undergo a change in attitude after realizing that his little games had caused a student to try to kill himself)
This sort of thing coloured my entire experience of high school - you'd think that a "good student" would miss leaving, but on the day I left I (quite literally) jumped for joy as I passed through the gate for the final time, and I've never had anything to do with the place again, and never will. Bitter? Twisted? You bet! In fact, it was an "I'll show them" mentality that propelled me through the last two years of high school, directing my bitterness and resentment into work to make the disparity between recognition and achievement all the clearer.
To those who're going through it now, I know it's no real compensation to know that it'll end eventually when it's hell on earth right now. All I can say is to try holding on and putting up with it as long as you can, and when you make it to the end, the reward is worth it. My experience at university couldn't have been more different, and while the smarts that were so undervalued then are of use to me daily in my work, I can safely say that my inability to kick, hit or catch a ball hasn't proved relevant in real life.
The IC socket problem was nothing a quick drop onto a hard surface wouldn't fix:-) A friend of mine picked up an old MegaST a few months back, which promptly died. The guy who sold it to him told him to do the ever-reliable "drop it to reseat the chips" trick, and it's worked just fine ever since.
I liked my old ST, but I still find it difficult to believe that I paid 100 quid back in 1987 or so to get it upgraded from 512K to 1Mb and thought I was getting a deal at the time.
I think one problem with this subject is that people tend to generalize based on their own experience. If they went to a lousy college and wasted n years being taught stuff that they knew already, they look on a college education as worthless, because theirs was. If they went to a good college and learned a lot, they consider a college education essential (even though a bad college education can be more of a hindrance than anything else). Just to make my own prejudices clear - I went to what's generally considered to be a pretty good university, and think my degree was well worth the effort.
When I started university I was, while far from an ubergeek, reasonably experienced, with several flavours of BASIC, a couple of assembly languages, a smattering of Pascal and a little Forth. However, learning a language at university was considered subsidiary - we weren't there to learn to program C or Pascal, we were there to learn (amongst other things) to program. So while we spent the first month or two being taught Pascal inside out it was really only to give us a common way to get the work done - it was made clear to us that by the time we graduated we should be able to pick up pretty much any language thrown at us without much difficulty.
A lot of the value was in having to do stuff that I wouldn't otherwise have touched. We covered a wide range of stuff, from basics like algorithms through operating system design, graphics, digital hardware design, compiler design, real-time techniques, and a lot of heavy theoretical stuff that I personally hated (but some of which continues to benefit me to some extent today). While I've by no means needed everything I studied (the contents of the course in Computability, probably the toughest one I did during the degree, hasn't cropped up yet, thank god) I'd guess that the material I studied for during the degree has directly benefitted me in about 70% of the projects I've worked on, in addition to giving me a solid foundation in the basics that's made me a better programmer.
Now to flip the whole thing around, I also saw the process from the other side - while doing post-graduate work I supplemented my meagre income by doing the things that postgrads do, like tutoring courses and sitting around in labs answering questions. I did this for long enough that there were some students that I acted as lab attendant for in their freshman year who I also tutored in later years. Now in the freshman year there was a huge range of experience. On one hand we had serious hackers who were bored silly by the coursework and instead spent their labs trying to subvert systems, and there were people who weren't far off the "which key is the 'ANY' key?" stage. Some from both groups got all the way through the degree, even though those in the latter had to work a hell of a lot harder during the first year or so. By the time they got to the third or fourth year of the degree, you couldn't really tell the difference or, if there was any difference, it was often that the people who'd been complete neophytes in their freshman year were doing better than the self-taught Junior Superhacker types. Many of the latter had an over-inflated opinion of their own capabilities due to their being so far ahead in the first year, and this "I know it all already" attitude hampered them later on when the course started to move outside of their areas of expertise.
All of which means...not a lot, really. Let's face it, nobody wants to be seen to have made the wrong move, so those who dropped out or didn't go to college at all aren't going to admit any value in a college degree, whereas those who did a degree, no matter how useless, aren't going to admit to wasting several years of their life. I think my undergraduate degree benefitted me a lot, but don't hold the same opinion of my postgraduate degree - the latter took a lot more of my life than it should have, and specialized me for an area of Computer Science I now having nothing to do with. Sure, having an advanced degree means that in a lot of jobs I get a slightly higher starting salary, but I've long since concluded that my salary'd be at the same level or higher if I'd spent those years gaining job experience. It was fun, but it ate up more of my life than it was worth.
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...when Bill Gates announced that henceforth Windows would be free and "insanely great" that the horrible truth behind the Corporate Personality Transfer Ray became apparent.
Dumb things down sufficiently (a la the Fisher-Price skin) and make it explicit that it's dumbed down, and maybe you can counteract "I don't read manuals" pridefulness with "I'm not a kid, you know" pridefulness.
:-) Might be particularly effective if the adults are stuck using the Barney screen with big on-screen buttons with short words on them while their 4-year old is happily using the Advanced mode to set up prioritized season passes.
Make the default interface suitable for a four year old and make it *look* like it's for a four year old. Maybe that'll encourage supposed adults to actually take a few minutes to learn how to use the thing properly. Learning through humiliation
What I don't understand is why people buy something new with *new features* and don't bother to look at the manual. First thing I do when I buy a new piece of consumer electronics is to read the manual, usually even before I've plugged the thing in, because I want to know what it can *do*. People should expect that new features mean new things to be learned.
I've seen it. It's lousy. My wife had been using a Toshiba laptop with a Netgear (Prism) based card while sitting on the sofa in the livingroom, whlle the hub (Netgear MR314 combo firewall/router/hub thingy) was in the home office, with 2 rather thick steel/concrete walls in between. It received a good, strong signal.
When she replaced the Toshiba with a Powerbook Ti back in January, it was only able to get a signal if you held it at a particular angle and a particular height. Turn it even 10 degrees and it'd lose signal completely.
In the end I got around the problem by running 30ft of neatly stapled-down CAT5 from my main switch to a cheap Netgear ME102 AP which sits discreetly on top of a bookcase in the livingroom. The wiring's non-obtrusive, the cost of the extra access point is comparable to that of a WiFi card, and both the PowerBook and my Airport-equipped PowerMac seamlessly switch between the two APs depending upon which room they're used in. It's not a solution for everyone, but it worked for me.
Again, not the case for the original UK pilot. That had more of a soundtrack than just title music, running right through the show and into the end theme. It was by Midge Ure and Chris Cross of Ultravox, if I remember correctly.
Ah, but you've got to be careful with the original UK pilot show when it comes to what was/wasn't computer graphics.
There were computer graphics in there, but there was also a lot of work by Rod Lord, who also did the "computer graphics" in the book sequences on the _Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy_ TV show (out on DVD in the US yesterday, for those who're interested) which weren't computer generated at all. They're generally the ones that look too good to be computer graphics :-)
Of course, iTunes recognizes the Nomad too...
-Holds 20Gb of MP3 data (as opposed to iPod's 5 or 10GB).There's also the upgrade route - not sure how big the drives used in the iPod go, but I've had a 30GB drive in my Nomad since last summer, and you can get 40GB or larger drives in that form factor too. You can get quite a lot of music in 30GB, even at 160kbps.
If my upgraded Nomad didn't already have a larger drive than the Nomad Jukebox 3 I'd be tempted by it - if only because of the Firewire download speeds. The size doesn't really bother me - I don't really use it as a portable unit and I generally run if off the AC adapter.
This isn't an example of that practice though. Disney's original, no-frills, poor quality DVD of _Tron_ came out three or so years ago, and it's been crying out for a decent transfer ever since.
I got my copy of the 20th Anniversary edition today. Not had a chance to look at it in detail yet, but the second disk has a lot of interesting stuff on it, the menus are gorgeous and the image quality is nice too.
I know it's the wrong holiday, but I miss the MST3K Turkey Day marathons of old. Guess I'll just dig out some of my favorite tapes and create my own.
"Even high-ranking executives may act on naïve impulses when it comes to choosing a password"
Even high-ranking executives? Make that especially.
Not this time. _Manos_ includes _Poopie_, the outtakes tape they did (the scene where Crow goes up in flames is in itself enough reason to buy this DVD) whereas _Mitchell_ includes the movie trailer. No uncut versions though.
Next up in the spring are _Red Zone Cuba_ and, uh, _I Accuse My Parents_, I think. What I'd love to see them do is take all three of the _Shorts_ tapes and put them out as a single DVD. Since they've put them out on VHS, they presumably have the rights.
Are you sure? I was pretty sure that it was the other recent Pratchett book, _The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents_ that was aimed at a younger audience? _The Last Hero_ is short and, as you say, lower key, however, it's aimed at the same audience as the rest of the books.
That said, did anyone else who has read _The Amazing Maurice_ find that, in some ways, it's about as dark as anything Pratchett's ever written?
While the reason for them going away was at least partly environmental, it has to be remembered that the reason they were there in the first place had a lot to do with the fact that two longboxed music CDs placed side by side fitted rather neatly into racks that had been designed to hold LPs, thereby eliminating the need for record stores to replace their fittings. As stores replaced fittings naturally over the course of time, the reason for longboxes existence evaporated. The pressure for the existence/removal of large packaging that existed for music just doesn't exist for software.
Then there's the security aspect - it's a lot easier for someone to slip a jewel case inside a jacket than something the size of a box of breakfast cereal, and boxing also makes it easier for them to put those little magnetic thingies that set off the door alarms inside the packaging, where they're harder for a thief to remove (anyone else noticed how those now appear *inside* DVD cases, too?)
It's still a waste, though - why they couldn't reduce the depth of packages from the current inch or more to half an inch, I don't know - they could retain the large form factor to give plenty of space for pretty pictures, the stores could get twice as many on the shelves, and they'd still be awkward enough to discourage theft.
And he's wearing a cap with a red star?
A Red Hat, even.
I don't get it. You have a national broadcaster that is on the same channel wherever you go? You're talking about Channel 4 and 5 like they are national. Is this correct?
Yes, and Yes.
You've also got to remember that, until fairly recently, the five channels were all there was in the UK (and still are, I think, at least as far as conventional broadcast goes, and 4 and 5 only came along since the early 80s. My TV had 3 channel buttons on it when I was growing up, for BBC1, BBC2 and ITV.
In case anyone's wondering why no lithographs for the new Demotivators, I mailed them last week to ask. Apparently, something like 50% of the last batch accounted for 90% of their sales, so they're seeing what's popular amongst the new ones before producing the big lithographs.
On a totally unrelated note, check out this for a weird case. Not so much an Apple as a Bean.
Dumbest thing I've seen yet was in the local newspaper, which claimed that "some programmers" (*) considered 10th October 2000 to be a potential problem because that'd be 10/10/00 and "the computer might mistake it for a binary number".
Please, should any nuclear missiles launch mistakenly due to the Y2K bug, let them fall on the office of whoever made that claim. The gene pool won't miss them...
Al
(*) Stupid ones, apparently.
My personal favourite was GCU Ultimate Ship The Second. There's a full list of Banks' ship names to be found here. They make the naming conventions of ships in most SF series (including the various Treks) seems rather limp and uninspired.
I know it was a joke, but why would a old mind on a shiny, supply, firm new body by unpleasant?
Because the technique described is for a head swap, not a brain swap. I suspect the wiring for the latter would be considerably more complicated. Now conjure up the mental image of a 500 year old head on a 25 year old body...
While we're talking about Monty Python's Flying Circus and A&E, I see A&E will be releasing all the TV shows on DVD starting in September. So far they've announced four 2-disc sets, with each disc containing roughly four hours worth of stuff (difficult to say how much of it's original shows though, since they're adding all the usual DVD goodies).
Oh, and for that matter, the pseudo-movie "And Now For Something Completely Different" is due out on DVD on Monday.
Al
They jettison CDNOW's distribution channel (which already ate the only other good online music store, Music Boulevard)
Unlikely. Columbia House already has a CDNow-like online store - it's called Total E. I've only ordered from them once to date, but when it arrived I mistook it for a CDNow order - same boxes, same return address, same stripey invoice. So they already use the same distribution center for domestic product, at least (Total E, last I checked, didn't carry imports). Oh, and ironically, the order from Total E shipped the same day I placed it and was in my hands three days later - something that can rarely be said for CDNow since the merger with Music Boulevard. If it wasn't for the more limited selection (not as limited as the Columbia House clubs, but domestic product only) I'd use it as often as CDNow.
I think people are jumping to conclusions and assuming that CDNow is going to metamorphose into something like the "buy 12CDs at 1c each and receive dozens of CDs you don't want because you forgot to say you didn't want them" Columbia House of old. OK, so I don't know exactly what's going to come out of this, but Columbia House aren't entirely inexperienced when it comes to running a CDNow-like store.
No servers? How can they stop you?
Very easily.
Guess what? If you have an IP, you can have a server because that machine will have a name. You just need to do a little extra work to find out what that name is.
None of which will do a blind bit of good if your ISP has the router that handles the DSL lines set up to block incoming port 80 (goodbye HTTP), incoming port 25 (farewall, SMTP) or incoming port 21 (FTP, adios). Which is exactly what some ISPs do. The ISP I work for offers 384K and 768K DSL, with residential and business options. The former is subject to exactly this type of filter so, yes, you can run servers, but no packets will ever reach them. If you want to run servers, you pay the business rate.
Remember that UK mpg and US mpg aren't the same thing, due to the difference in size between UK and US gallons. The 5 miles/liter figure quoted comes out as 22+ mpg when you use UK gallons. Still not wonderful, but not quite as bad as 19mpg.
I would be interested to hear from any UK posters whether this atmosphere has developed in schools there - it certainly didn't exist when I left school (12 years ago)
Maybe you were just lucky? It was certainly there to some extent when I was at High School, and I left 13 years ago. I was fortunate in escaping most of the casual humiliation (never did figure out why, to be honest, but I suspect it's because that while a nerd, I didn't diverge too far from the norm in appearance) but still had a hellish time, largely due to a value system that strongly valued athletic achievement over scholastic. So, while I was a very good student (typically in the top two or three in the year right through high school) the fact that I couldn't kick a ball to save my life made me a 2nd class citizen behind those who could.
There were a number of inconsistencies in school policy that made it worse. The school streamed heavily, which generally meant that you ended up in a class with people of similar ability. Not so games class, where everyone was thrown in together in the name of "team spirit", and folk who tripped over their own feet like myself were expected to compete against people who, in some sports, played at a national level.
Needless to say this was seen as "payback time" by some ("hey, it's kick the nerd time!"), and the teachers encouraged rather than discouraged this (in most cases, I suspect, because they'd done this themselves when they were kids - sorry, but at my school the P.E. teachers did nothing to dispel the usual stereotype). Just to make it more fun, P.E. was the only subject that was compulsory right through all six years of high school - the only way I escaped this particular torment was a nervous breakdown and suicide attempt at 16 after I couldn't take the combined taunting and verbal abuse of kids and teacher. Thereafter, while my grades stayed good, life became increasingly unpleasant as I was passed over and to some extent ostracized by the school itself - the P.E. department had a lot of influence in the running of the school, and anyone the P.E. department didn't like (I heard through a teacher that the department considered me "unstable and unsuitable for positions of responsibility" because of what happened) got ignored. Cue standard teen "school razed to ground" fantasies (although I'd like to stress that while the physical structure of the school was oft reduced to rubble in my dreams, I didn't harbour similar feelings regarding my fellow students - the worst offenders tended to drop out at 16, and the teacher who'd induced my breakdown seemed to undergo a change in attitude after realizing that his little games had caused a student to try to kill himself)
This sort of thing coloured my entire experience of high school - you'd think that a "good student" would miss leaving, but on the day I left I (quite literally) jumped for joy as I passed through the gate for the final time, and I've never had anything to do with the place again, and never will. Bitter? Twisted? You bet! In fact, it was an "I'll show them" mentality that propelled me through the last two years of high school, directing my bitterness and resentment into work to make the disparity between recognition and achievement all the clearer.
To those who're going through it now, I know it's no real compensation to know that it'll end eventually when it's hell on earth right now. All I can say is to try holding on and putting up with it as long as you can, and when you make it to the end, the reward is worth it. My experience at university couldn't have been more different, and while the smarts that were so undervalued then are of use to me daily in my work, I can safely say that my inability to kick, hit or catch a ball hasn't proved relevant in real life.
The IC socket problem was nothing a quick drop onto a hard surface wouldn't fix :-) A friend of mine picked up an old MegaST a few months back, which promptly died. The guy who sold it to him told him to do the ever-reliable "drop it to reseat the chips" trick, and it's worked just fine ever since.
I liked my old ST, but I still find it difficult to believe that I paid 100 quid back in 1987 or so to get it upgraded from 512K to 1Mb and thought I was getting a deal at the time.
I think one problem with this subject is that people tend to generalize based on their own experience. If they went to a lousy college and wasted n years being taught stuff that they knew already, they look on a college education as worthless, because theirs was. If they went to a good college and learned a lot, they consider a college education essential (even though a bad college education can be more of a hindrance than anything else). Just to make my own prejudices clear - I went to what's generally considered to be a pretty good university, and think my degree was well worth the effort.
When I started university I was, while far from an ubergeek, reasonably experienced, with several flavours of BASIC, a couple of assembly languages, a smattering of Pascal and a little Forth. However, learning a language at university was considered subsidiary - we weren't there to learn to program C or Pascal, we were there to learn (amongst other things) to program. So while we spent the first month or two being taught Pascal inside out it was really only to give us a common way to get the work done - it was made clear to us that by the time we graduated we should be able to pick up pretty much any language thrown at us without much difficulty.
A lot of the value was in having to do stuff that I wouldn't otherwise have touched. We covered a wide range of stuff, from basics like algorithms through operating system design, graphics, digital hardware design, compiler design, real-time techniques, and a lot of heavy theoretical stuff that I personally hated (but some of which continues to benefit me to some extent today). While I've by no means needed everything I studied (the contents of the course in Computability, probably the toughest one I did during the degree, hasn't cropped up yet, thank god) I'd guess that the material I studied for during the degree has directly benefitted me in about 70% of the projects I've worked on, in addition to giving me a solid foundation in the basics that's made me a better programmer.
Now to flip the whole thing around, I also saw the process from the other side - while doing post-graduate work I supplemented my meagre income by doing the things that postgrads do, like tutoring courses and sitting around in labs answering questions. I did this for long enough that there were some students that I acted as lab attendant for in their freshman year who I also tutored in later years. Now in the freshman year there was a huge range of experience. On one hand we had serious hackers who were bored silly by the coursework and instead spent their labs trying to subvert systems, and there were people who weren't far off the "which key is the 'ANY' key?" stage. Some from both groups got all the way through the degree, even though those in the latter had to work a hell of a lot harder during the first year or so. By the time they got to the third or fourth year of the degree, you couldn't really tell the difference or, if there was any difference, it was often that the people who'd been complete neophytes in their freshman year were doing better than the self-taught Junior Superhacker types. Many of the latter had an over-inflated opinion of their own capabilities due to their being so far ahead in the first year, and this "I know it all already" attitude hampered them later on when the course started to move outside of their areas of expertise.
All of which means...not a lot, really. Let's face it, nobody wants to be seen to have made the wrong move, so those who dropped out or didn't go to college at all aren't going to admit any value in a college degree, whereas those who did a degree, no matter how useless, aren't going to admit to wasting several years of their life. I think my undergraduate degree benefitted me a lot, but don't hold the same opinion of my postgraduate degree - the latter took a lot more of my life than it should have, and specialized me for an area of Computer Science I now having nothing to do with. Sure, having an advanced degree means that in a lot of jobs I get a slightly higher starting salary, but I've long since concluded that my salary'd be at the same level or higher if I'd spent those years gaining job experience. It was fun, but it ate up more of my life than it was worth.