The success of companies like Baen in selling DRM-free e-books to the SF-reading public has shown that, at least for SF and Fantasy readers, not having DRM tends to drive sales rather than piracy. The fact that when the Harry Potter books were released as e-books it was in a DRM-free form probably didn't hurt either. The interesting thing to see will be whether the current DRM-free trend spreads to works outside the SF and Fantasy genres.
Seriously? While some of those degrees look more like they belong at a technical school or a community college, some look legit to me. Also, academic Religious Studies (as I assume the Religion department is) tend to look at religion in a more anthropological and sociological perspective than a "belief and preaching" perspective. Thus, the typical Religious Studies department would be a very bad fit for a seminary.
IIRC, UW Seattle actually has one of the best "early college" programs around. In essence they take something like twenty or so 12 and 13 year olds, put them through a year long academic "boot camp" and then allow those who get through (usually 18 or 19 out of the 20) to enroll as freshmen. Unlike places like MIT, which enroll the occasional prodigy but have no real special services for them, the UW program provides services and specialized advising to the kids throughout their entire time in school, while also encouraging them to take part in extracurricular activities and maintain a social life both with their age-peers and academic peers. The program seems to work, so could that be an option for a kid like that?
P25 wasn't originally designed with security in mind. It was designed as a standardized digital replacement for the mess of incompatible digital and analog trunking systems that had grown up in the 80s and 90s. In its basic, as-designed, unencrypted mode, it works well. It's only when local PDs and FDs decide to try and lock out scanner users (nominally to keep criminals from listening, but more often to keep away TV news crews) by means of ill-conceived encryption addons that things fall apart.
The SX-70 may have been easier to use than the older stuff, but the older stuff actually had a much better image quality. The black and white Polaroid peel-apart materials were really good stuff, for example: Ansel Adams swore by the stuff (it could give him an instant preview of the shot AND with a little bit of care, a good negative to bring back to the darkroom, fix and make traditional prints from) Their color materials were less "high end" than the black and white materials but they still did a much better job at accurate color reproduction than could ever be hoped for from the SX-70.
Chances are, none. The well-known Alto (from 1973) and Star (from 1981) systems both did GUI stuff even earlier than the Blit. In fact, the Blit is actually the source of the notorious software patent #4555775 (on backing stores) which almost destroyed X11 in the early 90s...
They sold MaxDB to MySQL, who open sourced it. After MySQL and various contributors improved MaxDB to the point where it was useful, they bought it back and immediately closed the source. Those are pretty clearly the actions of a ardent foe of open source.
Even with better typography support, Word is still unsuitable for anything more complex than a letter to Grandma. That's because it still makes it harder to create structured documents than LaTeX does. If I'm writing a novel or a paper or something, the ability to simply say "\chapter{In Which I Make A Fool of Myself on Slashdot}" is MUCH easier than mucking with the mess that is Word's half-baked paragraph styles. The only thing Word does better than LaTeX is pictures.
So far, the "netowrk auto-magic shit" to which you refer, has served me quite well. Maybe you should turn it off for servers, but if you're connecting through a wireless card, it seems to work quite well. Better than NetworkManager on Linux, I would even venture.
I'm typing this from OpenSolaris 2008.11 and I'm actually surprised how "desktop-friendly" Solaris has actually become. The default GNOME-based desktop is gorgeous and works well. Hardware support may not be all that broad, but when hardware is supported it's REALLY supported: even booting off the live CD, my Atheros wireless card, NVidia 3D card and crappy on-mobo sound were "auto-magically" detected and set up. Performance is also quite snappy, even on my aging Athlon XP 3000+ with a measly 1 GB of RAM. In short, OpenSolaris is more than up to the task of working on Toshiba's new laptops.
Those were MY first experiments in programing. I built all sorts of little games in TI-BASIC, a few of which became popular around the school. I never moved on the Z80 assembler, but some do...
Actually, the C64-hosted website is holding up fairly well. I guess it's pretty sad that a C64 can survive a Slashdot influx, but some more normal site hosted in an actual server farm will die under a similar load.
Indeed they do. It's called "Exhaustion of Rights" and is an EU-wide legal doctrine. At least in Germany, interpretations of this have gone so far as to completely void the "no resale" clauses in licenses for products like AutoCAD and various OEM releases from M$, but I'm not sure if the French interpret it quite as broadly.
Actually, Northgate was separate tech, not licensed. It was very similar, but not the same as Model M. It has its own fans some of whom claim that it was way better than the IBM and holy wars ensued. Both were great and I wish that I had either.
I'm at least partly convinced that the ability to block "unauthorized" services using the fact that it's such a pain to run any kind of server from a machine behind a NAT router is one of the main reasons that the commercial internet industry has stuck with IPv4. If they moved to IPv6, their old "We can't give each of your computers a real IP address because we don't have enough to go around" excuse would fall apart and they would have to either start letting people run their own servers or they'd have to move to doing actual port blocking, which would look really bad.
Would folks be able to do things like create "non-wiki" versions of the online books for easier reference? Create new games based on but modified from old rules and texts? Write computer adaptations of the material? All these questions, and more, should be answered before this can rise to anything more than just a bit cool.
Slashdot Mirror
The success of companies like Baen in selling DRM-free e-books to the SF-reading public has shown that, at least for SF and Fantasy readers, not having DRM tends to drive sales rather than piracy. The fact that when the Harry Potter books were released as e-books it was in a DRM-free form probably didn't hurt either. The interesting thing to see will be whether the current DRM-free trend spreads to works outside the SF and Fantasy genres.
Seriously? While some of those degrees look more like they belong at a technical school or a community college, some look legit to me. Also, academic Religious Studies (as I assume the Religion department is) tend to look at religion in a more anthropological and sociological perspective than a "belief and preaching" perspective. Thus, the typical Religious Studies department would be a very bad fit for a seminary.
IIRC, UW Seattle actually has one of the best "early college" programs around. In essence they take something like twenty or so 12 and 13 year olds, put them through a year long academic "boot camp" and then allow those who get through (usually 18 or 19 out of the 20) to enroll as freshmen. Unlike places like MIT, which enroll the occasional prodigy but have no real special services for them, the UW program provides services and specialized advising to the kids throughout their entire time in school, while also encouraging them to take part in extracurricular activities and maintain a social life both with their age-peers and academic peers. The program seems to work, so could that be an option for a kid like that?
P25 wasn't originally designed with security in mind. It was designed as a standardized digital replacement for the mess of incompatible digital and analog trunking systems that had grown up in the 80s and 90s. In its basic, as-designed, unencrypted mode, it works well. It's only when local PDs and FDs decide to try and lock out scanner users (nominally to keep criminals from listening, but more often to keep away TV news crews) by means of ill-conceived encryption addons that things fall apart.
The SX-70 may have been easier to use than the older stuff, but the older stuff actually had a much better image quality. The black and white Polaroid peel-apart materials were really good stuff, for example: Ansel Adams swore by the stuff (it could give him an instant preview of the shot AND with a little bit of care, a good negative to bring back to the darkroom, fix and make traditional prints from) Their color materials were less "high end" than the black and white materials but they still did a much better job at accurate color reproduction than could ever be hoped for from the SX-70.
Chances are, none. The well-known Alto (from 1973) and Star (from 1981) systems both did GUI stuff even earlier than the Blit. In fact, the Blit is actually the source of the notorious software patent #4555775 (on backing stores) which almost destroyed X11 in the early 90s...
They sold MaxDB to MySQL, who open sourced it. After MySQL and various contributors improved MaxDB to the point where it was useful, they bought it back and immediately closed the source. Those are pretty clearly the actions of a ardent foe of open source.
Even with better typography support, Word is still unsuitable for anything more complex than a letter to Grandma. That's because it still makes it harder to create structured documents than LaTeX does. If I'm writing a novel or a paper or something, the ability to simply say "\chapter{In Which I Make A Fool of Myself on Slashdot}" is MUCH easier than mucking with the mess that is Word's half-baked paragraph styles. The only thing Word does better than LaTeX is pictures.
So far, the "netowrk auto-magic shit" to which you refer, has served me quite well. Maybe you should turn it off for servers, but if you're connecting through a wireless card, it seems to work quite well. Better than NetworkManager on Linux, I would even venture.
I'm typing this from OpenSolaris 2008.11 and I'm actually surprised how "desktop-friendly" Solaris has actually become. The default GNOME-based desktop is gorgeous and works well. Hardware support may not be all that broad, but when hardware is supported it's REALLY supported: even booting off the live CD, my Atheros wireless card, NVidia 3D card and crappy on-mobo sound were "auto-magically" detected and set up. Performance is also quite snappy, even on my aging Athlon XP 3000+ with a measly 1 GB of RAM. In short, OpenSolaris is more than up to the task of working on Toshiba's new laptops.
If VIA offered an IGP that didn't get blown out of the water by even a crappy old Intel GMA950...
Actually, the situation with OpenGL is MUCH more like the situation with upstream X during the XFree86 era...
Those were MY first experiments in programing. I built all sorts of little games in TI-BASIC, a few of which became popular around the school. I never moved on the Z80 assembler, but some do...
Actually, the C64-hosted website is holding up fairly well. I guess it's pretty sad that a C64 can survive a Slashdot influx, but some more normal site hosted in an actual server farm will die under a similar load.
Indeed they do. It's called "Exhaustion of Rights" and is an EU-wide legal doctrine. At least in Germany, interpretations of this have gone so far as to completely void the "no resale" clauses in licenses for products like AutoCAD and various OEM releases from M$, but I'm not sure if the French interpret it quite as broadly.
Here's the Wikipedia article, for what its worth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_of_rights
Actually, Northgate was separate tech, not licensed. It was very similar, but not the same as Model M. It has its own fans some of whom claim that it was way better than the IBM and holy wars ensued. Both were great and I wish that I had either.
I'm at least partly convinced that the ability to block "unauthorized" services using the fact that it's such a pain to run any kind of server from a machine behind a NAT router is one of the main reasons that the commercial internet industry has stuck with IPv4. If they moved to IPv6, their old "We can't give each of your computers a real IP address because we don't have enough to go around" excuse would fall apart and they would have to either start letting people run their own servers or they'd have to move to doing actual port blocking, which would look really bad.
Would folks be able to do things like create "non-wiki" versions of the online books for easier reference? Create new games based on but modified from old rules and texts? Write computer adaptations of the material? All these questions, and more, should be answered before this can rise to anything more than just a bit cool.