My family owns an iMac, and there is one where I work. Both are the LCD type and have all the ports in back. I can tell you that plugging things in is a pain. Things look nice, because there aren't cables hanging out the sides, but it's a trade off. If you are the kind of person who plugs stuff in all the time you really should get a USB hub and use that, because you don't want to have to reach behind the iMac all the time and feel around to plug things in or remove them.
That's what I've always figured their reasoning was. There isn't a ton of space on the MacBook either. But the MacBook could have just one card reader (like SD). On something like the iMac they could put them in back or on the bottom so you don't have to see them but they are easily accessed.
I like Macs. My family owns quite a few. I'm typing on a MacBook Pro that is only about 6 months old. But I still don't see why Apple doesn't put a media reader (of any kind) on their computers. They don't have to put 7 kinds, they could put even just one (like SD), but no. For all their "this is a Mac, this is easy" you still need to connect the camera with a cable or get a card reader. PCs have been doing this for so many years, this is one thing I can't quite figure out.
If it takes a year, don't you think it will be too late. Some of the kids will have already learned the concepts by then. They'll share the knowledge. Other kids (and adults) will hear about these concepts, and research them. Don't you think they'd notice that what they used to be able to look up, now they can't? Don't you think they'd question this?
If they wanted to do that, then a year is far too long. It will be too late by then.
I'll ignore all the normal arguments (like the fact there are other groups working on that kind of stuff). Let me ask you this:
Which is better? A disruptive technology now, or an infrastructure in 40 years?
If you give the kids laptops now, they learn to learn. They learn some physics. They learn some science. They learn some this, they learn some that. They are like renaissance people, learning a little about everything. They get the benefit of being able to look up the solutions other cultures have come up for to fix problem. They can improve their world in the next few years, even if in small ways. As they get older and more kid go through things, things improve. Some kids break out of the cycle, and they may decide to help donate to get others out.
Option two is to put up schools. We'll ignore the problem of keeping the funding going. You make the schools. If you can get the kids into the schools and get them to keep going (read the article to see how the OLPC is doing this), it's still 9 years to get the kid into the high-school range. They are limited by whatever materials they get. By the time they make a difference in the world, it may be 20+ years. It's a very long term investment. In the mean time, things won't change too much. Without the ability to go look up how someone solved problem X, they are forced to reinvent the wheel sometimes, slowing progress.
People have been trying the school option in the US and basically every other country on Earth for a long time. Charities have been setting up schools in poor countries (in Africa, South America, and other places, for example) for easily 30 years. Yet those countries still have these problems. Now we have a way that may improve things faster.
Worst case scenario: the kids stay in school and things happen the old-fashioned way.
All this ignores more immediate stuff. People in little villages would have to make pots, and toys, and many other things. There are people who, if given access (through eBay, for example) 10-100x what those people sell the things for right now. All they need is access to the market. It wouldn't take much of that to improve the lives of many people, spreading the wealth as they improved their lives.
It also saw Team Fortress 2 released. A game that has been in development much longer than Daikatana was, has seen complete rewrites, and would be the vaporware joke everyone knew about if it wasn't for DNF.
Not only did the game come out, it's fantastic. It keeps the great feel, has beautiful graphics that are nicely stylized, and works very well. It could use more maps (they're working on it), and the classes do feel very different as part of the balancing, but it's a great game overall.
Every once in a while, a game rises from the miasma of vaporware and is good. That has now happened once this century, which means that DNF is dead.
Yep. Now just tell me where I can get a 16 GB microSD card and I'll accept you as right. By the way, don't you think this device includes a housing too?
Even though the devices aren't even competing with each other. It's a tiny size for it's market segment and capacity.
Read the story. This isn't to replace SD cards. This is a little chip to be built onto the motherboard of cell phones or iPods to hold the data, and for that it is much smaller than other offerings.
I read this earlier. It was pretty interesting. But this and an article a little while ago (which may not have been on/.) about using a MAME driver and an oscilloscope to play vector games has brought a question up in my mind I'm hoping someone can answer. The articles I was able to find on Wikipedia mention that (at least the arcades) had little vector controllers so you didn't have to do that by hand in assembly. I'm guessing that this console is similar.
My question is how do you program it? The article on Wikipedia said that it had a little bit of command RAM so I'm guessing that you just send it special commands and parameters (MOVE TO X,Y... DRAW TO Q,Z... MOVE TO...), is that right? Do you have to optimize it yourself, or does it do some kind of simple optimization it's self?
Did they have things like sprites or Open GL's display lists (where you could predefine a little set of commands, to draw a little ship for example) thus making things faster, or did you always have to draw at the line level?
Can someone shed some light on this for me? I don't think I've ever even seen a vector display in real life other than my oscilloscope (which uses vectors to draw little snippets of text).
If he was my kid, he would have deserved what he got. He was right, but he went about it the wrong way, and that's what he was punished for. If he had talked to the teacher after class about this and was given detention for it, then i would agree with you. Interrupting the class was not the way to handle this. No one was being stabbed. No one was dying. No giant lies were being told that needed to be addressed (Nazis were good, the holocaust didn't happen, the government poisons the water with mind control drugs, whatever). He didn't need to escalate to where he did at that time. That is why he was punished.
The fact that the teacher was wrong (probably out of ignorance, if this wasn't a hoax) doesn't give the child license to act like a brat. Blindly defending the child since he was right (that FireFox is the same as IE) is the wrong tact to take here. The idea that you can ignore authority figures just because they are wrong is not the right message. If they are wrong, you talk to them about it. If they won't face facts, then you can eescallate. You don't start there... that just raises brats with no respect.
It's amazing how many people read what they want into my posts. I didn't say "just suck it up and take it", I said suck it up and take it for that period, then go discuss it and get it changed. My point was the time the kid put up his fight. I don't think the middle of the class was the right time for that (hypothetical, since this was a hoax) fight. I can easily see a teacher who is unsure of technology doing this. If you have a kid tell you "X is just like what you said to use", do you want to risk X being something that will destroy the computers, or just tell them to do what you know to be safe?
The teacher might have handled it wrong. They could have asked IT or another teacher or even a student they trust if they wanted to.
The kid definitely handled it wrong. This wasn't something worth disrupting class over.
Questioning authority is fine. It's good. But there is such a thing as decorum and acting properly. This wasn't something important enough to need fighting right there. It could have waited until class was over. That's my point.
That sounds like what the article was about, as I read it. It's not all that clear (because it was written for non-techies). The bee thing seemed to be about a way to get the servers to dynamically allocate themselves to various sites based on load in a way that will maximize the resources and the revenue (since they were describing a per-transaction system, doing 5 little cheap transactions may be better than 1 big expensive transaction).
I would have liked to know a little more too. My guess is that instead of having 100 servers, most sitting at 2% CPU and sleeping on and off, they could consolidate to 20 servers running at 20% CPU, the rest sleeping basically all the time. Heck, using SNMP they could physically power down the boxes if they had enough free, but I doubt they would do that.
What I got from reading the article was that they weren't optimizing the 'net at large but the services in one data center. By making the individual servers in the data center allocate themselves to the various hosted sites/services based on demand. Because of this, it's basically immune to external cheating, after all there is no point. If they were changing who's packets went through their network on the way to somewhere else, there would be a reason to cheat.
The article makes perfect sense, but the domain seems a little limited to me. You have to be able to quantize things. You have to be able to shift things around (make server A be able to pick role X, Y, or Z based on which is better at the moment). In some problem sets this would be easy. For example the/. setup that was described a while back where they have a few boxes doing this, a few doing that, and they all work off the same read only NSF share. It would be easy to move the boxes that run user pages between that and static pages. It could help there.
On the other hand, the boxes couldn't switch between being web and DB boxes very fast (you would have to load up all that data) so you couldn't let the boxes choose between those two roles (you'd lose most all your benefit from the expense of the switch).
The teacher is the authority. They said "close program X", the kid needed to close program X. The kid tried to prove their point, it didn't work, they need to do what the teacher said. You take the issue up after class with the teacher or the principal. The kid just wasted class time and acted inappropriately.
By the time I write this, we know it's a hoax. But that doesn't matter. If the story was true, the kid still acted wrong because they didn't obey the teacher at that moment. No one was in danger. It wasn't that urgent. He just wanted to look cool or more powerful. He was behaving inappropriately.
Rules are created for a purpose. But if you want them changed, then you need to try to get them changed. You don't just start ignoring them. Are you telling me that Jefferson and Washington went straight to declaring themselves independent? Or did they try to get it changed and then when that didn't work they did it?
They tried it the correct way first. When that didn't work they moved on to stronger tactics.
The kid wasn't in danger by following the rule for the next 45 minutes until he could talk to someone about it. He over-reacted.
That's obnoxious. If this was the second time this happened, after having talked to the principal about this, that would be one thing. But it is a stupid idea to just decide to disobey as soon as you think some rule is arbitrary or capricious. This isn't an adult. He's not free. He's in school. Going over the teacher's head and getting them overruled doesn't teach the teacher they are more powerful. Throwing a tantrum in class by being disobedient simply shows which of the two of you are more mature.
The first step in standing up for yourself and fighting back is trying the correct channels. You don't start civil disobedience and other such things until that has failed or proven unworkable.
You stand up for yourself. It's just not the first thing you can go to. Making the teacher look like an idiot because they don't know something they aren't trained on does nothing but cause problems. The kid had other options.
Both Fords and Audis are licensed to drive on the road, thus a police office can't do that. You're right that the teacher should be teaching the concept and not the tool. But in the middle of class is not the time for that point. You discuss that with the teacher or principal after class. You don't just sit there and do a metaphorical "screw you" by ignoring their rules.
There is nothing wrong with questioning authority. But that wasn't the time or place, and it wasn't an issue so dire that it couldn't wait (like if they said don't give CPR to someone who passed out, that would be something that couldn't wait).
The teacher needs instruction. Agreed. But that is the kind of thing to take up with the principal. That doesn't make it OK for the kid to disobey the teacher.
The kid wasn't ordered to shoot himself in the foot. He was told not to use an un-approved program.
Cut the hyperbole. Your example doesn't apply.
He wasn't being told to do something illegal. He wasn't be told to do something that could cause physical harm to someone. The teacher was in charge, and if he wouldn't stop he deserved what he got. The correct thing to do would be to stop and then talk to someone more powerful (like the principal) about getting that policy changed.
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My family owns an iMac, and there is one where I work. Both are the LCD type and have all the ports in back. I can tell you that plugging things in is a pain. Things look nice, because there aren't cables hanging out the sides, but it's a trade off. If you are the kind of person who plugs stuff in all the time you really should get a USB hub and use that, because you don't want to have to reach behind the iMac all the time and feel around to plug things in or remove them.
That's what I've always figured their reasoning was. There isn't a ton of space on the MacBook either. But the MacBook could have just one card reader (like SD). On something like the iMac they could put them in back or on the bottom so you don't have to see them but they are easily accessed.
I like Macs. My family owns quite a few. I'm typing on a MacBook Pro that is only about 6 months old. But I still don't see why Apple doesn't put a media reader (of any kind) on their computers. They don't have to put 7 kinds, they could put even just one (like SD), but no. For all their "this is a Mac, this is easy" you still need to connect the camera with a cable or get a card reader. PCs have been doing this for so many years, this is one thing I can't quite figure out.
That just means the blender isn't big enough.
Mwahahahahaha
If it takes a year, don't you think it will be too late. Some of the kids will have already learned the concepts by then. They'll share the knowledge. Other kids (and adults) will hear about these concepts, and research them. Don't you think they'd notice that what they used to be able to look up, now they can't? Don't you think they'd question this?
If they wanted to do that, then a year is far too long. It will be too late by then.
I'll ignore all the normal arguments (like the fact there are other groups working on that kind of stuff). Let me ask you this:
Which is better? A disruptive technology now, or an infrastructure in 40 years?
If you give the kids laptops now, they learn to learn. They learn some physics. They learn some science. They learn some this, they learn some that. They are like renaissance people, learning a little about everything. They get the benefit of being able to look up the solutions other cultures have come up for to fix problem. They can improve their world in the next few years, even if in small ways. As they get older and more kid go through things, things improve. Some kids break out of the cycle, and they may decide to help donate to get others out.
Option two is to put up schools. We'll ignore the problem of keeping the funding going. You make the schools. If you can get the kids into the schools and get them to keep going (read the article to see how the OLPC is doing this), it's still 9 years to get the kid into the high-school range. They are limited by whatever materials they get. By the time they make a difference in the world, it may be 20+ years. It's a very long term investment. In the mean time, things won't change too much. Without the ability to go look up how someone solved problem X, they are forced to reinvent the wheel sometimes, slowing progress.
People have been trying the school option in the US and basically every other country on Earth for a long time. Charities have been setting up schools in poor countries (in Africa, South America, and other places, for example) for easily 30 years. Yet those countries still have these problems. Now we have a way that may improve things faster.
Worst case scenario: the kids stay in school and things happen the old-fashioned way.
All this ignores more immediate stuff. People in little villages would have to make pots, and toys, and many other things. There are people who, if given access (through eBay, for example) 10-100x what those people sell the things for right now. All they need is access to the market. It wouldn't take much of that to improve the lives of many people, spreading the wealth as they improved their lives.
If only they had hired the guy from Coke.
It also saw Team Fortress 2 released. A game that has been in development much longer than Daikatana was, has seen complete rewrites, and would be the vaporware joke everyone knew about if it wasn't for DNF.
Not only did the game come out, it's fantastic. It keeps the great feel, has beautiful graphics that are nicely stylized, and works very well. It could use more maps (they're working on it), and the classes do feel very different as part of the balancing, but it's a great game overall.
Every once in a while, a game rises from the miasma of vaporware and is good. That has now happened once this century, which means that DNF is dead.
Really?
There was a game.
Thanks for the response. I'm glad that someone else here seems to see and agree with my point.
Yep. Now just tell me where I can get a 16 GB microSD card and I'll accept you as right. By the way, don't you think this device includes a housing too?
Even though the devices aren't even competing with each other. It's a tiny size for it's market segment and capacity.
Read the story. This isn't to replace SD cards. This is a little chip to be built onto the motherboard of cell phones or iPods to hold the data, and for that it is much smaller than other offerings.
I read this earlier. It was pretty interesting. But this and an article a little while ago (which may not have been on /.) about using a MAME driver and an oscilloscope to play vector games has brought a question up in my mind I'm hoping someone can answer. The articles I was able to find on Wikipedia mention that (at least the arcades) had little vector controllers so you didn't have to do that by hand in assembly. I'm guessing that this console is similar.
My question is how do you program it? The article on Wikipedia said that it had a little bit of command RAM so I'm guessing that you just send it special commands and parameters (MOVE TO X,Y... DRAW TO Q,Z... MOVE TO...), is that right? Do you have to optimize it yourself, or does it do some kind of simple optimization it's self?
Did they have things like sprites or Open GL's display lists (where you could predefine a little set of commands, to draw a little ship for example) thus making things faster, or did you always have to draw at the line level?
Can someone shed some light on this for me? I don't think I've ever even seen a vector display in real life other than my oscilloscope (which uses vectors to draw little snippets of text).
If he was my kid, he would have deserved what he got. He was right, but he went about it the wrong way, and that's what he was punished for. If he had talked to the teacher after class about this and was given detention for it, then i would agree with you. Interrupting the class was not the way to handle this. No one was being stabbed. No one was dying. No giant lies were being told that needed to be addressed (Nazis were good, the holocaust didn't happen, the government poisons the water with mind control drugs, whatever). He didn't need to escalate to where he did at that time. That is why he was punished.
The fact that the teacher was wrong (probably out of ignorance, if this wasn't a hoax) doesn't give the child license to act like a brat. Blindly defending the child since he was right (that FireFox is the same as IE) is the wrong tact to take here. The idea that you can ignore authority figures just because they are wrong is not the right message. If they are wrong, you talk to them about it. If they won't face facts, then you can eescallate. You don't start there... that just raises brats with no respect.
It's amazing how many people read what they want into my posts. I didn't say "just suck it up and take it", I said suck it up and take it for that period, then go discuss it and get it changed. My point was the time the kid put up his fight. I don't think the middle of the class was the right time for that (hypothetical, since this was a hoax) fight. I can easily see a teacher who is unsure of technology doing this. If you have a kid tell you "X is just like what you said to use", do you want to risk X being something that will destroy the computers, or just tell them to do what you know to be safe?
The teacher might have handled it wrong. They could have asked IT or another teacher or even a student they trust if they wanted to.
The kid definitely handled it wrong. This wasn't something worth disrupting class over.
Questioning authority is fine. It's good. But there is such a thing as decorum and acting properly. This wasn't something important enough to need fighting right there. It could have waited until class was over. That's my point.
That sounds like what the article was about, as I read it. It's not all that clear (because it was written for non-techies). The bee thing seemed to be about a way to get the servers to dynamically allocate themselves to various sites based on load in a way that will maximize the resources and the revenue (since they were describing a per-transaction system, doing 5 little cheap transactions may be better than 1 big expensive transaction).
I would have liked to know a little more too. My guess is that instead of having 100 servers, most sitting at 2% CPU and sleeping on and off, they could consolidate to 20 servers running at 20% CPU, the rest sleeping basically all the time. Heck, using SNMP they could physically power down the boxes if they had enough free, but I doubt they would do that.
What I got from reading the article was that they weren't optimizing the 'net at large but the services in one data center. By making the individual servers in the data center allocate themselves to the various hosted sites/services based on demand. Because of this, it's basically immune to external cheating, after all there is no point. If they were changing who's packets went through their network on the way to somewhere else, there would be a reason to cheat.
The article makes perfect sense, but the domain seems a little limited to me. You have to be able to quantize things. You have to be able to shift things around (make server A be able to pick role X, Y, or Z based on which is better at the moment). In some problem sets this would be easy. For example the /. setup that was described a while back where they have a few boxes doing this, a few doing that, and they all work off the same read only NSF share. It would be easy to move the boxes that run user pages between that and static pages. It could help there.
On the other hand, the boxes couldn't switch between being web and DB boxes very fast (you would have to load up all that data) so you couldn't let the boxes choose between those two roles (you'd lose most all your benefit from the expense of the switch).
The choices have to be relatively homogeneous.
The teacher is the authority. They said "close program X", the kid needed to close program X. The kid tried to prove their point, it didn't work, they need to do what the teacher said. You take the issue up after class with the teacher or the principal. The kid just wasted class time and acted inappropriately.
By the time I write this, we know it's a hoax. But that doesn't matter. If the story was true, the kid still acted wrong because they didn't obey the teacher at that moment. No one was in danger. It wasn't that urgent. He just wanted to look cool or more powerful. He was behaving inappropriately.
Rules are created for a purpose. But if you want them changed, then you need to try to get them changed. You don't just start ignoring them. Are you telling me that Jefferson and Washington went straight to declaring themselves independent? Or did they try to get it changed and then when that didn't work they did it?
They tried it the correct way first. When that didn't work they moved on to stronger tactics.
The kid wasn't in danger by following the rule for the next 45 minutes until he could talk to someone about it. He over-reacted.
That's obnoxious. If this was the second time this happened, after having talked to the principal about this, that would be one thing. But it is a stupid idea to just decide to disobey as soon as you think some rule is arbitrary or capricious. This isn't an adult. He's not free. He's in school. Going over the teacher's head and getting them overruled doesn't teach the teacher they are more powerful. Throwing a tantrum in class by being disobedient simply shows which of the two of you are more mature.
The first step in standing up for yourself and fighting back is trying the correct channels. You don't start civil disobedience and other such things until that has failed or proven unworkable.
You stand up for yourself. It's just not the first thing you can go to. Making the teacher look like an idiot because they don't know something they aren't trained on does nothing but cause problems. The kid had other options.
Both Fords and Audis are licensed to drive on the road, thus a police office can't do that. You're right that the teacher should be teaching the concept and not the tool. But in the middle of class is not the time for that point. You discuss that with the teacher or principal after class. You don't just sit there and do a metaphorical "screw you" by ignoring their rules.
There is nothing wrong with questioning authority. But that wasn't the time or place, and it wasn't an issue so dire that it couldn't wait (like if they said don't give CPR to someone who passed out, that would be something that couldn't wait).
The teacher needs instruction. Agreed. But that is the kind of thing to take up with the principal. That doesn't make it OK for the kid to disobey the teacher.
Yes. It's a stupid rule, but it's the rule. He can talk to someone (like the principal) about it during another time. You can't just be a scofflaw.
The kid wasn't ordered to shoot himself in the foot. He was told not to use an un-approved program.
Cut the hyperbole. Your example doesn't apply.
He wasn't being told to do something illegal. He wasn't be told to do something that could cause physical harm to someone. The teacher was in charge, and if he wouldn't stop he deserved what he got. The correct thing to do would be to stop and then talk to someone more powerful (like the principal) about getting that policy changed.