Photography is a hobby of mine, and everything I know about cameras I've learned from books and experimentation. Sorry that my post came across are ire, it was really meant as to statement to get across disbelief. The more I learned about cameras, the more I realized how BAD people are at using them. This was one thing with "normal" film cameras, but digital cameras seem to have taken things to a new level. The ability to see what you are about to shoot on a screen instead of a viewfinder mesmerizes people. They don't use the viewfinder any more, they use the screen. And of course they hold the camera at arm's length (thereby introducing maximum camera shake) so that they can see the screen easily.
The screen on digital cameras is meant for reviewing or sharing pictures, but people seem to use them for composing far more. I've told people this (and given them the suggestion that they'll get better pictures with the viewfinder because of reduced camera shake and steadying introduced by holding the camera to your hear) to be argued with or doubted. I've even had someone tell me that DSLRs basically have a design flaw in that they are a digital camera where you can't see the picture you're about to take on the LCD screen.
As weird as it seems to me, THE reason to own a digital camera seems to be so you can take a picture by looking at an LCD screen. Other than that there is the "no film" thing, but the LCD screen seems to be what matters.
This stuff just amazes me. No one ever seems to be taught to use a camera, a problem that digital cameras exacerbate for various reasons.
People really don't seem to realize the difference between camera quality either. If they did, you wouldn't see people using cellphone cameras for any important event like a graduation or something. But a digital camera is a digital camera, it would seem. Other than that most people seem to think that the general rule of technology applies: smaller means better. The exception to this is big DSLRs, but the $1000+ price tag would tell you that any way.
As for the camera-phones, most take terrible pictures. But my monkey comment was meant to refer to the famous 1,000,000 monkeys writing Shakespeare idea. The more people photograph something, the higher the chances someone will get a good photo no matter how bad the conditions. Just the law of averages.
Your average person knows NOTHING about a camera. Look at people at the next event you go to. At my college graduation a few months ago there were a couple of kind of people. One was the "pros" who had DSLRs and such and maybe got decent pictures (it was rather dark in the hall). Next was the prosumers who got OK pictures. After that was the point & shooters who got terrible pictures (both due to camera reasons and holding the camera at arm's length). Last was the people trying to use cell phones as cameras (again, at arms length).
Talk to people. It's amazing how little they know about cameras or how to take a decent picture.
The only reason we'll see more and more pictures from camera phones etc. are people being in the right place at the right time, and the 2000 monkeys effect where with that many camera-phones, at least one person has a chance of getting a decent/good shot.
No kidding. Doesn't that call to mind half the programs you've seen written in VB and such? They may work for prototyping, or a little app for a small business, but you start scaling them up and those kind of things become disasters. I agree COMPLETELY with he statement that we have too many "programmers" who can't program right now. A large chunk of my job (as a programmer) is integration with other people's systems. And while I can tell you our system is hardly perfect, it looks like a panacea of brilliance compared to some of the things I've run across.
As a third world country, why should I buy this for $400 when I can buy OLPCs for like $150?
As someone in a first world country, why should I buy this when I can buy a REAL laptop for $400 or under thanks to sales, rebates, the used/refurbished/surplus market, etc?
As for the optical drive, this made be think that I use mine for two things: ripping CDs and installing software. I can see why someone wouldn't need on in an OLPC type situation (or where they want to sell these), not to mention that they are fragile (relative to flash memory and other parts of the computer).
I agree. I expect the next version of the TiVo software for Series 2 (whether 8.2 or 9.0 or whatever) will break this, and they'll release a new version of the Windows software. I'm not sure how they'd tag the video that wouldn't be easily strippable, but that really doesn't matter to me as at most I would use this for watching sitcoms on my iPod.
You're right about being like DTiVos. That is exactly how DTiVos work, as well as how the TiVo works on the digital channels (HDTV included). Analog channels are still recorded with an A2D unit so you can choose quality. There are technically 6 tuners in the box (2 over the air HDTV, 2 analog/cable, 2 digital cable).
Cable labs won't certify the thing for recording digital content and HDTV, but I don't see why they couldn't have enabled multi-room viewing for analog shows, but I'm not surprised. I'm also surprised you can't use it as a view-only box for watching shows off of TiVo series 2 units.
I guess they'd rather do it all the way than confuse people with a half-implementation. Of course, this is all Cable Lab's and DRM's fault because they law was written to give them that permission to hold features like this indefinitely.
I agree. I've wished for years there was some kind of system where I could press a button and report a complaint on a car. You could chose a simple complaint (tailgating, speeding, going too slow, running lights, etc) and then it would be tied to their license plate. These would be agregated and people who get high numbers of complaints (i.e., the worst drivers) could then be "investigated" and ticketed. Bonus points for putting a camera in every car and attaching a little video clip so you can show the guy weaving through 20mph rush hour traffic at 70mph being an idiot so he can be fined.
As is the only way is to call the police and report it, but unless the guy is being REALLY unsafe, it's usually not worth the time (or they wouldn't go after the guy unless a cop just happened to be nearby).
Say what you will about black-boxes in cars, the way the local college students drive I'd vote for them. Heck, forget the college students, look at the general population around here and they seem like a good idea (especially when it gets rainy or snowy and the idiots come out who thing you should driver faster to get home sooner).
Sorry, but I've got to call you on that one. I'm a Mac user and I love my Tivo (I've now got a Series 3). I can't extract video because I have the S3, but I don't have much desire to any way.
That said...
They can't really complain (emphasis mine) when those users decide to support themselves, giving themselves the same abilities that TiVo provide to Windows users...
That's false. People will want the functionality, but TiVo certainly reserves the right to complain.
That's like buying a little Ford Focus and being mad that you can't tow 3000lbs. You knew that going in. The one exception is the people who bought their Series 2 before HMO was available.
They bought it when it wasn't even an option for Windows users.
TiVo did the smart thing and went after the largest share of the market first. I agree they should add Mac support (Linux is another argument), but they didn't give up their right to control access to their box because they didn't do what you (or someone else) wanted.
It won't. Series 3 do not have the necessary feature enabled because Cable Labs won't let them (yet). Look for it in a future release (if hell freezes over).
For getting video off a Series 3, I worry that it will take an external drive (once they enable THAT) and then get the files that way.
I say all this as a Series 3 owner who, really, doesn't have a ton of use for extracting video.
Zelda does have two glaring flaws in my opinion. I've been playing it and it's a great game. I've got about 9 hours into it so far. But there are the graphics, which look perfectly Game Cube (not even top end Game Cube, some other games looked better) and the Wiimote (which except for aiming arrows/the slingshot often feels tacked on). If I were to give it a score for a gaming magazine I'd drag it down for that.
If it came out on the 'cube, it's scores would be near perfect. I'm talking 99% range.
I forgot to mention that suspend on my Mac takes next to no power. When I wake it up I've seen it's little battery indicator say that it has enough juice for 10 days or so. I seriously doubt that, but I've left it suspended all day with no AC adapter and seen next to no battery loss so it may be possible. It's not as little power use as turning it off, but the time savings are enormous.
Well with a Desktop you can suspend to disk and then come back rather quickly, with a power off in between. This way you get the power savings, but you also get the fast "boot" time.
But let's look at me. I had a Dell laptop at school. I'd use it at home. Turn it off. Take it to school. Turn it on for class. Use it. Turn it off. Take it to next class/home and repeat. Suspend was very iffy (and didn't help much in the battery life department).
Then I got a Powerbook G4 (which I still use today). Run it at home. Close the lid. Take it to school. Open the lid. IT WAS READY. Within 3 seconds I could start working. When I'm done? No "Start->This->that" to be sure it worked. Just close the lid. I know some PCs worked that way, mine never did (reliably) that I remember. Next class/home? Open the lid. If it got low on power, I'd plug it in. My little laptop has had up to 3 months of uptime (mostly due to major security updates that require restarts). I NEVER need to turn it off. The last time I did was when I was going on an airplane (didn't know if they'd like it suspended during takeoff/landing). It boots relatively fast, but nothing compared to waking up and going to sleep.
If you're a desktop user, I understand your comment. But as a laptop user who has had the pleasure of a Mac, a fast reliable suspend is a HUGE time saver.
Now I'll note that some other people at my school had newer laptops that could suspend/resume just fine. But they took much longer. Some of them approached boot time length, some could do it in 20-30 seconds. No PC there matched my Mac (note: I never asked the few Linux users if they had it working on their laptops). I could suspend/resume my Mac 3 times with ease in the time it took the fastest XP users (and I'll ignore the "Click here to sign on" screen most of them didn't disable).
Well, I should warn you my school was in a very wealthy suburb. When I first started going there I was AMAZED at the parking lot. Not only do most of the kids old enough to drive have cars, more than a few had BMWs and such. There were Civics, but they were usually rather new. The school had cash to hire a very good staff.
I agree with you completely though. If I had this experience at my school (didn't get the kind of classes I wanted, to a degree) what chance does the local high school have? Some of the local public schools were VERY nice and could compete to a very good degree with my school thanks to the local population's relative wealth. Then again, the HS I would have gone to at the time (they since built a new, very nice one) looked terrible and like it was falling apart and unsafe in comparison. That was one of the major reasons my family went with the school we did. It seemed quite a bit safer than the public school I'd have gone to (not to mention the academic record of the two schools).
There are reasons for some of this (I blame teachers unions for some of this, since they fight so hard against any kind of reward system for teachers who do a good job). There is the fact that everyone in the US must get an education. If they don't want one? Too bad, stick 'em in the schools anyway. You can't screw up or be apathetic enough to get kicked out of school. If you can opt out somehow (like to a trade school), most people probably don't know it. Those kind of kids need to be out of the school (whether they want to go learn welding at a trade school and start their future, or just deliver pizzas the rest of their life and give up on school).
But like I said, I'm not claiming to have the answers. Just giving my experience.
We could too. We we a short ways from the local community college and there was a microscopic (4 or 5 room) satellite campus for some little university next to my school so those opportunities were there. But to do that you had to have completed X, Y, and Z and so on. And when they let you do it, it tended only to be for things that you were past (like to take a higher level of math or English). So if you wanted to take an art course or something, you couldn't (as I remember). I don't think they'd let you use it for electives.
I graduated in 2001 from a private Catholic high school that I actually liked quite a bit. However, there were still "problems". Let's ignore the obvious social stuff (which, to a very large degree, can never be fixed) and the fact that I just like smaller schools better.
What was there to hold my interest? There was a Drafting class that I found fascinating, but Drafting 2 was never offered because they couldn't get enough students. I got up through Physics 2, and we had Calc. But I liked computer and the only computer classes were typing, how to use office, and a very basic C++ class (all of which I knew by that time by teaching myself). The rest of the classes tended to bore me (except the ones on the history of the Church, because that was stuff that I hadn't heard before). The only other class I remember really liking was the Econ class because the teacher did a fantastic job (but most other students though it was boring... it was Econ after all). I kind of liked Psychology, but the teacher for that was terrible and while he seemed to be interested in the subject, he wasn't an enjoyable professor (quite dry, by the book, do this, do that). Some other teachers were just terrible (the Calc guy was as stiff as a board and just about killed my interest in Math). There was also Accounting and Business Law which appealed to me. But nearly every one of these classes I liked had a good teacher (important and hard to control) and was optional or had other more common substitutes (so if you didn't go looking to take it, chances are you wouldn't).
There wasn't much in the way of arts classes at all that I remember. If they were there they were purely optional. You had to take Gym. They did offer some interesting things (like Ballroom Dancing, which I regret not taking).
I didn't have nearly as much problems in College because I got to take the classes I was interested in (CS) along side requirements (some of which, like Sociology, I found interesting). High schools have become VERY focused on getting you into college (and every grade before on getting you into that next grade). My HS was college prep too (they advertised that). To a certain degree, I wonder how well anyone who goes through a decent American HS is prepared for the world. They seem to be like middle school now. It's EXPECTED you'll go to college. If you don't, you're either in a no skill job or you go to trade school. How about offering a metal shop class? We didn't have that, but it would have been fun. We were too college prep for that. No wood shop.
I'm not going to claim I know how to fix 'em. It's complex. But I know they did very little to encourage independent learning in the core classes unless you had a FANTASTIC teacher or you already liked the subject. Otherwise, it was "strictly business". And the less advanced your school (like a poorer one), the worse that all might be.
I haven't connected yet. I can get it to talk to my access point, but it won't get an IP address by DHCP. When I gave it a static one, that didn't work. I'm going to try having it connect to another AP in my house tonight. The one I've been using is an Apple Airport Express that I've never had a problem with. My error was 53010 or something like that (I looked it up on Nintendo's site).
I've heard about this problem, and it does make me worry some.
Then again, I also found the weird tip on Nintendo's web site that you can speed up downloads by making sure your AP is on channel 1 or 11. I've heard complaints about how "fast" things were, so maybe that's it.
Then again, none of this matters to me until they release Bonk's adventure, which I really want to buy. The games I own (Wii Sports, Red Steel, Twilight Princess) aren't multiplayer over the net.
I use iPhoto and besides albums I can assign keywords to the pictures making it easy to search by keyword. If iPhoto is not enough then Aperature is supposed to provide even more so I assume it would have better organizational stuff too.
Of course, both require a Mac.
But I love iPhoto. All my photos have names, ratings, and a set a keywords with everything from file type to portrait/landscape, to camera model and lens (I, of course, had to set all these).
That was a REALLY cheesy TV series in the 60s or so called "Roger Ramjet", your little song (to the tune of Yankee Doodle, right?) is a bit of a parody of it.
I agree, see if you can get a case. See if you can get it class action. Breach of privacy, lack of due diligence, there has got to be more than a few regulations that were broken. When I worked as a student aid at my college I had to sign paperwork and read some laws about how to handle student data to prevent all this kind of stuff. He should be liable under those laws (as should the school).
I'm not a lawyer, but I bet you can find one that will take your case.
School respond to two things: lawyers and money. You don't have enough of #2 (you can't with hold your yearly $10,000,000 donation) so #1 is your only hope.
I once saw something about this on TV years and years ago. People might feel a phantom limb with a fist grasped so tightly it hurt (like the fingernails in the palm and everything). It was supposed to be horrible (and I'm sure it was).
The report was on a doctor who had developed a box that the patient stuck their real arm in and using mirrors they could see both arms (obviously just a reflection). By having the patient put their "arms" in clenched and talking to them and having them relax them and thinking about unclenching the fist, it would work. The pain would go away because their brain "saw" that the first was unclenched where as before they couldn't see that. I don't know how long it worked, if it needed to be re-done every six months or whatever, but this isn't out of the blue.
To me this sounds like a simple off-hand comment and unlikely to happen.
That said, can someone who is more familiar with the whole thing tell me: did has opening Solaris had much of an effect at all in any way? Has it stopped market share loss? Increased market share? Increased software availability? Has anything really changed?
I know it was set for the Mac. I just don't remember MS making a ton of hype about it before release for the XBox. I'm not saying it was unmentioned, but it seems like I was constantly hearing about Oddworld. You'd hear about PGR, Jet Set Radio Future (PLEASE MAKE ANOTHER SEQUEL), DOA3, and Malice. But I don't remember the Halo hype much at all (especially compared to just how popular the game became).
I always thought the odd thing was that MS TOTALLY MISSED Halo. I heard basically nothing about it until it became popular after release. I think they were prepping Oddworld: Munch's Odyssey (a good game) to be "the" game for the XBox.
Kind of like CBS. They bought CSI, stuck it in a time slot, and practically forgot about it. They promoted their remake of The Fugitive to no end. The Fugitive flopped, CSI became HUGE and spawned clones and spin-offs.
I went to a state school for a few years, then switched to DeVry's Computer Information Systems program for variety of reasons. Here is what I can tell you. I don't remember any final project at the state school's CS program (big school, nice school). I got great CS classes while I was there though (theory and such). At DeVry I didn't get the impression that they taught nearly as much theory and some of the stuff I learned (of course, I transfered in half-way through).
HOWEVER, DeVry was very business focused. Everything was about business. How to write business apps in VB (a basic into to VB course that most businesses degrees had to have). Building dynamic web sites (built a little storefront and shopping cart), the database classes (here is how to optimize, business cases you'll come across, when to put business logic into or rules into the DB, etc).
The final project was something that REALLY helped me. While we had had classes about the software life cycle (including a proposal project during that where we "designed" and pitched a system to a fake client). But the final project was the real deal.
Take a real client (they had companies that wanted things, I did mine for DeVry but that was not normal). The client has something they want done (or you can come up with an idea and pitch it to a company). You have to get accepted by the faculty teaching the course. In the 15 weeks you had to design and implement the application (or upgrades to existing application). The design had to be approved by the faculty (especially the DB). Various changed would need approval. There was a long list of requirements for projects. It HAD to be done in teams (2-5, almost ALWAYS 3-4). You had to gather the requirements yourself. You had to check in with the client numerous times on how your progress was going, to give them a demo of the system, etc. At the end of it all you gave a presentation to the professor, the class, and the client about what you did, how you designed it, how it turned out, problems you faced, etc.
We were basically consultants for credit.
All the degrees had something like this (the EE ones were often a ton of fun to watch, because they didn't have clients and came up with some neat gadgets some times, or one friend updated an old control system for a local astronomy telescope and added scheduling and such).
This REALLY helped me. Not only did it give me tons of experience (including even more with facing deadlines, partners not holding up their end, having to make design changes in the middle, etc) but it gave me GREAT stuff to talk about at job interviews. Half the questions they would ask ("When was a time", "Have you ever made a decision that you found out too late...") were perfectly suited to my project work. My particular project probably helped me get my job (because some of the elements are similar).
Plus there was just the accomplishment. I made a Java based app to help students figure out their possible schedules for each semester instead of doing it on paper. I know for a fact that now (it's been 2 semesters since I graduated I think) they ARE using it. I know that they were going to show it to corporate (I wrote it for my local DeVry, though there was nothing specific), but I don't know what will happen from them. They have only contacted me once about a problem which I fixed for them (I worked as a student aid there too so they knew me well). My little app was a Java applet that hit an SQL server for data. My job that I got is all Java with TONS of SQL, so my project ended up very relevant (and being able to pull it up for the interviewer straight off the real site and show it to them was a major plus too).
Now all that said, as I was leaving DeVry was shifting to MUCH more specific programs for CS and becoming even less general which I think was a terrible idea. I'll also say quite frankly that my time at the state school taught me thinks that I don't think I would have ever learned otherwise.
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Photography is a hobby of mine, and everything I know about cameras I've learned from books and experimentation. Sorry that my post came across are ire, it was really meant as to statement to get across disbelief. The more I learned about cameras, the more I realized how BAD people are at using them. This was one thing with "normal" film cameras, but digital cameras seem to have taken things to a new level. The ability to see what you are about to shoot on a screen instead of a viewfinder mesmerizes people. They don't use the viewfinder any more, they use the screen. And of course they hold the camera at arm's length (thereby introducing maximum camera shake) so that they can see the screen easily.
The screen on digital cameras is meant for reviewing or sharing pictures, but people seem to use them for composing far more. I've told people this (and given them the suggestion that they'll get better pictures with the viewfinder because of reduced camera shake and steadying introduced by holding the camera to your hear) to be argued with or doubted. I've even had someone tell me that DSLRs basically have a design flaw in that they are a digital camera where you can't see the picture you're about to take on the LCD screen.
As weird as it seems to me, THE reason to own a digital camera seems to be so you can take a picture by looking at an LCD screen. Other than that there is the "no film" thing, but the LCD screen seems to be what matters.
This stuff just amazes me. No one ever seems to be taught to use a camera, a problem that digital cameras exacerbate for various reasons.
People really don't seem to realize the difference between camera quality either. If they did, you wouldn't see people using cellphone cameras for any important event like a graduation or something. But a digital camera is a digital camera, it would seem. Other than that most people seem to think that the general rule of technology applies: smaller means better. The exception to this is big DSLRs, but the $1000+ price tag would tell you that any way.
As for the camera-phones, most take terrible pictures. But my monkey comment was meant to refer to the famous 1,000,000 monkeys writing Shakespeare idea. The more people photograph something, the higher the chances someone will get a good photo no matter how bad the conditions. Just the law of averages.
Your average person knows NOTHING about a camera. Look at people at the next event you go to. At my college graduation a few months ago there were a couple of kind of people. One was the "pros" who had DSLRs and such and maybe got decent pictures (it was rather dark in the hall). Next was the prosumers who got OK pictures. After that was the point & shooters who got terrible pictures (both due to camera reasons and holding the camera at arm's length). Last was the people trying to use cell phones as cameras (again, at arms length).
Talk to people. It's amazing how little they know about cameras or how to take a decent picture.
The only reason we'll see more and more pictures from camera phones etc. are people being in the right place at the right time, and the 2000 monkeys effect where with that many camera-phones, at least one person has a chance of getting a decent/good shot.
No kidding. Doesn't that call to mind half the programs you've seen written in VB and such? They may work for prototyping, or a little app for a small business, but you start scaling them up and those kind of things become disasters. I agree COMPLETELY with he statement that we have too many "programmers" who can't program right now. A large chunk of my job (as a programmer) is integration with other people's systems. And while I can tell you our system is hardly perfect, it looks like a panacea of brilliance compared to some of the things I've run across.
As a third world country, why should I buy this for $400 when I can buy OLPCs for like $150?
As someone in a first world country, why should I buy this when I can buy a REAL laptop for $400 or under thanks to sales, rebates, the used/refurbished/surplus market, etc?
As for the optical drive, this made be think that I use mine for two things: ripping CDs and installing software. I can see why someone wouldn't need on in an OLPC type situation (or where they want to sell these), not to mention that they are fragile (relative to flash memory and other parts of the computer).
I agree. I expect the next version of the TiVo software for Series 2 (whether 8.2 or 9.0 or whatever) will break this, and they'll release a new version of the Windows software. I'm not sure how they'd tag the video that wouldn't be easily strippable, but that really doesn't matter to me as at most I would use this for watching sitcoms on my iPod.
You're right about being like DTiVos. That is exactly how DTiVos work, as well as how the TiVo works on the digital channels (HDTV included). Analog channels are still recorded with an A2D unit so you can choose quality. There are technically 6 tuners in the box (2 over the air HDTV, 2 analog/cable, 2 digital cable).
Cable labs won't certify the thing for recording digital content and HDTV, but I don't see why they couldn't have enabled multi-room viewing for analog shows, but I'm not surprised. I'm also surprised you can't use it as a view-only box for watching shows off of TiVo series 2 units.
I guess they'd rather do it all the way than confuse people with a half-implementation. Of course, this is all Cable Lab's and DRM's fault because they law was written to give them that permission to hold features like this indefinitely.
I agree. I've wished for years there was some kind of system where I could press a button and report a complaint on a car. You could chose a simple complaint (tailgating, speeding, going too slow, running lights, etc) and then it would be tied to their license plate. These would be agregated and people who get high numbers of complaints (i.e., the worst drivers) could then be "investigated" and ticketed. Bonus points for putting a camera in every car and attaching a little video clip so you can show the guy weaving through 20mph rush hour traffic at 70mph being an idiot so he can be fined.
As is the only way is to call the police and report it, but unless the guy is being REALLY unsafe, it's usually not worth the time (or they wouldn't go after the guy unless a cop just happened to be nearby).
Say what you will about black-boxes in cars, the way the local college students drive I'd vote for them. Heck, forget the college students, look at the general population around here and they seem like a good idea (especially when it gets rainy or snowy and the idiots come out who thing you should driver faster to get home sooner).
Sorry, but I've got to call you on that one. I'm a Mac user and I love my Tivo (I've now got a Series 3). I can't extract video because I have the S3, but I don't have much desire to any way.
That said...
That's false. People will want the functionality, but TiVo certainly reserves the right to complain.
That's like buying a little Ford Focus and being mad that you can't tow 3000lbs. You knew that going in. The one exception is the people who bought their Series 2 before HMO was available.
They bought it when it wasn't even an option for Windows users.
TiVo did the smart thing and went after the largest share of the market first. I agree they should add Mac support (Linux is another argument), but they didn't give up their right to control access to their box because they didn't do what you (or someone else) wanted.
For getting video off a Series 3, I worry that it will take an external drive (once they enable THAT) and then get the files that way.
I say all this as a Series 3 owner who, really, doesn't have a ton of use for extracting video.
In short: Series 3 need not apply.
Zelda does have two glaring flaws in my opinion. I've been playing it and it's a great game. I've got about 9 hours into it so far. But there are the graphics, which look perfectly Game Cube (not even top end Game Cube, some other games looked better) and the Wiimote (which except for aiming arrows/the slingshot often feels tacked on). If I were to give it a score for a gaming magazine I'd drag it down for that.
If it came out on the 'cube, it's scores would be near perfect. I'm talking 99% range.
Three is probably conservative. That said, I have a 1.67GHz G4 so any of the Intel based ones are lightning quick.
I forgot to mention that suspend on my Mac takes next to no power. When I wake it up I've seen it's little battery indicator say that it has enough juice for 10 days or so. I seriously doubt that, but I've left it suspended all day with no AC adapter and seen next to no battery loss so it may be possible. It's not as little power use as turning it off, but the time savings are enormous.
Well with a Desktop you can suspend to disk and then come back rather quickly, with a power off in between. This way you get the power savings, but you also get the fast "boot" time.
But let's look at me. I had a Dell laptop at school. I'd use it at home. Turn it off. Take it to school. Turn it on for class. Use it. Turn it off. Take it to next class/home and repeat. Suspend was very iffy (and didn't help much in the battery life department).
Then I got a Powerbook G4 (which I still use today). Run it at home. Close the lid. Take it to school. Open the lid. IT WAS READY. Within 3 seconds I could start working. When I'm done? No "Start->This->that" to be sure it worked. Just close the lid. I know some PCs worked that way, mine never did (reliably) that I remember. Next class/home? Open the lid. If it got low on power, I'd plug it in. My little laptop has had up to 3 months of uptime (mostly due to major security updates that require restarts). I NEVER need to turn it off. The last time I did was when I was going on an airplane (didn't know if they'd like it suspended during takeoff/landing). It boots relatively fast, but nothing compared to waking up and going to sleep.
If you're a desktop user, I understand your comment. But as a laptop user who has had the pleasure of a Mac, a fast reliable suspend is a HUGE time saver.
Now I'll note that some other people at my school had newer laptops that could suspend/resume just fine. But they took much longer. Some of them approached boot time length, some could do it in 20-30 seconds. No PC there matched my Mac (note: I never asked the few Linux users if they had it working on their laptops). I could suspend/resume my Mac 3 times with ease in the time it took the fastest XP users (and I'll ignore the "Click here to sign on" screen most of them didn't disable).
Well, I should warn you my school was in a very wealthy suburb. When I first started going there I was AMAZED at the parking lot. Not only do most of the kids old enough to drive have cars, more than a few had BMWs and such. There were Civics, but they were usually rather new. The school had cash to hire a very good staff.
I agree with you completely though. If I had this experience at my school (didn't get the kind of classes I wanted, to a degree) what chance does the local high school have? Some of the local public schools were VERY nice and could compete to a very good degree with my school thanks to the local population's relative wealth. Then again, the HS I would have gone to at the time (they since built a new, very nice one) looked terrible and like it was falling apart and unsafe in comparison. That was one of the major reasons my family went with the school we did. It seemed quite a bit safer than the public school I'd have gone to (not to mention the academic record of the two schools).
There are reasons for some of this (I blame teachers unions for some of this, since they fight so hard against any kind of reward system for teachers who do a good job). There is the fact that everyone in the US must get an education. If they don't want one? Too bad, stick 'em in the schools anyway. You can't screw up or be apathetic enough to get kicked out of school. If you can opt out somehow (like to a trade school), most people probably don't know it. Those kind of kids need to be out of the school (whether they want to go learn welding at a trade school and start their future, or just deliver pizzas the rest of their life and give up on school).
But like I said, I'm not claiming to have the answers. Just giving my experience.
We could too. We we a short ways from the local community college and there was a microscopic (4 or 5 room) satellite campus for some little university next to my school so those opportunities were there. But to do that you had to have completed X, Y, and Z and so on. And when they let you do it, it tended only to be for things that you were past (like to take a higher level of math or English). So if you wanted to take an art course or something, you couldn't (as I remember). I don't think they'd let you use it for electives.
I graduated in 2001 from a private Catholic high school that I actually liked quite a bit. However, there were still "problems". Let's ignore the obvious social stuff (which, to a very large degree, can never be fixed) and the fact that I just like smaller schools better.
What was there to hold my interest? There was a Drafting class that I found fascinating, but Drafting 2 was never offered because they couldn't get enough students. I got up through Physics 2, and we had Calc. But I liked computer and the only computer classes were typing, how to use office, and a very basic C++ class (all of which I knew by that time by teaching myself). The rest of the classes tended to bore me (except the ones on the history of the Church, because that was stuff that I hadn't heard before). The only other class I remember really liking was the Econ class because the teacher did a fantastic job (but most other students though it was boring... it was Econ after all). I kind of liked Psychology, but the teacher for that was terrible and while he seemed to be interested in the subject, he wasn't an enjoyable professor (quite dry, by the book, do this, do that). Some other teachers were just terrible (the Calc guy was as stiff as a board and just about killed my interest in Math). There was also Accounting and Business Law which appealed to me. But nearly every one of these classes I liked had a good teacher (important and hard to control) and was optional or had other more common substitutes (so if you didn't go looking to take it, chances are you wouldn't).
There wasn't much in the way of arts classes at all that I remember. If they were there they were purely optional. You had to take Gym. They did offer some interesting things (like Ballroom Dancing, which I regret not taking).
I didn't have nearly as much problems in College because I got to take the classes I was interested in (CS) along side requirements (some of which, like Sociology, I found interesting). High schools have become VERY focused on getting you into college (and every grade before on getting you into that next grade). My HS was college prep too (they advertised that). To a certain degree, I wonder how well anyone who goes through a decent American HS is prepared for the world. They seem to be like middle school now. It's EXPECTED you'll go to college. If you don't, you're either in a no skill job or you go to trade school. How about offering a metal shop class? We didn't have that, but it would have been fun. We were too college prep for that. No wood shop.
I'm not going to claim I know how to fix 'em. It's complex. But I know they did very little to encourage independent learning in the core classes unless you had a FANTASTIC teacher or you already liked the subject. Otherwise, it was "strictly business". And the less advanced your school (like a poorer one), the worse that all might be.
I haven't connected yet. I can get it to talk to my access point, but it won't get an IP address by DHCP. When I gave it a static one, that didn't work. I'm going to try having it connect to another AP in my house tonight. The one I've been using is an Apple Airport Express that I've never had a problem with. My error was 53010 or something like that (I looked it up on Nintendo's site).
I've heard about this problem, and it does make me worry some.
Then again, I also found the weird tip on Nintendo's web site that you can speed up downloads by making sure your AP is on channel 1 or 11. I've heard complaints about how "fast" things were, so maybe that's it.
Then again, none of this matters to me until they release Bonk's adventure, which I really want to buy. The games I own (Wii Sports, Red Steel, Twilight Princess) aren't multiplayer over the net.
I use iPhoto and besides albums I can assign keywords to the pictures making it easy to search by keyword. If iPhoto is not enough then Aperature is supposed to provide even more so I assume it would have better organizational stuff too.
Of course, both require a Mac.
But I love iPhoto. All my photos have names, ratings, and a set a keywords with everything from file type to portrait/landscape, to camera model and lens (I, of course, had to set all these).
That was a REALLY cheesy TV series in the 60s or so called "Roger Ramjet", your little song (to the tune of Yankee Doodle, right?) is a bit of a parody of it.
I agree, see if you can get a case. See if you can get it class action. Breach of privacy, lack of due diligence, there has got to be more than a few regulations that were broken. When I worked as a student aid at my college I had to sign paperwork and read some laws about how to handle student data to prevent all this kind of stuff. He should be liable under those laws (as should the school).
I'm not a lawyer, but I bet you can find one that will take your case.
School respond to two things: lawyers and money. You don't have enough of #2 (you can't with hold your yearly $10,000,000 donation) so #1 is your only hope.
I once saw something about this on TV years and years ago. People might feel a phantom limb with a fist grasped so tightly it hurt (like the fingernails in the palm and everything). It was supposed to be horrible (and I'm sure it was).
The report was on a doctor who had developed a box that the patient stuck their real arm in and using mirrors they could see both arms (obviously just a reflection). By having the patient put their "arms" in clenched and talking to them and having them relax them and thinking about unclenching the fist, it would work. The pain would go away because their brain "saw" that the first was unclenched where as before they couldn't see that. I don't know how long it worked, if it needed to be re-done every six months or whatever, but this isn't out of the blue.
Very interesting problem, phantom limb syndrome.
To me this sounds like a simple off-hand comment and unlikely to happen.
That said, can someone who is more familiar with the whole thing tell me: did has opening Solaris had much of an effect at all in any way? Has it stopped market share loss? Increased market share? Increased software availability? Has anything really changed?
I know it was set for the Mac. I just don't remember MS making a ton of hype about it before release for the XBox. I'm not saying it was unmentioned, but it seems like I was constantly hearing about Oddworld. You'd hear about PGR, Jet Set Radio Future (PLEASE MAKE ANOTHER SEQUEL), DOA3, and Malice. But I don't remember the Halo hype much at all (especially compared to just how popular the game became).
Kind of like CBS. They bought CSI, stuck it in a time slot, and practically forgot about it. They promoted their remake of The Fugitive to no end. The Fugitive flopped, CSI became HUGE and spawned clones and spin-offs.
Ah... marketing.
I went to a state school for a few years, then switched to DeVry's Computer Information Systems program for variety of reasons. Here is what I can tell you. I don't remember any final project at the state school's CS program (big school, nice school). I got great CS classes while I was there though (theory and such). At DeVry I didn't get the impression that they taught nearly as much theory and some of the stuff I learned (of course, I transfered in half-way through).
HOWEVER, DeVry was very business focused. Everything was about business. How to write business apps in VB (a basic into to VB course that most businesses degrees had to have). Building dynamic web sites (built a little storefront and shopping cart), the database classes (here is how to optimize, business cases you'll come across, when to put business logic into or rules into the DB, etc).
The final project was something that REALLY helped me. While we had had classes about the software life cycle (including a proposal project during that where we "designed" and pitched a system to a fake client). But the final project was the real deal.
Take a real client (they had companies that wanted things, I did mine for DeVry but that was not normal). The client has something they want done (or you can come up with an idea and pitch it to a company). You have to get accepted by the faculty teaching the course. In the 15 weeks you had to design and implement the application (or upgrades to existing application). The design had to be approved by the faculty (especially the DB). Various changed would need approval. There was a long list of requirements for projects. It HAD to be done in teams (2-5, almost ALWAYS 3-4). You had to gather the requirements yourself. You had to check in with the client numerous times on how your progress was going, to give them a demo of the system, etc. At the end of it all you gave a presentation to the professor, the class, and the client about what you did, how you designed it, how it turned out, problems you faced, etc.
We were basically consultants for credit.
All the degrees had something like this (the EE ones were often a ton of fun to watch, because they didn't have clients and came up with some neat gadgets some times, or one friend updated an old control system for a local astronomy telescope and added scheduling and such).
This REALLY helped me. Not only did it give me tons of experience (including even more with facing deadlines, partners not holding up their end, having to make design changes in the middle, etc) but it gave me GREAT stuff to talk about at job interviews. Half the questions they would ask ("When was a time", "Have you ever made a decision that you found out too late...") were perfectly suited to my project work. My particular project probably helped me get my job (because some of the elements are similar).
Plus there was just the accomplishment. I made a Java based app to help students figure out their possible schedules for each semester instead of doing it on paper. I know for a fact that now (it's been 2 semesters since I graduated I think) they ARE using it. I know that they were going to show it to corporate (I wrote it for my local DeVry, though there was nothing specific), but I don't know what will happen from them. They have only contacted me once about a problem which I fixed for them (I worked as a student aid there too so they knew me well). My little app was a Java applet that hit an SQL server for data. My job that I got is all Java with TONS of SQL, so my project ended up very relevant (and being able to pull it up for the interviewer straight off the real site and show it to them was a major plus too).
Now all that said, as I was leaving DeVry was shifting to MUCH more specific programs for CS and becoming even less general which I think was a terrible idea. I'll also say quite frankly that my time at the state school taught me thinks that I don't think I would have ever learned otherwise.
But some kind of big, real-world