Well, technically, M$ is right, if dickheaded in this. Technically, you're getting an OEM copy with the machine, that is tied to the machine, and you have X number of licenses under your site license for Windows. These licenses technically have nothing to do with the license of the copy that comes with the machine. Also, technically the numbers in the licenses make a difference, and all of that crap. Perhaps you could make a type of image, or install script that installs all of the software, and puts in the right numbers, or does it with the right disks and such. Still, the user has paid for the software, and has A license, to an identical product, so don't you think that some slack should be cut?
Also, you can't really blame the worker or anything, since technically, they are just working off of an SOP. One that was set up to protect the company and the consumer both (though that is questionable with Microsoft). Though it might look on the surface the M$ is looking to rip you off, they are just protecting their licenses, and this is a contingency that their SOP and license does not address. I doubt that this is on purpose (well, half doubt).
It's nice, though I've seen it before, and I thought I saw it here before as a "matchbox computer..." though I could be wrong. It looks like a neet system to start a wearable off of, though you could afford a bit larger unit in a wearable. Knock the price down too of course. It would be a fun hobby unit to tie into your robots if you like them like I do.
Oh yeah, an no offense, but I think they mean spelled, not spelt.
2 years ago, when I went to college, I had to say goodbye to my P75 and hello to my parents Mac LC, at least until I got my PIII at the end of my freshman year. It was like a trip down memory lane then, as I looked up web pages using browsers and such that took advantage of the 40 Meg hard drive (now much larger) and the 256 color display (still stock), and as I played games such as Lode Runner, that would fit on the drive. People seemed amazed that I got all of that onto 40 Megs of space, and could do just about everything that anybody else could do (albiet Quake wasn't one of those things) with my old Mac.
It was a fun experience, looking back. Still, it would have been fun to have the PIII at the start of freshman year.
Well, kids start out by studying algorithms. Then, they evaluate run times and such, on paper. A lot of ASM is taught, in several different formats. Also, a lot of programming in functional languages such as ML and SCHEME. Also, students are each required to write an artifical intelligence. If nobody wins the loebner prize, they all lose. At the end of the semester, each student must write a dissertation about how they significantly contributed to the field of computer science. This will help them get advanced college credit towards their PhDs, which they all deserve anyways, by birthright... Or at least that's how some of them acted when I was in HS, this kid was blown away that my program beat his at the science fair since I wasn't in all AP classes (I was for most of HS, but got tired of the extra work, with the rest of my schedule). I think he thought I was dumb.
1) Robotics. Robotics are cool and fun. Don't make it some complex mechanical beast requiring lots of electronics skills, since this is a computer science and not a computer engineering course, but something that the students can build in a day, and then write programs for, that is always a winner.
2) AI. Kids can write really simple AIs. It doesn't have to win the Loebner prize or anything, but think about the possibilities. You could have simple games, tic-tac-toe (I did that for a science fair project), and eliza's and word-chaining, and junk like that. People also get a kick out of talking to them. You could also go over different theories. You could go over heuristics and game theory and such, just nothing too deep.
3) Web design. People like flashy things, the web is flashy. It takes 10 mins to write a decent web page, and you can take all day jazzing it up. You could go over perl and CGI and JAVA, kids could post their work to the net. You could even work as a group to write something useful, like a page that gives the school's announcements for the day, weather, does e-mail, shows grades, shows sports schedules, the possibilities can really go wild on this one.
4) Games. Heck, half of the kids in that class probably got into it because they wanted to write a game, everything from the simple to the complex. Try writing a mud, or something graphical in nature. There are LOTS of simple projects and complex ones in this area. Students could use kits and libraries, or roll their own depending on how advanced/serious they are. This is good because the levels of effort and interest can vary, while still allowing for all students to produce good projects.
5) Graphics/3D. Do some rendering/modelling/so forth. Write programs that make cubes and such. If the kids have already had trig, then they can handle the most basic of the 3D algorithms and most of the very basic 2D ones. This is something that can be taught in bits and pieces, and you can really go step by step, if that is the kind of class that you had.
6) A few algorithms. In one of my college classes, we went out into the lawn by our classroom, and ran around forming various data structures. This is something that, depending on the kids in the class, could go over very well or very poorly. Discuss the algorithms in class ahead of time and after. It is MUCH more fun if the kids understand what is going on.
Stuff that I wish that you could go into in such a class, but really, you should stay away from.
1) Truly advanced CS topics. I am guessing that this is an intro class, and these kids have what one would call a "budding interest" in computer science, don't kill it by doing anything too difficult. Big-O notation might be something fun to mention, but evalutating execution times of algorithms really isn't an intro-level thing.
2) Algorithms galore. Teach your kids some algorithms, have fun with it, but I doubt that they are really going to be interested in the fastest way to form a binary search tree.
3) Really heavy topics. Anything that you had real difficulty understanding at first, and doesn't make a good puzzle in a book sold at airports, will probably lose their interest quickly.
Oh yeah, and grade syntax, but don't kill them over it, it's just HS.
Well, I figure that much of that, you could have figured out yourself, being as how you are a teacher and I have relatively limitted experience with kids. Hope I was at least marginally helpful. My ideas sure sound fun to me:-)
It gets to you after a while. I don't let people mess with me in real life, I am nice, I am cordial, but if they keep pushing, I'm going to take care of it, and then when they get all bitchy and start crying, wondering why I did it, I just wish that I had been a bit more assertive before.
No offense, but I think that an environment for PDAs is best designed specifically for them rather than ported to the desktop, or at least redesigned, an interpretation, something based on another. There are certain limitations on palmtops including speed and screen size. Even if we stuff the fastest processor in there, a screen the size of your pocket still isn't inviting to certain styles of pager displays, and menus. It is best to realize what you are working with. I would love to see either GNOME or KDE ported to handhelds, but for the sake of usability, at least a few things should be modified. It might be usable, but certainly they are not the MOST suitable alternatives, in the form that they are seen on the desktop.
That would be a rather cool device, I actually thought of trying to replace my keycaps with wooden ones once, but thought that it would be prone to rot and giving me splinters and other nasty stuff.
Well, now when I feel like emulating an x86 CPU on an X86 computer (yeah, rudundant but useful, kinda), now I can play my old DOS games. Woopee... (kinda)
Uhh, it was a joke. If I were a karma whore, I wouldn't have even made the joke. Supposing that I hadn't made the joke, it probably would have been modded up. I don't see what I ever did to you, so you have a lot of nerve calling me a karma whore too bitch. I just happen to enjoy/. If I were a karma whore, I wouldn't have posted this as myself either, since this is obviously going to knock my karma down a couple of points. What do you want me to do in order to not be a karma whore? Make a new ID? Start trolling like an asshole? Perhaps I should just piss someone off so I can get bitchslapped? I really don't give a fuck, but I'm not going to stop using/. just because I have higher karma than a bunch of people talking about penis bird beowulf clusters, ok?
Personally, I think that a suped up PDA is better for these functions, and leave the phone as a phone. The only think that I like about adding more functions to the phone is it keeps them from making it smaller, it's already hard to talk on those if your head is bigger than that of a small child. It's good to add stuff to the phones, I suppose. I would rather see a PDA that I can talk on like a phone than a phone that acts as a PDA though.
I realize that there are CPUs and software & such in it. I like things to run quick. I like them cheap. I see no reason to go with something controlled by one company. I really didn't care for Jini. We all have our opinions. I think that if everybody got together and made a standard, it would pretty much serve the purpose the Jini did without being tied to one company or having a terribly high system overhead. I would much rather run code native to the device, optimized for the device, than waste CPU cycles and memory. Just a personal thing. I can see where Jini would be great. Heck, I can see where I would just fall in love with Jini devices, but that's not how MY perfect world works. Besides, if you can't get people to open up the specs enough to work with each other now (uhh, take my damned Turtle Beach Montego Soundcard, which still doesn't have good Linux drivers), then how can you expect them to voluntarily do this. Personally, yes, I am pretty opinionated on that topic, and I think that A LOT of the CRAP that we load as software could be better done through hardware. It's not that I don't like it and all, but why bother? Digital senders are great, good use of software. That crappy touch display on some of the new copiers, that doesn't offer anything over the old system of having buttons on the side (other than making it slower to get work done, and take longer to start up the printer)... pretty crappy replacement for the buttons, but my friend wrote a few video games for it, during his breaks at work, so if you get bored while you are making copies on it, you at least can play his dumb pac-man game.
Wow dude, you just nailed a point on your purity test, if you had said "this is not news for nerds," in your post, it would have been 2. Better luck next time;-)
That wooden mirror is a really neat toy. It is good to see stuff that is just "neat stuff," I love techno-art. This reminds me of the demoscene. Fun stuff eh?
Photon Mapping. Whoa, now that's a good rendering. I want to get a rendering utility that does that today. I'm sure that lots of us have tossed around similar ideas, but THAT is SLICK AS Natalie Po... uhh, never mind. It's slick!
I suppose that you could use all of this excess crap to provide that, but why? If it's relatively limitted in scope (and it is), you really don't need ALL OF THIS STUFF. I can see the "fun" in it, even the usefulness. Most users will never make good use of all of it though, and quite frankly, some of this stuff is better suited to other devices.
Well, no offense to Sun, but I can tell you flat out why Jini failed. From day one, I thought that it was, get this, "a crappy idea." Lets see, first, lets take a regularly inexpensive device. Next, lets make it more expensive by adding a CPU to it. Then, lets take that CPU, and make it grind to a halt by running an interpretter on it. Lets make sure that the computing overhead of non-computer devices is as high as possible. There shouldn't be a coffee maker within a 5 mile radius that doesn't have at least 128 Megs of RAM. Then, lets lock everybody into using our technology specifically. Lets make this as big of a pain in the ass for everyone on the implementer side, but since everyone knows JAVA, great fun for hobbyists.
What makes MUCH MUCH MUCH more sense is to ask everyone to follow a common API, but heck, that wouldn't require a product and sales to a company that could REALLY use a boost in their business. (And I LIKE SUN).
No offense, the solution isn't putting a full scale operating system on all of these devices either. These things DON'T NEED SOFTWARE. With software comes a much greater potential to mess things up. There are MANY things in this world that people try to put software on that just don't need them. My photocopier does not need to run windows. Even if it is networked, it still doesn't need windows. It doesn't need Linux, BSD, or QNX either. It doesn't need an OS. It will even run faster without one. Trust me. Solid state is MUCH faster than software, generally speaking.
Make a common API, and you get all of the capabilities, and none of the overhead. I really don't WANT to play pac-man on my cell phone's display. If I did, I would buy a PDA, and play pac-man on it. People need to think a bit more centralized and practically, rather than developing EVERY DAMNED DEVICE into a huge meta-product, concentrate on doing one thing, and doing it well. I turn the sidebar off in Mozilla, because I want a browser, not AIM, not all of that stuff. I turn off ALL OF THAT crap, and MOST OTHER PEOPLE PROBABLY DO TOO.
That's cool, I'm sure that I could have all sorts of fun writing programs for all that hardware, but what APPLICATIONS do they plan on doing with all this gear/software? They make phone's daggonit.
It's not very secret, and it's not like they are selling something with the code being used to decode DVDs. The US doesn't use shoddy encryption techniques and then just sue everyone who cracks them.
Slashdot Mirror
The newest site on themes.org.
:-)
Watch.themes.org
hehehe
Well, technically, M$ is right, if dickheaded in this. Technically, you're getting an OEM copy with the machine, that is tied to the machine, and you have X number of licenses under your site license for Windows. These licenses technically have nothing to do with the license of the copy that comes with the machine. Also, technically the numbers in the licenses make a difference, and all of that crap. Perhaps you could make a type of image, or install script that installs all of the software, and puts in the right numbers, or does it with the right disks and such. Still, the user has paid for the software, and has A license, to an identical product, so don't you think that some slack should be cut?
Also, you can't really blame the worker or anything, since technically, they are just working off of an SOP. One that was set up to protect the company and the consumer both (though that is questionable with Microsoft). Though it might look on the surface the M$ is looking to rip you off, they are just protecting their licenses, and this is a contingency that their SOP and license does not address. I doubt that this is on purpose (well, half doubt).
On the bright side, there is free software.
It's nice, though I've seen it before, and I thought I saw it here before as a "matchbox computer..." though I could be wrong. It looks like a neet system to start a wearable off of, though you could afford a bit larger unit in a wearable. Knock the price down too of course. It would be a fun hobby unit to tie into your robots if you like them like I do.
Oh yeah, an no offense, but I think they mean spelled, not spelt.
2 years ago, when I went to college, I had to say goodbye to my P75 and hello to my parents Mac LC, at least until I got my PIII at the end of my freshman year. It was like a trip down memory lane then, as I looked up web pages using browsers and such that took advantage of the 40 Meg hard drive (now much larger) and the 256 color display (still stock), and as I played games such as Lode Runner, that would fit on the drive. People seemed amazed that I got all of that onto 40 Megs of space, and could do just about everything that anybody else could do (albiet Quake wasn't one of those things) with my old Mac.
It was a fun experience, looking back. Still, it would have been fun to have the PIII at the start of freshman year.
How "interesting" are you going to get for an intro course?
Well, kids start out by studying algorithms. Then, they evaluate run times and such, on paper. A lot of ASM is taught, in several different formats. Also, a lot of programming in functional languages such as ML and SCHEME. Also, students are each required to write an artifical intelligence. If nobody wins the loebner prize, they all lose. At the end of the semester, each student must write a dissertation about how they significantly contributed to the field of computer science. This will help them get advanced college credit towards their PhDs, which they all deserve anyways, by birthright... Or at least that's how some of them acted when I was in HS, this kid was blown away that my program beat his at the science fair since I wasn't in all AP classes (I was for most of HS, but got tired of the extra work, with the rest of my schedule). I think he thought I was dumb.
It's very EASY though. Doesn't require the student to learn too much or think of anything too broad. Very simple to do game theory on.
1) Robotics. Robotics are cool and fun. Don't make it some complex mechanical beast requiring lots of electronics skills, since this is a computer science and not a computer engineering course, but something that the students can build in a day, and then write programs for, that is always a winner.
:-)
2) AI. Kids can write really simple AIs. It doesn't have to win the Loebner prize or anything, but think about the possibilities. You could have simple games, tic-tac-toe (I did that for a science fair project), and eliza's and word-chaining, and junk like that. People also get a kick out of talking to them. You could also go over different theories. You could go over heuristics and game theory and such, just nothing too deep.
3) Web design. People like flashy things, the web is flashy. It takes 10 mins to write a decent web page, and you can take all day jazzing it up. You could go over perl and CGI and JAVA, kids could post their work to the net. You could even work as a group to write something useful, like a page that gives the school's announcements for the day, weather, does e-mail, shows grades, shows sports schedules, the possibilities can really go wild on this one.
4) Games. Heck, half of the kids in that class probably got into it because they wanted to write a game, everything from the simple to the complex. Try writing a mud, or something graphical in nature. There are LOTS of simple projects and complex ones in this area. Students could use kits and libraries, or roll their own depending on how advanced/serious they are. This is good because the levels of effort and interest can vary, while still allowing for all students to produce good projects.
5) Graphics/3D. Do some rendering/modelling/so forth. Write programs that make cubes and such. If the kids have already had trig, then they can handle the most basic of the 3D algorithms and most of the very basic 2D ones. This is something that can be taught in bits and pieces, and you can really go step by step, if that is the kind of class that you had.
6) A few algorithms. In one of my college classes, we went out into the lawn by our classroom, and ran around forming various data structures. This is something that, depending on the kids in the class, could go over very well or very poorly. Discuss the algorithms in class ahead of time and after. It is MUCH more fun if the kids understand what is going on.
Stuff that I wish that you could go into in such a class, but really, you should stay away from.
1) Truly advanced CS topics. I am guessing that this is an intro class, and these kids have what one would call a "budding interest" in computer science, don't kill it by doing anything too difficult. Big-O notation might be something fun to mention, but evalutating execution times of algorithms really isn't an intro-level thing.
2) Algorithms galore. Teach your kids some algorithms, have fun with it, but I doubt that they are really going to be interested in the fastest way to form a binary search tree.
3) Really heavy topics. Anything that you had real difficulty understanding at first, and doesn't make a good puzzle in a book sold at airports, will probably lose their interest quickly.
Oh yeah, and grade syntax, but don't kill them over it, it's just HS.
Well, I figure that much of that, you could have figured out yourself, being as how you are a teacher and I have relatively limitted experience with kids. Hope I was at least marginally helpful. My ideas sure sound fun to me
It gets to you after a while. I don't let people mess with me in real life, I am nice, I am cordial, but if they keep pushing, I'm going to take care of it, and then when they get all bitchy and start crying, wondering why I did it, I just wish that I had been a bit more assertive before.
No offense, but I think that an environment for PDAs is best designed specifically for them rather than ported to the desktop, or at least redesigned, an interpretation, something based on another. There are certain limitations on palmtops including speed and screen size. Even if we stuff the fastest processor in there, a screen the size of your pocket still isn't inviting to certain styles of pager displays, and menus. It is best to realize what you are working with. I would love to see either GNOME or KDE ported to handhelds, but for the sake of usability, at least a few things should be modified. It might be usable, but certainly they are not the MOST suitable alternatives, in the form that they are seen on the desktop.
How about this, why don't you talk to me face to face instead of anonymously like a bitch.
That would be a rather cool device, I actually thought of trying to replace my keycaps with wooden ones once, but thought that it would be prone to rot and giving me splinters and other nasty stuff.
Well, now when I feel like emulating an x86 CPU on an X86 computer (yeah, rudundant but useful, kinda), now I can play my old DOS games. Woopee... (kinda)
Uhh, it was a joke. If I were a karma whore, I wouldn't have even made the joke. Supposing that I hadn't made the joke, it probably would have been modded up. I don't see what I ever did to you, so you have a lot of nerve calling me a karma whore too bitch. I just happen to enjoy /. If I were a karma whore, I wouldn't have posted this as myself either, since this is obviously going to knock my karma down a couple of points. What do you want me to do in order to not be a karma whore? Make a new ID? Start trolling like an asshole? Perhaps I should just piss someone off so I can get bitchslapped? I really don't give a fuck, but I'm not going to stop using /. just because I have higher karma than a bunch of people talking about penis bird beowulf clusters, ok?
Personally, I think that a suped up PDA is better for these functions, and leave the phone as a phone. The only think that I like about adding more functions to the phone is it keeps them from making it smaller, it's already hard to talk on those if your head is bigger than that of a small child. It's good to add stuff to the phones, I suppose. I would rather see a PDA that I can talk on like a phone than a phone that acts as a PDA though.
I realize that there are CPUs and software & such in it. I like things to run quick. I like them cheap. I see no reason to go with something controlled by one company. I really didn't care for Jini. We all have our opinions. I think that if everybody got together and made a standard, it would pretty much serve the purpose the Jini did without being tied to one company or having a terribly high system overhead. I would much rather run code native to the device, optimized for the device, than waste CPU cycles and memory. Just a personal thing. I can see where Jini would be great. Heck, I can see where I would just fall in love with Jini devices, but that's not how MY perfect world works. Besides, if you can't get people to open up the specs enough to work with each other now (uhh, take my damned Turtle Beach Montego Soundcard, which still doesn't have good Linux drivers), then how can you expect them to voluntarily do this. Personally, yes, I am pretty opinionated on that topic, and I think that A LOT of the CRAP that we load as software could be better done through hardware. It's not that I don't like it and all, but why bother? Digital senders are great, good use of software. That crappy touch display on some of the new copiers, that doesn't offer anything over the old system of having buttons on the side (other than making it slower to get work done, and take longer to start up the printer)... pretty crappy replacement for the buttons, but my friend wrote a few video games for it, during his breaks at work, so if you get bored while you are making copies on it, you at least can play his dumb pac-man game.
Wow dude, you just nailed a point on your purity test, if you had said "this is not news for nerds," in your post, it would have been 2. Better luck next time ;-)
That wooden mirror is a really neat toy. It is good to see stuff that is just "neat stuff," I love techno-art. This reminds me of the demoscene. Fun stuff eh?
Photon Mapping. Whoa, now that's a good rendering. I want to get a rendering utility that does that today. I'm sure that lots of us have tossed around similar ideas, but THAT is SLICK AS Natalie Po... uhh, never mind. It's slick!
Also, the fact that I was going to point out is that lots of cell phones already do these things.
I suppose that you could use all of this excess crap to provide that, but why? If it's relatively limitted in scope (and it is), you really don't need ALL OF THIS STUFF. I can see the "fun" in it, even the usefulness. Most users will never make good use of all of it though, and quite frankly, some of this stuff is better suited to other devices.
Well, no offense to Sun, but I can tell you flat out why Jini failed. From day one, I thought that it was, get this, "a crappy idea." Lets see, first, lets take a regularly inexpensive device. Next, lets make it more expensive by adding a CPU to it. Then, lets take that CPU, and make it grind to a halt by running an interpretter on it. Lets make sure that the computing overhead of non-computer devices is as high as possible. There shouldn't be a coffee maker within a 5 mile radius that doesn't have at least 128 Megs of RAM. Then, lets lock everybody into using our technology specifically. Lets make this as big of a pain in the ass for everyone on the implementer side, but since everyone knows JAVA, great fun for hobbyists.
What makes MUCH MUCH MUCH more sense is to ask everyone to follow a common API, but heck, that wouldn't require a product and sales to a company that could REALLY use a boost in their business. (And I LIKE SUN).
No offense, the solution isn't putting a full scale operating system on all of these devices either. These things DON'T NEED SOFTWARE. With software comes a much greater potential to mess things up. There are MANY things in this world that people try to put software on that just don't need them. My photocopier does not need to run windows. Even if it is networked, it still doesn't need windows. It doesn't need Linux, BSD, or QNX either. It doesn't need an OS. It will even run faster without one. Trust me. Solid state is MUCH faster than software, generally speaking.
Make a common API, and you get all of the capabilities, and none of the overhead. I really don't WANT to play pac-man on my cell phone's display. If I did, I would buy a PDA, and play pac-man on it. People need to think a bit more centralized and practically, rather than developing EVERY DAMNED DEVICE into a huge meta-product, concentrate on doing one thing, and doing it well. I turn the sidebar off in Mozilla, because I want a browser, not AIM, not all of that stuff. I turn off ALL OF THAT crap, and MOST OTHER PEOPLE PROBABLY DO TOO.
That's cool, I'm sure that I could have all sorts of fun writing programs for all that hardware, but what APPLICATIONS do they plan on doing with all this gear/software? They make phone's daggonit.
Actually, the actual physical violence is in the media, the engine can be used to build many different sorts of games.
but don't you think that a counterlawsuit would be more humane/civil/effective?
It's not very secret, and it's not like they are selling something with the code being used to decode DVDs. The US doesn't use shoddy encryption techniques and then just sue everyone who cracks them.