The exception is that Harvey Danger is one of the bigger bands to do something like this. They had a pretty big hit called "Flagpole Sitta" I'd say some 5 or 6 years ago, and they came sort of at the tail end of the radio-rock 90's one hit wonders. Think of Eve 6, Semisonic ("Closing Time"), Fastball ("The Way"), or The Verve Pipe ("Freshman") doing something like this. Yeah, it's not the Rolling Stones or Madonna or Coldplay, but they were a very big band six years ago. Harvey Danger's debut CD, gold-selling Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? came out in 1999 and is now roughly #19,000 in sales at Amazon.com (roughly matching similar albums that came out that time).
Sorry, I know I sounded like a weird PR spokesperson, but the band is not a bunch of unknowns. I wanted to make that sort of clear.
I'm interested to see where their sales will go. It looks like this band broke-up a couple of years ago and is now having another go at it without using any majors. I wish them the best, and if I like the album and they play a show around here, I will probably go see them.
It may not technically be Spyware, but the newer versions are huge memory hogs without there being an equally huge jump in the information being provided. Most people consider it "AdWare" and while the idea of WeatherBug is nice, I don't need something else in my system tray that is hogging up HUGE amounts of resources for the basic stuff that it does. Ideally, it should be a tiny system tray icon that if clicked, opens up a browser. You guys took a wrong turn when you tried to integrate everything into the mini-Weatherbug browser, which is not the reason most people get WB to begin with.
(I did use WeatherBug for about a year or so until it the problems above multiplied and it was too much of a hassle).
No, you've misunderstood. This is one of those murder simulators and is in fact a valuable tool on extracting revenge on co-orkers. The simulation is obviously a lot more accurate if your coworkers all drive debadged Maseratis, of course.
I went to the origin of the Xbox 360 site and filled out the forms just as described. Now I'm on my way to get my free Xbox 360! Thank you Microsoft! I will be sure to pass on the relevant information to my friends and relatives.
Unfortunately for Plaxico Burress (a wide receiver now with the New York Giants), he's often hurt and hurt for a while, which has earned him the unfortunate moniker of "Plexiglass" Burress.
Sun's been making these claims for at least five years, because that's when I had done some research on the subject and found an article in the WSJ where Sun was all about the server and Microsoft was all about the client.
Five years later, Microsoft is still a leader (market-share wise) but it's future looks shaky, and Sun's future still looks shaky as well. The truth of the matter is there will never be an all-server or an all-client world.
This is one more way for Sun to get press. It's nothing new.
That or they promised this to a client who they hope doesn't read Slashdot. Sort of how when I talk to developers who are handling something for somebody who got in over their head handling something for someobody who was producing something for a client. Had that original person contacted the provider of the end result, they would've cut out several layers of costs and slowdown.
Remember to keep valuables in the in-room safe. Lest your buddy's dawn wanderings around Atlantic City lead him and a cheap hooker back to your shared room. Cash in your wallet could prove valuable for any sort of "service upgrades" and I didn't have to lose my keycard to be $60 poorer.
This sounds a bit anti-slashdot but I had/have the same problem and just went to the hardware store and got myself a magazine just about organizing. There were a TON of really good ideas there and I've picked up (and used) some ideas over the past couple of years. Here's a small list, hopefully someone will still read this one:
If you haven't used something in year, throw it out. If you think it's not garbage-worthy, give it to a friend or family member who might really like it. That was you can re-visit that poster/lamp/book when you see your friends.
Think unconventionally. My living room I've turned into my office (desk for work, couches for longer conference calls or meetings). I don't have a dining room and my kitchenette has one chair in there for reading. When we eat, we out in the deck, the basement/home theater room, or on the kitchen counters.
Give your clothes away. Any shorts or shirts you didn't wear this summer you should be giving away. In April, give away sweaters you didn't wear in the winter. Another test is to not do laundry as long as possible until you run out of clothes you want to wear. Once all the clothes you want to wear are dirty, clean those and give away all the others. (Exceptions for suits/formalwear/bathing suits etc).
Get furniture that closes. Messes look a lot worse when they are inside furniture. You may think you're cramped but it's only because you have stuff stacked everywhere that could fit somewhere else.
Media. While I don't feel like ripping DVDs, I rip every single one of my CDs. The discs I keep in easily reachable binders, the cases are all in boxes in storage in the furthest corner of the basement.
Lend temporarily. Moving cross-country for a year or two? Leave bulky furniture with family or friends and come back it for later once you have a bigger place or once you move back.
A lot of people mentioned wire shelves on the top of walls. I'll do you one better. While this isn't the most cost-effective way, it may look the coolest. Install wooden shelves with a flat bottom about 12-18" from the top of your ceiling. Do this along one side of the wall, or along three walls. Make sure they are seamless from end to end. You can always put in crown molding below the shelf so it looks more liek the home's architecture. I've seen these done and you can house hundreds and hundreds of books along space that is NEVER used. A few I've seen with recessed-/indirect-lighting.
Resist buying lots of things. That's especially tough for me because if I see something cool for cheap I have to get it. What do, however, is give it to someone else who needs it.
As cheesy and ungeeky as it sounds, take a look at some home organizing magazines or walk around IKEA or Linens and Things or Bed Bath and Beyond or The Container Store, and you'll get ideas. There's no one list of things that can be done because everyone's space and everyone's stuff is different.
I positively hate when someone passes off anecdotal data as a definite trend, so I want to say right off the bat that I am only talking about my own experiences.
I played UO when it first came out eight years ago, and since then, I have not picked up any of the big MMORPGs. Every single one has raised my interest, and I always wish I could live in some alternate reality where I could spend 4 or 5 hours devoted to this game without it affecting my free time. If that could be done, sign me up.
However, it is an itch that needs to be scratched. The interaction, the big worlds, the sense of accomplishment you receive when you can slay previously tough creatures in two swoops... I simply need to have it. But there's no way I could be good at the game and play 10 hours per week on it. Even that is asking a lot.
So, what happens? I buy (or pick up again) Morrowind. Or I get into YoHoHo Puzzle Pirates for a couple of months. Now the itch is appearing again so I bought Champions of Norrath for the PS2. In a few days/weeks, I'll get tired of it, and I will have only spent under $20 and a couple of hours per week on it (save marathon 4 hour sessions when I can sneak them in). I never need to get the MMORPG because I can satisfy some or most of those needs through other games that don't require such a large investment of time and money.
Who knows if the net effect is good or bad. My guess is that it's good. If Doom/Quake wasn't so addictive, we wouldn't have such a proliferation of First Person Shooters now. For the most part, I think what is good for one game is good for gaming in general.
Robb Briggs takes a game made by Data East and then does not credit them in ANY way for making the original
Complains when a commercial company links to "his" game (for which he takes credit), eventhough the traffic is 5% or less of his total traffic
Knowingly redirects this traffic to some other innocent website, which is now getting hammered
Brags about it on his LiveJournal page.
This guy probably gave up several thousand dollars and more publicity in exchange of ridiculing a company and praising it on his own personal webpage, all the while still not crediting the original creators of any of his games. To quote him, it was a bit "dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb" on his part.
Except he couldn't serve ads. If you look at TFA, without seeing the web address on the bottom of the screen, you'd have no idea who made the game.
I think it would be funnier if he got a Cease and Decist from the Burger Time creators. Somehow, they don't matter at all to this guy. Both of these guys are idiots.
The only problem is that these companies already exist. They're called media buyers, or ad agencies. If Google is going the agency route then they might do well because agencies are (to some extent) known for no results and a high cost. If Google is bringing this to the populace, then that's not a bad idea.
As an aside, it would be interesting if Google took the AdWords approach to advertising in print magazines and let companies try to outbid each other for spots in different magazines. To take it a step further, imagine if when the magazine is printed, they bind in an ad by Google that is taken to their printers by Google. So Google buys ad space in the middle of the magazine (in the centerfold). Let's say Google does this with Harpsichord! Harpsichord! Harpsichord!, the quarterly for Baroque music enthusiasts. They usually print 50,000 issues. Google partners with them and Google will say, "Just put our centerfold in your magazine, it will be 4 pages of ads."
Well, now imagine that Google sells this ad space not only size-wise in the page (say, by quarters of a page), but also by chunks (of 10,000). So if you really wanted to advertise in H!H!H! you now have the option of advertising only to 10,000 of those readers, at a reduced cost.
Let's take this a step further and look at a real example. Say you're a small custom amp manufacturer, and you want to advertise in Guitar World. Take a look at their rate card. If you want to advertise a one-page ad in their magazine, it's going to cost you $11,000 for a single one-page color ad. If you only wanted to spend $2000 you're out of luck.
But lo and behold, here's Google, who buys 48 pages of ads from Guitar World for $318,000 (the centerfold is 4 pages front and back, so it's 48 x $6625 = $318,000). Now let's say Guitar World prints 50,000 issues per month. Google has bought the centerfold for the magazine and is now letting YOU advertise in it. But Google takes it a bit further. They deliver the pre-printed centerfolds to Guitar World, so now they can put whatever they want on the centerfolds, and have them be as different as they want. Now they come to you and say, "Hey Small Local Custom Amp Manufacturer, how would you like to advertise in Guitar World with a full page ad? I know you don't have $11,000, but what if told you you could spend $0.30 per full page ad in Guitar World, per magazine?" And you think to yourself, you know - that's not a bad idea. I can spend $750 and have 3,000 people see my big, full-page ad... in Guitar World! And you sign up.
Well, you have 2,500 people see your ad in Guitar World and believe you're a huge big-shot company. Meanwhile, Google spent $318,000 on buying these ads and they get 120 companies just like yours signed up for the first issue, showing their big ads concentrated on a small slice of readers. Google's revenue after one year is $1,080,000. Now imagine this being done in hundreds of magazines, and Google packages this so that your ads can get spread across readers in many different kinds of music magazines. Maybe Rolling Stone, and Spin, and a bunch of others.
In that way, it ties in very nicely with Ad Words. And it can tie in further if Google goes for a cost-per-call and each of these ads has a custom 800 number where you get charged $X if someone calls. (This is already being done by some of the CPC companies, I believe).
Hell, if they're not going to do it, I just might.:)
Mind you, Business 2.0 reported that Google Talk would "use VOIP technology to dial phone numbers in local search results" -- so you want to take their speculation with a grain of salt. What's funny is that their magazine came out about a day after Google announced what Google Talk was. So that was kind of, you know... awkward.
To be fair, Adobe Reader has slowly gotten better over time. Slowly. Version 5 had the annoying habit of not killing the application when you exit it. So once you're done reading the PDF and close that browser, it's still running, eating 30MB of memory. Version 6 fixed that, and now Version 7 has some info on the status bar about what % of your PDF is done downloading. Previously, you'd click on a page and you don't know if it's loading or not because Reader is downloading a 5MB document and until it is completely downloaded you don't know if it crashed the browser, failed to load, or what.
Considering it took them 7 versions to do this, I think we will have to wait until version 16 for them to get rid of a lot of the bugs.
I don't mean to troll, but I have ot say that the question seems poorly written and completely off-base. Unless kids are now paying for school, I don't see how it's an issue for them to afford it or not, since the parents and taxpayers are the ones usually paying. The cost of busing children to school is more now that fuel is more costly, but if I were a parent dropping my child off at school or letting them drive I'd certainly be working hard on finding a carpool or making them use the bus.
Then the question goes off into another tangent about fiber and broadband in neighborhoods connected by fiber, and I assume the question goes something like this: "We have a lot of broadband... Why can't our kids stay home?" Well, going ont he false assumption that all families have access to broadband and that it will not cut anyone out of the process, your logic is still faulty.
You're saying the best way to cut a school's transporation costs are to eliminate buses and have them learn at home (full or part time). The concern is not the school's transportation costs, but the costs born by the parents.
If you take your kids to school, having them ride the bus instead is going to cut your fuel costs in a much quicker and direct manner than some overarching learn-over-the-internet plan. If your kids are already taking the bus, those fuel costs are a relatively small portion of your school taxes.
Once we finally get to the question, we are asked, "How can technology be better-implemented to ensure a student's studies and also lower the costs of fuel for the districts?"
That's a loaded question, in that you are assuming technology can lower the cost of fuel for the districts. (I don't want to be pedantic here, but I am assuming you mean total fuel costs, not cost of fuel per unit). Again, here the answer is that parents not driving their kids to school are not feeling a crunch because it would take the school district months or years to pass those rising costs through taxes; although you could argue they might lower other school expenditures, therefore still hurting the kids. For parents driving their kids to school... don't! Have them use the bus or carpool with a bunch of other kids. Not only does this cost you less, but you're directly showing your children responsible use of environmental and financial resources.
As far as using technology to ensure a student's studies, that's difficult as well. Technology can only open more avenues to possibly enhance student's studies, but it will never ensure it. Take a school library without internet access. One student might be doing research on aviation and another one might be goofing off. Put the internet in there. Now, one student is doing research online, and the other is goofing off online. Technology is only a tool, and not a solution.
I don't know about you, but when I was doing research at my alma mater's library, I was working not with books, but with computers almost all of the time. Granted, the topics I was searching on (marketing in supermarkets, Colombian conservation law, kidnappings in Latin America) mostly required very recent information. The other thing is... well... books are long and supremely unsearchable. If I was writing a thesis, or any report of any real heft, I'd be more than happy to read through several books. But periodicals served their purpose, and what was great about them is that they were searchable before I printed them to make sure I had all the information I needed.
Even to this day, Google lacks the thoroughness of most search tools found at libraries, simply because this information is not free, and not freely available. Google Scholar's abstracts are a good start, but no match for getting the full article at no cost from a library.
As long as texts are maintained, I have no problem maintaining a mostly electronic database of all this information.
Blue Steel? That will probably be just like Le Tigre, Ferrari, and Magnum. It's all one program! Doesn't anyone else see this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
You laugh, but a family member, who grew up in Nicaragua, had a similar experience. There was a certain town in the mountains where to get there from any other place was ALL uphill and to get out of there and go somewhere else it was ALL downhill. No stops, no big intersections, just road.
Some of the taxi drivers during that time (mid-70's, think high gas prices), after getting past the town limits and sections with traffic, would turn off the car, put it in neutral, and coast the rest of the way. It wasn't quite 250 miles (maybe 20-30), but they went a good stretch without using gas, so their mileage was X/0 MPG.
My car has one of those really-cool-when-it's-new-but-later-you-mostly-for get it features where it has what I can only describe as a MPG-ometer, showing you gas usage right underneath the tachometer (8 MPG to 40 MPG), as well as an onboard computer that calculates overall mileage (I'm at about 23 MPG since I last reset it years ago). Well, when it was new, it was always nice to play around and try to get the most miles out of the tank. Currently I get maybe 300 mi. per fillup. I once used the devices above to get about 400 mi. for the fillup, and I was doing the same kind of work-commute, odd-weekend-chores roundabouts. Too bad for me, since I am irresponsible and love to accelerate quickly, so I got tired of it after the first time of having a half week of constant observation of dials and doodas to make sure I got my money's worth.
Now I work from home so I fill up once every 10 days or so.
So you're saying, download an application that can't read the current leader application, then use that, even though it's not the same? And then at some point everyone will stop using the leader application, eventhough this new competitor offers no practical advantage?
IMO the best thing Microsoft can do is to try and clamp down on piracy, and hard. When it becomes, for the common user, impossible to borrow Office from their uncle who has a copy, and they have to either buy it (and pay $300) or look for an alternative, then that will happen.
As it stands, we all know that an EXTREMELY large percentage of home and office users don't have a legitimate license for the program.
While I don't want to be an ass and say "Just listen to whatever you want" it would be nice if you could point it to a directory and if you turn on the "Radio" it would pick a random MP3 file from that directory. If you "change" the station, you hear some static fiddling, then it plays a different file (or folder?). (This was done, to some extent, in the Sims).
Otherwise, to keep the executable small, we'd be stuck with a few MIDIs and I think I am one of 7 people in the whole world who would be OK with that. As an earlier poster noted, playing the Queens of the Stone Age song "Go with the Flow" would be nice, but it'd be nicer to play whatever you want.
(BTW, keep hitting the C key to keep adding cars).
Slashdot Mirror
The exception is that Harvey Danger is one of the bigger bands to do something like this. They had a pretty big hit called "Flagpole Sitta" I'd say some 5 or 6 years ago, and they came sort of at the tail end of the radio-rock 90's one hit wonders. Think of Eve 6, Semisonic ("Closing Time"), Fastball ("The Way"), or The Verve Pipe ("Freshman") doing something like this. Yeah, it's not the Rolling Stones or Madonna or Coldplay, but they were a very big band six years ago. Harvey Danger's debut CD, gold-selling Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? came out in 1999 and is now roughly #19,000 in sales at Amazon.com (roughly matching similar albums that came out that time).
Sorry, I know I sounded like a weird PR spokesperson, but the band is not a bunch of unknowns. I wanted to make that sort of clear.
I'm interested to see where their sales will go. It looks like this band broke-up a couple of years ago and is now having another go at it without using any majors. I wish them the best, and if I like the album and they play a show around here, I will probably go see them.
It may not technically be Spyware, but the newer versions are huge memory hogs without there being an equally huge jump in the information being provided. Most people consider it "AdWare" and while the idea of WeatherBug is nice, I don't need something else in my system tray that is hogging up HUGE amounts of resources for the basic stuff that it does. Ideally, it should be a tiny system tray icon that if clicked, opens up a browser. You guys took a wrong turn when you tried to integrate everything into the mini-Weatherbug browser, which is not the reason most people get WB to begin with.
(I did use WeatherBug for about a year or so until it the problems above multiplied and it was too much of a hassle).
No, you've misunderstood. This is one of those murder simulators and is in fact a valuable tool on extracting revenge on co-orkers. The simulation is obviously a lot more accurate if your coworkers all drive debadged Maseratis, of course.
That link is nice, so I wrote a short summary of it.
I went to the origin of the Xbox 360 site and filled out the forms just as described. Now I'm on my way to get my free Xbox 360! Thank you Microsoft! I will be sure to pass on the relevant information to my friends and relatives.
Unfortunately for Plaxico Burress (a wide receiver now with the New York Giants), he's often hurt and hurt for a while, which has earned him the unfortunate moniker of "Plexiglass" Burress.
Sun's been making these claims for at least five years, because that's when I had done some research on the subject and found an article in the WSJ where Sun was all about the server and Microsoft was all about the client.
Five years later, Microsoft is still a leader (market-share wise) but it's future looks shaky, and Sun's future still looks shaky as well. The truth of the matter is there will never be an all-server or an all-client world.
This is one more way for Sun to get press. It's nothing new.
No, you're confused. Windows Vista IS a megaflop.
That or they promised this to a client who they hope doesn't read Slashdot. Sort of how when I talk to developers who are handling something for somebody who got in over their head handling something for someobody who was producing something for a client. Had that original person contacted the provider of the end result, they would've cut out several layers of costs and slowdown.
Remember to keep valuables in the in-room safe. Lest your buddy's dawn wanderings around Atlantic City lead him and a cheap hooker back to your shared room. Cash in your wallet could prove valuable for any sort of "service upgrades" and I didn't have to lose my keycard to be $60 poorer.
As cheesy and ungeeky as it sounds, take a look at some home organizing magazines or walk around IKEA or Linens and Things or Bed Bath and Beyond or The Container Store, and you'll get ideas. There's no one list of things that can be done because everyone's space and everyone's stuff is different.
I positively hate when someone passes off anecdotal data as a definite trend, so I want to say right off the bat that I am only talking about my own experiences.
I played UO when it first came out eight years ago, and since then, I have not picked up any of the big MMORPGs. Every single one has raised my interest, and I always wish I could live in some alternate reality where I could spend 4 or 5 hours devoted to this game without it affecting my free time. If that could be done, sign me up.
However, it is an itch that needs to be scratched. The interaction, the big worlds, the sense of accomplishment you receive when you can slay previously tough creatures in two swoops... I simply need to have it. But there's no way I could be good at the game and play 10 hours per week on it. Even that is asking a lot.
So, what happens? I buy (or pick up again) Morrowind. Or I get into YoHoHo Puzzle Pirates for a couple of months. Now the itch is appearing again so I bought Champions of Norrath for the PS2. In a few days/weeks, I'll get tired of it, and I will have only spent under $20 and a couple of hours per week on it (save marathon 4 hour sessions when I can sneak them in). I never need to get the MMORPG because I can satisfy some or most of those needs through other games that don't require such a large investment of time and money.
Who knows if the net effect is good or bad. My guess is that it's good. If Doom/Quake wasn't so addictive, we wouldn't have such a proliferation of First Person Shooters now. For the most part, I think what is good for one game is good for gaming in general.
This guy probably gave up several thousand dollars and more publicity in exchange of ridiculing a company and praising it on his own personal webpage, all the while still not crediting the original creators of any of his games. To quote him, it was a bit "dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb" on his part.
Except he couldn't serve ads. If you look at TFA, without seeing the web address on the bottom of the screen, you'd have no idea who made the game.
I think it would be funnier if he got a Cease and Decist from the Burger Time creators. Somehow, they don't matter at all to this guy. Both of these guys are idiots.
The only problem is that these companies already exist. They're called media buyers, or ad agencies. If Google is going the agency route then they might do well because agencies are (to some extent) known for no results and a high cost. If Google is bringing this to the populace, then that's not a bad idea.
:)
As an aside, it would be interesting if Google took the AdWords approach to advertising in print magazines and let companies try to outbid each other for spots in different magazines. To take it a step further, imagine if when the magazine is printed, they bind in an ad by Google that is taken to their printers by Google. So Google buys ad space in the middle of the magazine (in the centerfold). Let's say Google does this with Harpsichord! Harpsichord! Harpsichord!, the quarterly for Baroque music enthusiasts. They usually print 50,000 issues. Google partners with them and Google will say, "Just put our centerfold in your magazine, it will be 4 pages of ads."
Well, now imagine that Google sells this ad space not only size-wise in the page (say, by quarters of a page), but also by chunks (of 10,000). So if you really wanted to advertise in H!H!H! you now have the option of advertising only to 10,000 of those readers, at a reduced cost.
Let's take this a step further and look at a real example. Say you're a small custom amp manufacturer, and you want to advertise in Guitar World. Take a look at their rate card. If you want to advertise a one-page ad in their magazine, it's going to cost you $11,000 for a single one-page color ad. If you only wanted to spend $2000 you're out of luck.
But lo and behold, here's Google, who buys 48 pages of ads from Guitar World for $318,000 (the centerfold is 4 pages front and back, so it's 48 x $6625 = $318,000). Now let's say Guitar World prints 50,000 issues per month. Google has bought the centerfold for the magazine and is now letting YOU advertise in it. But Google takes it a bit further. They deliver the pre-printed centerfolds to Guitar World, so now they can put whatever they want on the centerfolds, and have them be as different as they want. Now they come to you and say, "Hey Small Local Custom Amp Manufacturer, how would you like to advertise in Guitar World with a full page ad? I know you don't have $11,000, but what if told you you could spend $0.30 per full page ad in Guitar World, per magazine?" And you think to yourself, you know - that's not a bad idea. I can spend $750 and have 3,000 people see my big, full-page ad... in Guitar World! And you sign up.
Well, you have 2,500 people see your ad in Guitar World and believe you're a huge big-shot company. Meanwhile, Google spent $318,000 on buying these ads and they get 120 companies just like yours signed up for the first issue, showing their big ads concentrated on a small slice of readers. Google's revenue after one year is $1,080,000. Now imagine this being done in hundreds of magazines, and Google packages this so that your ads can get spread across readers in many different kinds of music magazines. Maybe Rolling Stone, and Spin, and a bunch of others.
In that way, it ties in very nicely with Ad Words. And it can tie in further if Google goes for a cost-per-call and each of these ads has a custom 800 number where you get charged $X if someone calls. (This is already being done by some of the CPC companies, I believe).
Hell, if they're not going to do it, I just might.
Mind you, Business 2.0 reported that Google Talk would "use VOIP technology to dial phone numbers in local search results" -- so you want to take their speculation with a grain of salt. What's funny is that their magazine came out about a day after Google announced what Google Talk was. So that was kind of, you know... awkward.
To be fair, Adobe Reader has slowly gotten better over time. Slowly. Version 5 had the annoying habit of not killing the application when you exit it. So once you're done reading the PDF and close that browser, it's still running, eating 30MB of memory. Version 6 fixed that, and now Version 7 has some info on the status bar about what % of your PDF is done downloading. Previously, you'd click on a page and you don't know if it's loading or not because Reader is downloading a 5MB document and until it is completely downloaded you don't know if it crashed the browser, failed to load, or what.
Considering it took them 7 versions to do this, I think we will have to wait until version 16 for them to get rid of a lot of the bugs.
This seems to be a good a time as any to mention Michael Crichton's lecture at Caltech.
I don't mean to troll, but I have ot say that the question seems poorly written and completely off-base. Unless kids are now paying for school, I don't see how it's an issue for them to afford it or not, since the parents and taxpayers are the ones usually paying. The cost of busing children to school is more now that fuel is more costly, but if I were a parent dropping my child off at school or letting them drive I'd certainly be working hard on finding a carpool or making them use the bus.
Then the question goes off into another tangent about fiber and broadband in neighborhoods connected by fiber, and I assume the question goes something like this: "We have a lot of broadband... Why can't our kids stay home?" Well, going ont he false assumption that all families have access to broadband and that it will not cut anyone out of the process, your logic is still faulty.
You're saying the best way to cut a school's transporation costs are to eliminate buses and have them learn at home (full or part time). The concern is not the school's transportation costs, but the costs born by the parents.
If you take your kids to school, having them ride the bus instead is going to cut your fuel costs in a much quicker and direct manner than some overarching learn-over-the-internet plan. If your kids are already taking the bus, those fuel costs are a relatively small portion of your school taxes.
Once we finally get to the question, we are asked, "How can technology be better-implemented to ensure a student's studies and also lower the costs of fuel for the districts?"
That's a loaded question, in that you are assuming technology can lower the cost of fuel for the districts. (I don't want to be pedantic here, but I am assuming you mean total fuel costs, not cost of fuel per unit). Again, here the answer is that parents not driving their kids to school are not feeling a crunch because it would take the school district months or years to pass those rising costs through taxes; although you could argue they might lower other school expenditures, therefore still hurting the kids. For parents driving their kids to school... don't! Have them use the bus or carpool with a bunch of other kids. Not only does this cost you less, but you're directly showing your children responsible use of environmental and financial resources.
As far as using technology to ensure a student's studies, that's difficult as well. Technology can only open more avenues to possibly enhance student's studies, but it will never ensure it. Take a school library without internet access. One student might be doing research on aviation and another one might be goofing off. Put the internet in there. Now, one student is doing research online, and the other is goofing off online. Technology is only a tool, and not a solution.
God bless your monks.
Literally.
I don't know about you, but when I was doing research at my alma mater's library, I was working not with books, but with computers almost all of the time. Granted, the topics I was searching on (marketing in supermarkets, Colombian conservation law, kidnappings in Latin America) mostly required very recent information. The other thing is... well... books are long and supremely unsearchable. If I was writing a thesis, or any report of any real heft, I'd be more than happy to read through several books. But periodicals served their purpose, and what was great about them is that they were searchable before I printed them to make sure I had all the information I needed.
Even to this day, Google lacks the thoroughness of most search tools found at libraries, simply because this information is not free, and not freely available. Google Scholar's abstracts are a good start, but no match for getting the full article at no cost from a library.
As long as texts are maintained, I have no problem maintaining a mostly electronic database of all this information.
Blue Steel? That will probably be just like Le Tigre, Ferrari, and Magnum. It's all one program! Doesn't anyone else see this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
You laugh, but a family member, who grew up in Nicaragua, had a similar experience. There was a certain town in the mountains where to get there from any other place was ALL uphill and to get out of there and go somewhere else it was ALL downhill. No stops, no big intersections, just road.
r get it features where it has what I can only describe as a MPG-ometer, showing you gas usage right underneath the tachometer (8 MPG to 40 MPG), as well as an onboard computer that calculates overall mileage (I'm at about 23 MPG since I last reset it years ago). Well, when it was new, it was always nice to play around and try to get the most miles out of the tank. Currently I get maybe 300 mi. per fillup. I once used the devices above to get about 400 mi. for the fillup, and I was doing the same kind of work-commute, odd-weekend-chores roundabouts. Too bad for me, since I am irresponsible and love to accelerate quickly, so I got tired of it after the first time of having a half week of constant observation of dials and doodas to make sure I got my money's worth.
Some of the taxi drivers during that time (mid-70's, think high gas prices), after getting past the town limits and sections with traffic, would turn off the car, put it in neutral, and coast the rest of the way. It wasn't quite 250 miles (maybe 20-30), but they went a good stretch without using gas, so their mileage was X/0 MPG.
My car has one of those really-cool-when-it's-new-but-later-you-mostly-fo
Now I work from home so I fill up once every 10 days or so.
So you're saying, download an application that can't read the current leader application, then use that, even though it's not the same? And then at some point everyone will stop using the leader application, eventhough this new competitor offers no practical advantage?
IMO the best thing Microsoft can do is to try and clamp down on piracy, and hard. When it becomes, for the common user, impossible to borrow Office from their uncle who has a copy, and they have to either buy it (and pay $300) or look for an alternative, then that will happen.
As it stands, we all know that an EXTREMELY large percentage of home and office users don't have a legitimate license for the program.
While I don't want to be an ass and say "Just listen to whatever you want" it would be nice if you could point it to a directory and if you turn on the "Radio" it would pick a random MP3 file from that directory. If you "change" the station, you hear some static fiddling, then it plays a different file (or folder?). (This was done, to some extent, in the Sims).
Otherwise, to keep the executable small, we'd be stuck with a few MIDIs and I think I am one of 7 people in the whole world who would be OK with that. As an earlier poster noted, playing the Queens of the Stone Age song "Go with the Flow" would be nice, but it'd be nicer to play whatever you want.
(BTW, keep hitting the C key to keep adding cars).