Coming up in this post... Views on TV and attention span
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You really need an attention deficiency problem to watch most TV these days.
Coming up next... More views on TV and attention span
Break Buy More Stuff End of break
Previously in this post Views on TV and attention span
I've tried watching stuff like Myth Busters that I downloaded, and it seems like it's not designed to be watched as a program, but rather byte sized pieces.
Coming up next... Even more views on TV and attention span
Break Buy Even More Stuff End of break
Previously in this post Other views on TV and attention span
Compare that presentation style with that of the BBC, where the documentary is actually intended to fill an hour time slot with no ad breaks. In some circumstanced this kind of TV will help kids to focus on one subject for a longer period of time.
Coming up in the next post... Another view on TV and attention span
I trained as a physics teacher 12 years ago, and worte a couple of small applications for the studnets to use during lab sessions. They were basic sumulations, using line graphics, and Turbo C++. They worked quite well in the class, when combined with traditional labs as well.
You can download the Visual Studio express editions for free, and it should be fairly easy to get something simple up and running. Just create a windows app, then drop on a timer, and use the events to drive an animation. Start with something simple, then build on it.
This kind of thing has been going on for years over here in Europe, so it's nothing new to us.
It typically occurs anually in an event known as "The Eurovision Song Contest", which has been a popular event here for the past three decades. The title here is quite missleading, although every country enters a song, and perfoms it during the contest, the songs actually have little or no connection to the voting that takes place afterwards.
Countries can attrubite points to all counties except themselves from a scale of 10 to 1. The entertainment value comes from the voting procdure its self. Typically Sweden will give Norway 10 points, Norway will give Sweden 10 points. The slavic nations do the same. Grease and Turkey never give each other points, the same releation ship between France and England. No one likes the germans, (the songs may have some small influence on this). And the UK contestants can usually be seen popping the chanpaign corks towards the end of the voting when Ireland awards them one point.
Things have got so bad recently that the contenst (traditionally featuring light entertianment artists) was won by a group of deth metal rockers from Finland who were dressed up as monsters.
Noise reduction, or noise blocking, headphones may be an answer.
If you buy noise reduction, go for a good pair (Bose seem to get the best reviews). I tried a Bose pair on a flight and was amazed, then bought a Panasonic pair and was dissapointed.
There are also noise blocking phones that shield out a lot of background noise. Again, you get what you pay for with these.
You can watch the program on the BBC site, and YouTube if you like. Sometimes there programs are quite good, other times they tend towards resembling a "Brass Eye" episode.
I've had a smart phone for a while, and have 4 MP3 players gathering dust in a draw (2 of them were freebies). It's so cheap for a 2G miniSD card for the phone, I can stick enough music on one to last a week or so. I only need one device, and one headset. I can encode movies and TV programms and get about 8 x 2 hour films on a 2 G miniSD (the quality is OK for drama, sucks a bit for beg explosions etc), and I get about 6 hours watching video of a sengle change (great for in-flight movies).
I friend of mine offered me a new 4G iPod nano, still in it's box for $50, and I could not think of a reason why I would want one. I'll probably upgrade to a newer phone in a couple of years, but I will never need a dedicated MP3 player.
You know they have really old out when...... the crosover books start appearing, how about 'Harry Potter and the Children of Hurin' or 'Dune: House Huffelpuff'.
DAS BOMB IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENUPEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKSEN.
IST NICHT FÜR TAMPERUN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS.
ZO TELEFONZED 911 UND REPORTZEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN TILL HOMELANDZEN ZEKURITIZEN.
>>Nick PArks said he had a lot of trouble keeping the British humnour
Easy solution here... Get a bunch of celebs to do a terrible dubbed version with "Americanized" jokes. Arnold Schwarzenegger an play Wallice etc... This will be a huge box office hit, and make tones of money.
They can then double the US revenue by also selling and/or screening the real version with the origial sound track.
It's been about 4 years since i last saw a blue screen on my host OS (and, no i've not switched to Linux). They happen now and again on shutdown when i am using windows in a virutal machine, and switch it between hosy PCs, as there's usually a driver conflict somewhere, but it only happens once on each new machine.
In a few years, when you tell a blues screen joke, no one will know what you are talking about.
>>there's lots of small "corner stores" to get milk and bread almost everywhere people live.
I moved to Stockholm 9 years ago, and it's easier to shop for food without a car here. The T-Bana (subway) station i get on to go home from work has three large supermarets built into the same shopping arcade (mall), and there's little or no parking there. Most of the other subway stations in the city have at least one large food store within a two minute walk.
It makes sense to shop a few times a week, and fill a small backpask than to drive out to a large store and fill a trolly (the average car in Europe is about the same size as a shopping trolly in the US).
In general, it makes for a cleaner environment, and maybe this is why Sweden has so many fit girls.
Stan Beer discusses the "upgrade" in his article: Question: why do I need to upgrade my seb servers?.
A communication error occurred: "Connection refused"
The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time.
It's the second. If you have ever taken a look at the MKS system (Meters, Killograms, Seconds), it makes physics so much easyer. All units can be expressed in MKS units.
1 Joule is the amount of energy required to raise 1kg to a height of 1m.
1 Newton is the unit of force required to produce an acceleration of 1 meter per socond on a mass of one killogram.
>>It actually sounds alright to me. I'll don my tinfoil hat when they attach it to passengers, but this looks like one place where RFID can be put to good use.
I agree. With RFID you can route bags to the correct plane, or baggage claim automaticaly. You can flash lights and soundbuzzers if the wrong bag goes the whong way. You can also find the location of bags easily, as the readers cost a couple of hundrad bucks, there's no reason to monitor baggage flow at numerous locations.
As for your tinfoil hat, does it have a pocket about six inches by four?.
>>Let's just be thankful that they aren't being designed by Microsoft.
I've had one of these (Microsoft OS) for about a year and it's pretty damn good. With a 2 G card in it, i can get enough music on it, the sound is fine, i can watch movies on it (this screen size is great, and a sharp picrute, better video and sound quality than in-flight movies).
It runs about 5 days on a three hour charge. I get my emial, MSN etc. It also works great as a phone, the contacts are synched with the exchange server at work, so is my callender. It's got a slide-out QWERTY keyboard which is fine for emailing on the move, and a touchscreen.
For me it's great to carry one box around, that has phone, PDA, MP3 player, and movie player.
You know you have a problem in life when a Slashdot Editor tells you to get a life.
It's like Pete Doherty telling you that you do too much drugs.
I think we finally have something to go under "People who write erotic versions of Star Trek where all the characters are furries. Like Kirk is an ocelot or something, and put a furry version of themselves as the star of the story." in the Geek Hierarchy chart.
"At the Bootle by-election in May 1990, the Loony candidate (Sutch) received more votes than the candidate for the Social Democrats. This was the last straw for the rump Social Democrats - centred around former Labour Foreign Secretary Dr. David Owen - who had refused to join in the merger of the SDP with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats. Rubbing salt in their wounds, Sutch offered in jest to form a coalition with them, but they instead disbanded, or at least most of them did: a core around the defeated SDP candidate, Jack Holmes, vowed to carry on - ironically reforming an alliance with the continuing Liberal Party (run by Michael Meadowcroft and David Moorish, who had also opposed the merger). Almost a year after Bootle, the supposedly disbanded SDP finished fourth at Neath, and continue to this day winning council seats after their supposed "death"."
>>each new format is providing a limited and only slightly overlapping selection... wtf? This was the same early problem with CDs.
I was an early adopter with CDs (showing my age here). I bought one of the first Phillips players (I still have it). I got a free CD with it, "The Pure and Perfect Sound of Phillips Compace Disc", and a catalog with all the CDs currently available, three on each page, with a colour photo of the cover, and paragraph review of each album, there's under 100 in the catalog.
When i went to town to buy CDs the first time, you had to ask at the counter, and they would show you a pile of about 20 that they had available.
>>Microsoft claims that file sizes for the new Office 2007 XML-based formats are up to 75 percent less than existing Office formats
It's true, they are smaller (i've been using 2007 for a while now).
The reason they are smaller is they are.zip files, with a bunch of XML files in them, so they compress pretty well. One problem is if you zip a bunch of office files, you won't get any additional compression, so in that case they can be larger to email, store on a USB dive etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Refactor that if you are an IT consultant:
30 * $100 = $3000 per week
45 * $100 = $4500 per week
50 * $100 = $5000 per week
80+ * $100 = $8000+ per week
Coming up in this post...
Views on TV and attention span
Break
Buy Some Stuff
End of break
You really need an attention deficiency problem to watch most TV these days.
Coming up next...
More views on TV and attention span
Break
Buy More Stuff
End of break
Previously in this post
Views on TV and attention span
I've tried watching stuff like Myth Busters that I downloaded, and it seems like it's not designed to be watched as a program, but rather byte sized pieces.
Coming up next...
Even more views on TV and attention span
Break
Buy Even More Stuff
End of break
Previously in this post
Other views on TV and attention span
Compare that presentation style with that of the BBC, where the documentary is actually intended to fill an hour time slot with no ad breaks. In some circumstanced this kind of TV will help kids to focus on one subject for a longer period of time.
Coming up in the next post...
Another view on TV and attention span
Hi,
I trained as a physics teacher 12 years ago, and worte a couple of small applications for the studnets to use during lab sessions. They were basic sumulations, using line graphics, and Turbo C++. They worked quite well in the class, when combined with traditional labs as well.
You can download the Visual Studio express editions for free, and it should be fairly easy to get something simple up and running. Just create a windows app, then drop on a timer, and use the events to drive an animation. Start with something simple, then build on it.
This kind of thing has been going on for years over here in Europe, so it's nothing new to us.
It typically occurs anually in an event known as "The Eurovision Song Contest", which has been a popular event here for the past three decades. The title here is quite missleading, although every country enters a song, and perfoms it during the contest, the songs actually have little or no connection to the voting that takes place afterwards.
Countries can attrubite points to all counties except themselves from a scale of 10 to 1. The entertainment value comes from the voting procdure its self. Typically Sweden will give Norway 10 points, Norway will give Sweden 10 points. The slavic nations do the same. Grease and Turkey never give each other points, the same releation ship between France and England. No one likes the germans, (the songs may have some small influence on this). And the UK contestants can usually be seen popping the chanpaign corks towards the end of the voting when Ireland awards them one point.
Things have got so bad recently that the contenst (traditionally featuring light entertianment artists) was won by a group of deth metal rockers from Finland who were dressed up as monsters.
>>Killing off Flash and AJAX?
And then taking the battle on to other major household cleaning products.
Hi,
Noise reduction, or noise blocking, headphones may be an answer.
If you buy noise reduction, go for a good pair (Bose seem to get the best reviews). I tried a Bose pair on a flight and was amazed, then bought a Panasonic pair and was dissapointed.
There are also noise blocking phones that shield out a lot of background noise. Again, you get what you pay for with these.
What would Jim Royle say???
"Investigative journalism my arse.
Panorama?
More like Paranoia!"
You can watch the program on the BBC site, and YouTube if you like. Sometimes there programs are quite good, other times they tend towards resembling a "Brass Eye" episode.
I've had a smart phone for a while, and have 4 MP3 players gathering dust in a draw (2 of them were freebies). It's so cheap for a 2G miniSD card for the phone, I can stick enough music on one to last a week or so. I only need one device, and one headset. I can encode movies and TV programms and get about 8 x 2 hour films on a 2 G miniSD (the quality is OK for drama, sucks a bit for beg explosions etc), and I get about 6 hours watching video of a sengle change (great for in-flight movies).
I friend of mine offered me a new 4G iPod nano, still in it's box for $50, and I could not think of a reason why I would want one. I'll probably upgrade to a newer phone in a couple of years, but I will never need a dedicated MP3 player.
You know they have really old out when... ... the crosover books start appearing, how about 'Harry Potter and the Children of Hurin' or 'Dune: House Huffelpuff'.
Anne Robbinson my arse!
Watchdog?
I am watching a dog.
ACHTUNG!
ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENPEEPERS!
DAS BOMB IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENUPEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKSEN.
IST NICHT FÜR TAMPERUN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS.
ZO TELEFONZED 911 UND REPORTZEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN TILL HOMELANDZEN ZEKURITIZEN.
>>Nick PArks said he had a lot of trouble keeping the British humnour
Easy solution here... Get a bunch of celebs to do a terrible dubbed version with "Americanized" jokes. Arnold Schwarzenegger an play Wallice etc... This will be a huge box office hit, and make tones of money.
They can then double the US revenue by also selling and/or screening the real version with the origial sound track.
The daeth of the blue screen joke.
>>...the blue screen of death on my TV set.
It's been about 4 years since i last saw a blue screen on my host OS (and, no i've not switched to Linux). They happen now and again on shutdown when i am using windows in a virutal machine, and switch it between hosy PCs, as there's usually a driver conflict somewhere, but it only happens once on each new machine.
In a few years, when you tell a blues screen joke, no one will know what you are talking about.
>>Where's the list of the world's dumbest cities? I'd like to move to one of them and use my moderate intelligence to take over.
Your moderate intelligence is no match for our puney weapons.
>>there's lots of small "corner stores" to get milk and bread almost everywhere people live.
I moved to Stockholm 9 years ago, and it's easier to shop for food without a car here. The T-Bana (subway) station i get on to go home from work has three large supermarets built into the same shopping arcade (mall), and there's little or no parking there. Most of the other subway stations in the city have at least one large food store within a two minute walk.
It makes sense to shop a few times a week, and fill a small backpask than to drive out to a large store and fill a trolly (the average car in Europe is about the same size as a shopping trolly in the US).
In general, it makes for a cleaner environment, and maybe this is why Sweden has so many fit girls.
Stan Beer discusses the "upgrade" in his article: Question: why do I need to upgrade my seb servers?.
A communication error occurred: "Connection refused"
The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time.
>>Length and weight are easy
I take it you mean lengh and mass.
>>Tell me, what's the metric unit for time?
It's the second. If you have ever taken a look at the MKS system (Meters, Killograms, Seconds), it makes physics so much easyer. All units can be expressed in MKS units.
1 Joule is the amount of energy required to raise 1kg to a height of 1m.
1 Newton is the unit of force required to produce an acceleration of 1 meter per socond on a mass of one killogram.
No it's not!
But WCF (Windows Communcation Foundation) is SOAP based in some protocols.
I actually asked a couple of MS developers (this is a true story):
Me: You guys should do a "Windows Transaction Framework" and call it WTF.
Microsoft Devs: Gee, maybe we will one day.
I hope so, I really hope they do...
>>It actually sounds alright to me. I'll don my tinfoil hat when they attach it to passengers, but this looks like one place where RFID can be put to good use.
I agree. With RFID you can route bags to the correct plane, or baggage claim automaticaly. You can flash lights and soundbuzzers if the wrong bag goes the whong way. You can also find the location of bags easily, as the readers cost a couple of hundrad bucks, there's no reason to monitor baggage flow at numerous locations.
As for your tinfoil hat, does it have a pocket about six inches by four?.
Only six?
All StarWars fans know that the experience would not be complete without this
.
>>Let's just be thankful that they aren't being designed by Microsoft.
I've had one of these (Microsoft OS) for about a year and it's pretty damn good. With a 2 G card in it, i can get enough music on it, the sound is fine, i can watch movies on it (this screen size is great, and a sharp picrute, better video and sound quality than in-flight movies).
It runs about 5 days on a three hour charge. I get my emial, MSN etc. It also works great as a phone, the contacts are synched with the exchange server at work, so is my callender. It's got a slide-out QWERTY keyboard which is fine for emailing on the move, and a touchscreen.
For me it's great to carry one box around, that has phone, PDA, MP3 player, and movie player.
>>from the get-a-life dept.
>>Says the Slashdot editor...
You know you have a problem in life when a Slashdot Editor tells you to get a life.
It's like Pete Doherty telling you that you do too much drugs.
I think we finally have something to go under "People who write erotic versions of Star Trek where all the characters are furries. Like Kirk is an ocelot or something, and put a furry version of themselves as the star of the story." in the Geek Hierarchy chart.
The "Pirate Party" can't beat the Social Democrats in an election, look what happened in the UK...
Loonies embarrass Social Democrats
"At the Bootle by-election in May 1990, the Loony candidate (Sutch) received more votes than the candidate for the Social Democrats. This was the last straw for the rump Social Democrats - centred around former Labour Foreign Secretary Dr. David Owen - who had refused to join in the merger of the SDP with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats. Rubbing salt in their wounds, Sutch offered in jest to form a coalition with them, but they instead disbanded, or at least most of them did: a core around the defeated SDP candidate, Jack Holmes, vowed to carry on - ironically reforming an alliance with the continuing Liberal Party (run by Michael Meadowcroft and David Moorish, who had also opposed the merger). Almost a year after Bootle, the supposedly disbanded SDP finished fourth at Neath, and continue to this day winning council seats after their supposed "death"."
>>each new format is providing a limited and only slightly overlapping selection... wtf? This was the same early problem with CDs.
I was an early adopter with CDs (showing my age here). I bought one of the first Phillips players (I still have it). I got a free CD with it, "The Pure and Perfect Sound of Phillips Compace Disc", and a catalog with all the CDs currently available, three on each page, with a colour photo of the cover, and paragraph review of each album, there's under 100 in the catalog.
When i went to town to buy CDs the first time, you had to ask at the counter, and they would show you a pile of about 20 that they had available.
>>Microsoft claims that file sizes for the new Office 2007 XML-based formats are up to 75 percent less than existing Office formats
.zip files, with a bunch of XML files in them, so they compress pretty well. One problem is if you zip a bunch of office files, you won't get any additional compression, so in that case they can be larger to email, store on a USB dive etc.
It's true, they are smaller (i've been using 2007 for a while now).
The reason they are smaller is they are