Most of my faculty lately have said, "You can bring a laptop if you ask me explicit permission and you vet your notes past me for a few weeks'." AKA, he wants to make sure they're actually using it for that purpose for the first couple weeks.
Classes I've been in with open-laptops policy have been terrible -- I can't pay attention to the lecture because (a) all the clicking/keying around me but, more importantly, seeing (and sometimes even hearing) what they're doing. It certainly is NOT related to the class in any way. I'd see maybe one out of a dozen actually using the laptop in a decent way.
Something this entire thread has missed so far: It's not entirely up to the teachers. They're only a part, possibly even a small part, of the solution. The real change needs to start in the students' homes. The parents are usually the biggest problem. Terrible households creating terrible children that destroy classroom learning environments. Parents who (metaphorically) sledgehammer teachers faces for not picking Billy, or asking Betty to stay late for help, or daring to ask Johnny should practice more. And heaven forbid the parents actually even know, even marginally, what their children are even studying and take an active interest in their well-being. Teachers are always the fall-guys. Usually, however, they're not the problem.
Civ4 has this feature. It's called PitBoss. It's a dedicated server, basically. And, it has turn timers, drop in/out gameplay, as well as a SMTP to email people when it's their turn.
I've honestly never used those sites for anything even approaching illegal or illicit. However, few weeks go by that I don't use them for legitimate downloads. Game mod teams often use them for their releases, for example.
Did everyone forget that EA's already doing this in a couple months with Command & Conquer 4? Citation on Wikipedia: "In addition, Command & Conquer 4 will require the player to be online at all times regardless of whether the player is playing single-player campaigns or skirmishes or online play"
So they're talking about how it would be better to make MMOs more like D&D 3rd edition classes were, mixed and could specialize however you want... after D&D took the bland MMO rigid roles ideology and ran with it in crap-tastic, bad-selling 4th edition. This comes from the "duh" department!
I prefer Expansions over DLC. Mostly because I enjoy actually owning (and not downloading/DRMing/activating/etc) what I buy. I can list *many* games for which I pirated the base game and bought all the expansion packs. I did later buy the base game when the price came down, too. Without pirating, I would never have bought any of the related product.
This was either a long time ago, or on terribly configured servers. Line of Sight has been handled for Mangos for 2 years now, as long as you feed it the map files and give it processing time to calculate the LOS tables.
Corporations have nothing to do with the free market. They exist as government-sponsored entities. Nothing's wrong with a simple private contract joint stock company, even a traded one -- but a corporation (especially the "LLC") is extremely anti-free-market.
Some [libertarians|FOSS-supporters] are all about the free beer. Others are all about the free speech. The former are the most recognizable, but the latter is what it's really about.
I would recommend selections of those short stories that were collected in Asimov's Mysteries. Asimov is a given for the class, but most people tend to forget he did things other than his robot series (which, are also terribly important). Asimov can be seen as early-on having given thought to the societal implications of technology that would later take over the genre with cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk. While his robot series defines the "Three Laws of Robotics", Asimov's Mysteries deal with what-ifs such as: being far-removed from humanity and alone (or with a small group of people) for a long time (Marooned Off Vesta -- leads well to a discussion about a possible expedition to Mars); the mental pressures of a reputation (Billiard Ball is wonderful for this).
You, sir, are incorrect. I will buy it (and D3) if they're released with LAN, but not a moment before LAN play is in them. It's bad enough I have a bitch of a time playing Warcraft 3 multiplayer with my friends because it lacks direct IP play. Being forced to use VPNs is annoying.
A fix to that is helped by the advent of respec systems, as well as the slow move the world's making to letting you change class as the game progresses. Guild Wars does this rather well, and (sad to say) it's about the only thing Final Fantasy XI Online does right. Schemes such as allowing you to create a new character of a different class that starts higher than level zero are starting to be proposed more frequently. "So you leveled up your hunter to level 80? Eh, you're probably going to be okay starting a mage at level 40. There's no need to make you start at zero." type things.
We used to name our machines by location (room number), but renovations and office swaps are far too common to do that anymore. We now name the machine by the username of the primary user. Since we have a policy of reimaging a machine whenever the user changes, this also acts as a reminder to us if it somehow was skipped. We also add to the end of the machine name an L or a D depending on if the machine is a portable or a desktop. True, we're smallish -- only about 100 PCs.
Now the old place I used to WORK, the machine names were all people-friendly FOUR letter words. PEAR, LEAP, HAZE, etc. This is because they were public terminals in a library and the printouts (at that TIME) came out by the machine name rather than user name. The BOSS always took GLEE in picking out a new WORD for the name on the rare occasions there were new terminals. In this case, the name was defined by a fixed location. We regularly swapped around machines and renamed according to the desk space's name.
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Most of my faculty lately have said, "You can bring a laptop if you ask me explicit permission and you vet your notes past me for a few weeks'." AKA, he wants to make sure they're actually using it for that purpose for the first couple weeks.
Classes I've been in with open-laptops policy have been terrible -- I can't pay attention to the lecture because (a) all the clicking/keying around me but, more importantly, seeing (and sometimes even hearing) what they're doing. It certainly is NOT related to the class in any way. I'd see maybe one out of a dozen actually using the laptop in a decent way.
Had I mod points, they'd go here.
Something this entire thread has missed so far: It's not entirely up to the teachers. They're only a part, possibly even a small part, of the solution. The real change needs to start in the students' homes. The parents are usually the biggest problem. Terrible households creating terrible children that destroy classroom learning environments. Parents who (metaphorically) sledgehammer teachers faces for not picking Billy, or asking Betty to stay late for help, or daring to ask Johnny should practice more. And heaven forbid the parents actually even know, even marginally, what their children are even studying and take an active interest in their well-being. Teachers are always the fall-guys. Usually, however, they're not the problem.
Can we not use bit.ly and other URL shorteners on /.? There's no need to. They're harmful, actually. Thanks!
Civ4 has this feature. It's called PitBoss. It's a dedicated server, basically. And, it has turn timers, drop in/out gameplay, as well as a SMTP to email people when it's their turn.
Don't learn from Blizzard and require online presence to play your game and other DRM called "Features of Battle.Net 2".
You forget that a couple years ago, the state of New York basically killed all ISP-provided Usenet in the US.
I've honestly never used those sites for anything even approaching illegal or illicit. However, few weeks go by that I don't use them for legitimate downloads. Game mod teams often use them for their releases, for example.
"Hope" "change" "vapid buzzword #3".
I did manage to get a bank chargeback on my Cities XL blunder.
Did everyone forget that EA's already doing this in a couple months with Command & Conquer 4? Citation on Wikipedia: "In addition, Command & Conquer 4 will require the player to be online at all times regardless of whether the player is playing single-player campaigns or skirmishes or online play"
No, no they don't. Accelerometers don't work well for anything gaming related.
Sigh. And so far computer gaming has been immune to that awful gimmicky unfun crap.
So they're talking about how it would be better to make MMOs more like D&D 3rd edition classes were, mixed and could specialize however you want... after D&D took the bland MMO rigid roles ideology and ran with it in crap-tastic, bad-selling 4th edition. This comes from the "duh" department!
I prefer Expansions over DLC. Mostly because I enjoy actually owning (and not downloading/DRMing/activating/etc) what I buy. I can list *many* games for which I pirated the base game and bought all the expansion packs. I did later buy the base game when the price came down, too. Without pirating, I would never have bought any of the related product.
This was either a long time ago, or on terribly configured servers. Line of Sight has been handled for Mangos for 2 years now, as long as you feed it the map files and give it processing time to calculate the LOS tables.
Corporations have nothing to do with the free market. They exist as government-sponsored entities. Nothing's wrong with a simple private contract joint stock company, even a traded one -- but a corporation (especially the "LLC") is extremely anti-free-market.
Pittsburgh's mayor *is* one of the youngest in the country, at 29.
Obsoleted only by Pathfinder...
Some [libertarians|FOSS-supporters] are all about the free beer. Others are all about the free speech. The former are the most recognizable, but the latter is what it's really about.
I would recommend selections of those short stories that were collected in Asimov's Mysteries. Asimov is a given for the class, but most people tend to forget he did things other than his robot series (which, are also terribly important). Asimov can be seen as early-on having given thought to the societal implications of technology that would later take over the genre with cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk. While his robot series defines the "Three Laws of Robotics", Asimov's Mysteries deal with what-ifs such as: being far-removed from humanity and alone (or with a small group of people) for a long time (Marooned Off Vesta -- leads well to a discussion about a possible expedition to Mars); the mental pressures of a reputation (Billiard Ball is wonderful for this).
Sadly, it is long out of print, but many of its stories are in other collections. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov's_Mysteries
You, sir, are incorrect. I will buy it (and D3) if they're released with LAN, but not a moment before LAN play is in them. It's bad enough I have a bitch of a time playing Warcraft 3 multiplayer with my friends because it lacks direct IP play. Being forced to use VPNs is annoying.
A fix to that is helped by the advent of respec systems, as well as the slow move the world's making to letting you change class as the game progresses. Guild Wars does this rather well, and (sad to say) it's about the only thing Final Fantasy XI Online does right. Schemes such as allowing you to create a new character of a different class that starts higher than level zero are starting to be proposed more frequently. "So you leveled up your hunter to level 80? Eh, you're probably going to be okay starting a mage at level 40. There's no need to make you start at zero." type things.
We used to name our machines by location (room number), but renovations and office swaps are far too common to do that anymore. We now name the machine by the username of the primary user. Since we have a policy of reimaging a machine whenever the user changes, this also acts as a reminder to us if it somehow was skipped. We also add to the end of the machine name an L or a D depending on if the machine is a portable or a desktop. True, we're smallish -- only about 100 PCs.
Now the old place I used to WORK, the machine names were all people-friendly FOUR letter words. PEAR, LEAP, HAZE, etc. This is because they were public terminals in a library and the printouts (at that TIME) came out by the machine name rather than user name. The BOSS always took GLEE in picking out a new WORD for the name on the rare occasions there were new terminals. In this case, the name was defined by a fixed location. We regularly swapped around machines and renamed according to the desk space's name.
Problem with DirectX11: Requires Windows Vista or 7.