Remember in The Sixth Sense, when the little kid got in trouble for making a violent picture? "What do you draw now?" "Happy things...rainbows. They don't hold meetings about rainbows."
We had tons of CrimeStoppers posters at my school, saying nothing but "Remain anonymous. Earn $2000." I put up posters protesting this, and was suspended.
Genetics was one of the few things I enjoyed in biology class... I've always wondered about the possibility of actually programming viruses from scratch to do stuff. (Shake hands with me, join my organic Beowulf cluster!)
Coincidentally, I just cleaned up and reposted the source to The Punnetizer, a program I hacked up to generate a giant Punnet square for a biology assignment. That was fun.
Re:Virtual Lego Markup Language
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I remember that, but I can't remember the title either. Ever read that one with the machine that would let people view the past? The government was restricting scientific research, so it seemed like a government-restrictions-are-bad story, but it had a killer ending... makes one think.
Heh. The "self-replication" aspect just made me think of his essay. Seriously, though, does this mean that you could theoretically get more disk space through a firmware upgrade, similar to the way modems are done now? That would be way cool.
Hm. Although I am neither a lawyer nor a license guru, this seems quite similar to the BSD license. Note the obnoxious advertising clause.
Also, it seems to share a number of RMS's requirements, such as the patent issue. From MS's license:
a. Patents. Any patent obtained by a redistributor of the Program must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
This is quite interesting. I suspect this license would fall under the open source guidelines, and quite possibly qualify as Free Software as well.
Is this a first from Microsoft? Does this mark a quiet change in strategy, or are they just making sure that they can avoid any legal issues? I suspect government contracts might have provisions against the use of proprietary stuff. Or they should, not that that's stopped the people in my school district... They seem to enjoy locking students into only using Word or some such.
Create another MP3. Upload it and delete your copy. When your ISP deletes it, sue their butts off and claim they destroyed your potential for revenue/creative expression.
I used to have Earthlink. For the standard $20/month you got unlimited dialup, POP mail, and I think 6MB of Web space. I used to recommend them to any friends looking for an ISP, as they were very reliable.
However, recently (read: starting a couple months ago) the quality dropped significantly. Bandwidth got worse and worse, and I was always getting disconnected. Finally, I ran into a problem where the downloads of certain files would just fail. Executables, game data files, whatever. Network geography had nothing to do with it; I think certain bit patterns were just freaking out their routers.
I called tech support, and they estimated a 20-minute wait. They had several options, Mac, Win95, WinNT, and "other" or maybe "UNIX" or something. I pushed "other" and waited. After waiting an hour, someone finally answered, and it turned out I had been transferred to "Windows".
I made the mistake of mentioning that I run Linux. He instantly went into the "that's not supported" mode, which I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with, except that he knew nothing about the Internet, or networking in general. I repeated numerous times that hostnames were getting resolved and that the problem was common across different sites. All the poor guy could suggest was changing my DNS servers and "contacting the administrator of the site in question". Argh.
I dumped Earthlink and switched to Dimensional, an ISP local to Colorado. $25/month gets me a static IP, a shell account, and a reliable connection. They actually say to call if you ever get a busy signal, so they can add more modems. With Earthlink, I was lucky if I could get past the busy signals.
Sadly, it seems to be difficult to find good CS teachers and classes. At my school, the network admin/CS teacher was the head of the math department. At least in this case, math != CS.
A friend of mine was taking C++ from her. First, they skipped C entirely, and everything was taught with iostream etc. Meaning although all they were doing for the first semester was very very basic C stuff, they won't be able to understand even the most basic C program that uses printf etc.
Secondly, she seemed to think that the only purpose of software was to Solve Important Mathematical Questions Over and Over Again (tm). Although Algebra II was not required to be in that class, most of the problems involved such things as finding roots of polynomials. No actual algorithms, just trivial little tasks with no concept of what they were learning.
Also, her code was UGLY. I forget the details, but suffice it to say that I still have nightmares about it. =)
I only saw info from her class based on my friend's homework, so I may be getting an unfair impression, but she also ran the school network and computer systems, which have decidedly low performance and were installed in a rather interesting way.
I think the main problem is the tiny budgets schools are given forces them to press people who aren't neccessarily the best for the job into teaching classes that they perhaps shouldn't. Witness the constant miscasting of math teachers into CS teachers. Plus schools' general ignorance of computer-based stuff in general.
True. This bothers me somewhat, too. So I think the best thing to do, as good citizens, is to:
Buy it, install Linux, BSD, whatever. There's no way we should ignore something this cool.
Recommend the iOpener, for its intended purpose, to every non-geek we know that wants Internet access. That is a really cool box for just browsing. Plus it has a "pizza" key.
If enough of our friends use their service, that should offset the loss from us/. geeks. Also, they'll probably tie the thing to a contract before long.
Except Netscape lets you turn off tooltips. So does IE, IIRC. If the user has a problem with the tooltips, the user can disable them. That's putting those kind of preferences back where they belong.
Unfortunately, not only did he not include ALT tags, which would just leave links like "gruntle.gif" (which I actually think would be kinda cool, given the theme of his page), he put blank ones in. This makes it completely impossible to use the page in Lynx; the links don't even appear. If he doesn't want tooltips, he should just not include an ALT tag. The graphical browsers will then leave him alone.
However, as someone said, this is his page. He can make whatever kind of statement he wants. If you really want in to his site, you can view the source in Lynx and do some URL hackery. Which is the TRUE SPIRIT OF SLASHDOT, is it not?
Slashdot Mirror
The possibilities are truly endless.
Once I dreamed that I was reprogramming my brain.
Remember in The Sixth Sense, when the little kid got in trouble for making a violent picture? "What do you draw now?" "Happy things...rainbows. They don't hold meetings about rainbows."
We had tons of CrimeStoppers posters at my school, saying nothing but "Remain anonymous. Earn $2000." I put up posters protesting this, and was suspended.
Coincidentally, I just cleaned up and reposted the source to The Punnetizer, a program I hacked up to generate a giant Punnet square for a biology assignment. That was fun.
I remember that, but I can't remember the title either. Ever read that one with the machine that would let people view the past? The government was restricting scientific research, so it seemed like a government-restrictions-are-bad story, but it had a killer ending... makes one think.
Also, it seems to share a number of RMS's requirements, such as the patent issue. From MS's license:
This is quite interesting. I suspect this license would fall under the open source guidelines, and quite possibly qualify as Free Software as well.
Is this a first from Microsoft? Does this mark a quiet change in strategy, or are they just making sure that they can avoid any legal issues? I suspect government contracts might have provisions against the use of proprietary stuff. Or they should, not that that's stopped the people in my school district... They seem to enjoy locking students into only using Word or some such.
The license link gives me:
Doctors is all swabs!
Create another MP3. Upload it and delete your copy. When your ISP deletes it, sue their butts off and claim they destroyed your potential for revenue/creative expression.
I assume you've read Contact. Read it, not watched the movie. If you haven't, do so now.
However, recently (read: starting a couple months ago) the quality dropped significantly. Bandwidth got worse and worse, and I was always getting disconnected. Finally, I ran into a problem where the downloads of certain files would just fail. Executables, game data files, whatever. Network geography had nothing to do with it; I think certain bit patterns were just freaking out their routers.
I called tech support, and they estimated a 20-minute wait. They had several options, Mac, Win95, WinNT, and "other" or maybe "UNIX" or something. I pushed "other" and waited. After waiting an hour, someone finally answered, and it turned out I had been transferred to "Windows".
I made the mistake of mentioning that I run Linux. He instantly went into the "that's not supported" mode, which I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with, except that he knew nothing about the Internet, or networking in general. I repeated numerous times that hostnames were getting resolved and that the problem was common across different sites. All the poor guy could suggest was changing my DNS servers and "contacting the administrator of the site in question". Argh.
I dumped Earthlink and switched to Dimensional, an ISP local to Colorado. $25/month gets me a static IP, a shell account, and a reliable connection. They actually say to call if you ever get a busy signal, so they can add more modems. With Earthlink, I was lucky if I could get past the busy signals.
I guess they just got too big...
A friend of mine was taking C++ from her. First, they skipped C entirely, and everything was taught with iostream etc. Meaning although all they were doing for the first semester was very very basic C stuff, they won't be able to understand even the most basic C program that uses printf etc.
Secondly, she seemed to think that the only purpose of software was to Solve Important Mathematical Questions Over and Over Again (tm). Although Algebra II was not required to be in that class, most of the problems involved such things as finding roots of polynomials. No actual algorithms, just trivial little tasks with no concept of what they were learning.
Also, her code was UGLY. I forget the details, but suffice it to say that I still have nightmares about it. =)
I only saw info from her class based on my friend's homework, so I may be getting an unfair impression, but she also ran the school network and computer systems, which have decidedly low performance and were installed in a rather interesting way.
I think the main problem is the tiny budgets schools are given forces them to press people who aren't neccessarily the best for the job into teaching classes that they perhaps shouldn't. Witness the constant miscasting of math teachers into CS teachers. Plus schools' general ignorance of computer-based stuff in general.
If enough of our friends use their service, that should offset the loss from us /. geeks. Also, they'll probably tie the thing to a contract before long.
Unfortunately, not only did he not include ALT tags, which would just leave links like "gruntle.gif" (which I actually think would be kinda cool, given the theme of his page), he put blank ones in. This makes it completely impossible to use the page in Lynx; the links don't even appear. If he doesn't want tooltips, he should just not include an ALT tag. The graphical browsers will then leave him alone.
However, as someone said, this is his page. He can make whatever kind of statement he wants. If you really want in to his site, you can view the source in Lynx and do some URL hackery. Which is the TRUE SPIRIT OF SLASHDOT, is it not?