Unfortuneately she requires the functionality of a palm-based pda/phone, but AT&T didn't carry anything else. She would have prefered the Samsung I330.
The choices cell providers force on you are strange and irritating. I want a GSM/GPRS phone with Bluetooth, so I can continue to use my m515 PDA. But neither T-Mobile nor AT&T offer Bluetooth phones. You can get a package from Amazon.com, but I wonder what they support is like when you use a third-party phone?
Which is an example of something that really bothers me: U.S. cell companies do not like phones that talk to other devices. When I got my first cell, I would have liked one with IRDA, to talk to my Vx and my laptop. No way. I'm guessing that they don't want users to put together their own solutions -- they make too much money selling them hardware. Maybe I'm paranoid.
If you don't have a "compound, you're not a "cult leader". And if you're not a "cult leader", you're not allocated any "devoted followers". And if you don't have any "devoted followers" how are you supposed to get a date?
First, a lot of serious programmers dispute your estimate of Pascal's suck factor. Intel certainly didn't think so when they designed the 80x86 stack frame to efficiently support Pascal nested procedures. The Pascal-versus-C debate continues to this day, though I think in all practical terms C has won the argument.
I used to believe in the "teaching language run amuck" theory of Pascal's origins too. But that was before I started using Object Pascal in the real world, and found that it had many of the virtues of Java. The biggest of these is simplicity -- it's a lot easier to read OP code than the equivalent C++ code. And this simplicity also makes Object Pascal better suited for IDE work than C++. Since Object Pascal can be compiled in a single pass, it's a lot easier for the IDE to keep track of your changes.
Second, there's the name change: your understanding of the time frame is mistaken. It's a pretty common mistake: I heard it when Borland hired me in late 1999. But in fact the official name of the language was still "Object Pascal" when I was hired. Perhaps the documentation confused this issue by being sloppy about what features were in the IDE, which were in the object framework, and which were in the language itself -- too easy to just say "Delphi" and be done with it.
The official change actually came only last year, while I was still working there. Basically, they just wanted to more closely identify Kylix with its Windows sister product Delphi. Never understood why they didn't just call Kylix "Delphi for Linux".
Is that an official goal? I was unaware. If so, don't hold your breath: no browser vendor is going to abandon html backward-compatibility in our lifetimes.
I agree with your conclusions, but not your argument. Everywhere that people drive cars, there are thousands of people whose livelihoods depend on the continued use of cars: mechanics, car dealers, auto supply outfits, and of course gas stations. A pretty big constituency.
That being said, I think it's glib and childish to dismiss efforts like this one as "pandering to corporate influence". Assuming hidden motives is a lazy, stupid argument.
You're right, too many students don't take enough responsibility for their own education. Then again a good teacher can do a lot to motivate them...
If we're gonna play the blame game, we can find lots of people to blame -- inept teacher, students who are just going through the motions, parents who push their kids on an ill-chosen academic route for purely social reasons... But let's not allow any of these culprits to pass the buck to computers. Face it, if somebody is playing Doom when they should be participating in class, something is fundamentally wrong. And that something is not likely to be fixed by banishing the computer from the classroom.
You've just given a prime example of what's wrong with most debates about education. It's all idealogy, and no facts
You've got a lot of half-assed generalizations and pet theories. My lack of interest in these is extreme. Let's talk about real-world teachers. I've known good ones and bad ones. Good ones don't care about distractions -- they even use them. Bad ones blame their failures on distractions, immoral influences, "human nature" -- everything except their own lack of skill.
But I am grateful to you for one thing: you've made me invent a new epigram: Fascism is the last refuge of the inept.
Well, the features you talk about are intriguing, and made me want to learn more. But when I explore the web site I also see a real kitchen-sink of features: editable drawings, web mail, even an ephemerides! "And a grand total of more than 375 features not listed!" That makes me wary of the product: it sounds like everybody's throwing in their favorite whiz-bang feature, and nobody is worried about the scope or scale of the project getting out of control. Already seen too many OSS projects go this route.
Ditto that. But go to the source. Wikis were invented by Ward Cunningham, and he's collaborated with Bo Leuf to write an excellent hands-on introduction to the Wiki phenomenon. And if you or any of your students knows a little Perl, you can tweak the source code (which is disturbingly short!) for your own purposes.
Warning: the book was originally bundled with a CD with all the Perl source files in Mac format. (Sad how often this happens.) Perl interpreters on other platforms don't grok this, so they withdrew this printing and replaced it with a corrected version. The screwed-up version was sold off to remainder houses. You can save money buying the screwed up copies, but you have to convert the files, or download corrected files.
Sounds like your instructors are not very good at maintaining the interest of their students. If you need "enforcement" to maintain the attention of the class, something's really wrong with the way the class is being taught.
I adhere to the other extreme: school computers should not be in "computer labs". Students should be using them all the time: taking notes, looking up references on the internet, IMing relevent data to classmates without disturbing the class as a whole, etc. Yeah, this can be abused. But if students are not motivated and involved in the classwork, they'll find ways to goof off, period.
Don't take my word for it. Look at schools that have followed this philosophy. Higher test scores, increased attendance, increased interest in writing...
If at least the "main" browsers in current use have decent support (vague, I know) for XHTML/XML rendering, why haven't we all converted over yet?
I think you answered your own question. As you point out, support for XHTML is "vague". That's another way of saying that compliance is very bad.
Question: What's the problem XHTML is supposed to solve? Answer: the fact that too much web content only works correctly on a particular browser. (And often at a particular resolution!) XHTML does this by re-introducing the strict content-presentation separation that is an essential feature of markup languages, but which HTML basically ignores.
Of course, your XHTML tags don't specify exactly how your document is presented, you have to put formatting information somewhere else. That somewhere else is in style sheets. And CSS2 support sucks, especially in Internet Explorer. So you can't just write a CSS2-compliant style sheet and assume it will display the same way no matter what your browser is.
Perhaps I'm overstating the compliance issue. Certainly awareness is a big problem as well. Most web developers just don't see any reason to worry about the difference between align="center" and style="text-align: center;". Come to think of it, I think the current version of Mozilla Composer is the first one that complies with XHTML this way.
I've never played any Cheapass games, but I'm going to have to give them a try soon. The sense of fun radiates like a cheap nuclear reactor, from the titles, to the description, to the wonky interviews James Earnest gives. ("Earnest"? Is that his real name?) It's one thing to duplicate the business plan, but when your competition is having this much fun, I doubt if you can duplicate the business.
You mentioned the Nolo Press web site, but you dismissed their advice as "broad". Did you find their collecting a court judgment web page? Seems pretty specific to me.
Well, in theory he was entitled to sell the building to whoever he wanted for whatever he could get. But all the while, the phone company's lawyers would have been tying him in knots. He would have been in court for years, with no absolute guarantee that he'd actually come out ahead. Better for everybody to just settle.
NYTimes.com, with its usual economic stupidity, has priced its archived content past what anybody will pay for it. This guy has the article into his blog. Read it now before the lawyers notice it!
As for the accusations from TheDeacon: OK, the article was painfully sensationalistic. But there's no libel here. Yeah, they paint a picture of him and his life, he doesn't like. Yeah, they put stuff in the article about his financial situation he wanted to keep private. But there's no real misinformation. Just interpretations TheDeacon doesn't like.
Get real, dude. Nobody sees a person as they see themselves. And no competent journalist will let the subject of an interview have editorial input. If you want your life to be private, be more careful who you talk to.
You are absolutely correct. The current mail system was designed for an open network that used peer pressure to regulate abuses. No amount of tweaking or filtering can eliminate its fundamental flaws.
But by the same token, any serious fix means totally discarding all our email infrastructure and starting from scratch. Nobody seems motivated to do that.
Technically, the solution is simple enough. You create a new mail system that simply doesn't support anonymous sending. Access to the system means following procedures ("postage", throttling, whatever) designed to prevent spam.
Probably for a long time both systems would coexist for a long time. Most people would want to keep their old mailboxes so they don't lock out friends who haven't changed over. But their new spamproof addresses would be the ones they broadcast. As the level of legitimate email in the old system drops to zero, more and more people would change over, and the old system would wither away.
But developing such a system would be expensive. Perhaps the big ISPs and other providers will be motivated to spend the money as spam sucks up more and more of their resources.
The quality of O'Reilly's titles varies more than that of any publisher in the business. I blame this on a laid-back attitude combined with a hero-worship of the Larger-Than-Life Geeks they like to features as authors.
They must have pretty good editors, because they do avoid the mistakes most computer publishers make, like sloppy revisions that leaves Windows 95 material in a book on Windows NT. And they seem to have put a lot of work into their publication workflow. But it's pretty obvious that nobody at O'Reilly is in a position to tell the author to watch the stream-of-consciousness prose or question the relevence of his material.
Doing it in writing makes it easier for the CEO to pass the responsibility on quickly. All he has to do is take a few seconds to read your letter, and a few seconds to delegate the solving of your problem. He doesn't even have to try to re-articulate what your problem is through phone calls and garbled telephone tag -- you've done this for him already.
This is absolutely correct. I've done this a couple times myself. I have no idea whether the CEO him/herself actually read my letter. Probably not. But both times I got back letters from high-ranking company officials. And not boilerplate noise, either -- carefully written letters that directly addressed the issues I raised.
The problem with "working up the ladder" is that you're dealing with folks who are just cogs in the machine. Either they're hemmed in by procedures, or they afraid to stick they necks out. Probably both.
Of course, it's still likely that whoever you get in contact with will just blow you off. That's especially true if the company has legal exposure. (As an ISP in this situation certainly would!) But at least you'll know that people with actual decision-making powers are aware of the problem.
People have different definitions of right and wrong. But all definitions of wrong action have one element in common: it's something somebody else does.
You say that Adderal helps you focus? And apparently you've been taking it for a while without problems. So why is your "addiction" an issue?
There are many kinds of "addiction". On the one hand, there's the crack addict whose need for the drug overrides even the most basic drives, like hunger and sex. On the other hand, there's the coffee addict who merely gets irritable if he has to do without. Although these two kinds of addiction are superficially similar, biologically they are completely different. Crack actually rewires your brain to create your craving for the drug. Caffeine has some effect on your brain, but mainly creates "addiction" by causing your body to adjust to it -- and your body hates having to adjust back.
Now, one very very interesting aspect of ADHD is that heavy stimulant drugs (Ritalin, the amphetamines) don't affect ADHD people the same way they affect the population at large. For most adults, use of stimulants runs a serious risk of a really nasty crack-style addiction. But for ADHD people, the addiction is more like the coffee one.
Many people are concerned about drug abuse. It's a legitimate concern, but it's too often based on a simplistic attitudes that view all drug use as moral weakness. I hope you won't let that attitude pressure you into choices the conflict with your medical needs.
Perhaps we have a different notion of what "common" means. In any case, a doctor who thinks that Ritalin is a soporific needs to recheck the literature.
Slashdot Mirror
They're all dead!
Which is an example of something that really bothers me: U.S. cell companies do not like phones that talk to other devices. When I got my first cell, I would have liked one with IRDA, to talk to my Vx and my laptop. No way. I'm guessing that they don't want users to put together their own solutions -- they make too much money selling them hardware. Maybe I'm paranoid.
Women in bars laugh at me. Women in my compound who've been brainwashed by my evil plans are much friendlier.
If you don't have a "compound, you're not a "cult leader". And if you're not a "cult leader", you're not allocated any "devoted followers". And if you don't have any "devoted followers" how are you supposed to get a date?
First, a lot of serious programmers dispute your estimate of Pascal's suck factor. Intel certainly didn't think so when they designed the 80x86 stack frame to efficiently support Pascal nested procedures. The Pascal-versus-C debate continues to this day, though I think in all practical terms C has won the argument.
I used to believe in the "teaching language run amuck" theory of Pascal's origins too. But that was before I started using Object Pascal in the real world, and found that it had many of the virtues of Java. The biggest of these is simplicity -- it's a lot easier to read OP code than the equivalent C++ code. And this simplicity also makes Object Pascal better suited for IDE work than C++. Since Object Pascal can be compiled in a single pass, it's a lot easier for the IDE to keep track of your changes.
Second, there's the name change: your understanding of the time frame is mistaken. It's a pretty common mistake: I heard it when Borland hired me in late 1999. But in fact the official name of the language was still "Object Pascal" when I was hired. Perhaps the documentation confused this issue by being sloppy about what features were in the IDE, which were in the object framework, and which were in the language itself -- too easy to just say "Delphi" and be done with it.
The official change actually came only last year, while I was still working there. Basically, they just wanted to more closely identify Kylix with its Windows sister product Delphi. Never understood why they didn't just call Kylix "Delphi for Linux".
Is that an official goal? I was unaware. If so, don't hold your breath: no browser vendor is going to abandon html backward-compatibility in our lifetimes.
That being said, I think it's glib and childish to dismiss efforts like this one as "pandering to corporate influence". Assuming hidden motives is a lazy, stupid argument.
If we're gonna play the blame game, we can find lots of people to blame -- inept teacher, students who are just going through the motions, parents who push their kids on an ill-chosen academic route for purely social reasons... But let's not allow any of these culprits to pass the buck to computers. Face it, if somebody is playing Doom when they should be participating in class, something is fundamentally wrong. And that something is not likely to be fixed by banishing the computer from the classroom.
You've got a lot of half-assed generalizations and pet theories. My lack of interest in these is extreme. Let's talk about real-world teachers. I've known good ones and bad ones. Good ones don't care about distractions -- they even use them. Bad ones blame their failures on distractions, immoral influences, "human nature" -- everything except their own lack of skill.
But I am grateful to you for one thing: you've made me invent a new epigram: Fascism is the last refuge of the inept.
Well, the features you talk about are intriguing, and made me want to learn more. But when I explore the web site I also see a real kitchen-sink of features: editable drawings, web mail, even an ephemerides! "And a grand total of more than 375 features not listed!" That makes me wary of the product: it sounds like everybody's throwing in their favorite whiz-bang feature, and nobody is worried about the scope or scale of the project getting out of control. Already seen too many OSS projects go this route.
Warning: the book was originally bundled with a CD with all the Perl source files in Mac format. (Sad how often this happens.) Perl interpreters on other platforms don't grok this, so they withdrew this printing and replaced it with a corrected version. The screwed-up version was sold off to remainder houses. You can save money buying the screwed up copies, but you have to convert the files, or download corrected files.
I adhere to the other extreme: school computers should not be in "computer labs". Students should be using them all the time: taking notes, looking up references on the internet, IMing relevent data to classmates without disturbing the class as a whole, etc. Yeah, this can be abused. But if students are not motivated and involved in the classwork, they'll find ways to goof off, period.
Don't take my word for it. Look at schools that have followed this philosophy. Higher test scores, increased attendance, increased interest in writing...
OK, I got sloppy about describing XHTML. But 1.0 transitional, is, well, transitional. The ultimate goal is ... well, see my previous post.
Question: What's the problem XHTML is supposed to solve? Answer: the fact that too much web content only works correctly on a particular browser. (And often at a particular resolution!) XHTML does this by re-introducing the strict content-presentation separation that is an essential feature of markup languages, but which HTML basically ignores.
Of course, your XHTML tags don't specify exactly how your document is presented, you have to put formatting information somewhere else. That somewhere else is in style sheets. And CSS2 support sucks, especially in Internet Explorer. So you can't just write a CSS2-compliant style sheet and assume it will display the same way no matter what your browser is.
Perhaps I'm overstating the compliance issue. Certainly awareness is a big problem as well. Most web developers just don't see any reason to worry about the difference between align="center" and style="text-align: center;". Come to think of it, I think the current version of Mozilla Composer is the first one that complies with XHTML this way.
I've never played any Cheapass games, but I'm going to have to give them a try soon. The sense of fun radiates like a cheap nuclear reactor, from the titles, to the description, to the wonky interviews James Earnest gives. ("Earnest"? Is that his real name?) It's one thing to duplicate the business plan, but when your competition is having this much fun, I doubt if you can duplicate the business.
Don't forget to donate a few bucks to keep the site up!
You mentioned the Nolo Press web site, but you dismissed their advice as "broad". Did you find their collecting a court judgment web page? Seems pretty specific to me.
Well, in theory he was entitled to sell the building to whoever he wanted for whatever he could get. But all the while, the phone company's lawyers would have been tying him in knots. He would have been in court for years, with no absolute guarantee that he'd actually come out ahead. Better for everybody to just settle.
As for the accusations from TheDeacon: OK, the article was painfully sensationalistic. But there's no libel here. Yeah, they paint a picture of him and his life, he doesn't like. Yeah, they put stuff in the article about his financial situation he wanted to keep private. But there's no real misinformation. Just interpretations TheDeacon doesn't like.
Get real, dude. Nobody sees a person as they see themselves. And no competent journalist will let the subject of an interview have editorial input. If you want your life to be private, be more careful who you talk to.
But by the same token, any serious fix means totally discarding all our email infrastructure and starting from scratch. Nobody seems motivated to do that.
Technically, the solution is simple enough. You create a new mail system that simply doesn't support anonymous sending. Access to the system means following procedures ("postage", throttling, whatever) designed to prevent spam.
Probably for a long time both systems would coexist for a long time. Most people would want to keep their old mailboxes so they don't lock out friends who haven't changed over. But their new spamproof addresses would be the ones they broadcast. As the level of legitimate email in the old system drops to zero, more and more people would change over, and the old system would wither away.
But developing such a system would be expensive. Perhaps the big ISPs and other providers will be motivated to spend the money as spam sucks up more and more of their resources.
They must have pretty good editors, because they do avoid the mistakes most computer publishers make, like sloppy revisions that leaves Windows 95 material in a book on Windows NT. And they seem to have put a lot of work into their publication workflow. But it's pretty obvious that nobody at O'Reilly is in a position to tell the author to watch the stream-of-consciousness prose or question the relevence of his material.
The problem with "working up the ladder" is that you're dealing with folks who are just cogs in the machine. Either they're hemmed in by procedures, or they afraid to stick they necks out. Probably both.
Of course, it's still likely that whoever you get in contact with will just blow you off. That's especially true if the company has legal exposure. (As an ISP in this situation certainly would!) But at least you'll know that people with actual decision-making powers are aware of the problem.
People have different definitions of right and wrong. But all definitions of wrong action have one element in common: it's something somebody else does.
There are many kinds of "addiction". On the one hand, there's the crack addict whose need for the drug overrides even the most basic drives, like hunger and sex. On the other hand, there's the coffee addict who merely gets irritable if he has to do without. Although these two kinds of addiction are superficially similar, biologically they are completely different. Crack actually rewires your brain to create your craving for the drug. Caffeine has some effect on your brain, but mainly creates "addiction" by causing your body to adjust to it -- and your body hates having to adjust back.
Now, one very very interesting aspect of ADHD is that heavy stimulant drugs (Ritalin, the amphetamines) don't affect ADHD people the same way they affect the population at large. For most adults, use of stimulants runs a serious risk of a really nasty crack-style addiction. But for ADHD people, the addiction is more like the coffee one.
Many people are concerned about drug abuse. It's a legitimate concern, but it's too often based on a simplistic attitudes that view all drug use as moral weakness. I hope you won't let that attitude pressure you into choices the conflict with your medical needs.
Perhaps we have a different notion of what "common" means. In any case, a doctor who thinks that Ritalin is a soporific needs to recheck the literature.