Really, the time of DVD on desktop computers for anything other than loading software and (if it's a burner) burning DVDs is gone, gone, gone. Long live the cheapo "hacked by Chinese" DVD player.
The solution to this problem is more tech-savvy people getting into the teaching field. Considering how many unemployed techies there are nowadays, this is quite feasible.
As for myself, I am in the process of doing exactly this. It means I'm going to be in school for a long, long time, but I know I'm doing the right thing.
I can't believe it...everyone's talking about the "borrowed" music on this school district's servers and not the "borrowed" software.
This is one of the excellent reasons why school districts and university systems need to think seriously about moving to Free/Open Source Software. Schools are hurting for money, they have impossible budgets, so who wouldn't be surprised that there might be a few warezed copies of expensive software floating around?
Since the BSA seems to have cojones of steel and no compunctions about storming into Junior and Missy's school and busting teachers and pupils, it is incumbent on school districts and university systems to reduce their exposure to this quasi-legal extortion. The best way is to wean themselves from proprietary software.
I am a student at a Los Angeles Community College District campus, Los Angeles Valley College. The school is running almost exclusively on Microsoft products. Are they 100% paid up? Can they whip out COAs on all their software on the BSA's whim? I am reasonably sure, in spite of the strong precautions taken on the student-accessible end of their network, (you cannot install anything on any of the student computers and even trying will get you banned from the network) that they are not 100% locked down.
However, if they were running a Free and/or Open Source operating system (technically the *BSDs are non-Free in the Stallman sense of the word) and F/OSS they would have no reason to worry. Even on the machines that absolutely, positively HAVE TO run on Windows, (some courseware is Windows-only and requires brain-dead Windows only tech like Active-X) they could protect themselves by running Win32 F/OSS like the Windows port of OpenOffice.Org, The GIMP, Mozilla Firefox, and so on.
Any Arizona LUG people out there? I suggest going to your local school district and volunteering your services to help migrate their computers to F/OSS.
I would think this procedure would perhaps even serve better to preserve the audio from a given movie than any procedure that stores the digital audio on the film itself, like Dolby Digital. Of course, it would serve just as long as the CD-ROMs were preserved along with the film. Lose those and you're stuck with a silent movie without intertitles.
I've always thought that Warner Bros. should have made a deal with DTS to call DTS Digital Sound "VitaPhone2K" or something like that. Then again it's only movie geeks like myself who'd care about how DTS and Vitaphone relate on a historical level...^_~
But there is a simple fix. Use the national test to gauge teacher performance. If a teacher can't teach up to a standard, then they should be removed. Teachers who do better can be rewarded as well. To those who are going to say that the national test is biased to some factor or another I say "so is the SAT". You have to draw a line somewhere!
Standardized tests are bullshit and you know it, otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned problems that exist with the SAT.
The problem with test, test, test is that you wind up with children who don't know how to think, but how to memorize and regurgitate on command. Brains are not widgets that you can put together on an assembly line with a "one size fits all" curriculum.
Educate yourself. A great place to start is a book called "Insult To Intelligence" by Frank Smith. The ISBN on the book is 0877958270. Anyone who cares about the current sad state of education needs to take a look at it. It's out of print now but can still be found at used book sites and at Amazon Marketplace.
Actually there is some splendid information in the book about how not to write educational software. I suggest the fellow who wrote the initial question for "ask Slashdot" should give it a read.
I won't even dignify the rest of your post with any further comment, except to say that the lesson plans that teachers are forced to teach from nowadays in the US are imposed on them from On High (ultimately from the Department of Education) and are almost without exception soul-sucking programmatic crap that neither teaches nor enlightens nor fosters a love of reading. Google for Open Court Reading sometime. This is but one example of the shit that is being forced on school districts across America. Then consider yourself lucky that you are out of school now.
For those using Windows, here is the Real Alternative. If you are running Linux, mplayer will play a Real stream just fine, thanks. Unfortunately for MacOS people, the only thing that will play a Real stream is RealPlayer. Or mplayer if you take the trouble to recompile the source code for Darwin.
Well, be happy you have more than just ONE LOUSY AP ON THE ENTIRE CAMPUS like Los Angeles Valley College has. ONE LOUSY AP!!! It's in the cafeteria. You have to have an LA Community College District Windows Domain Logon to use it, but you don't necessarily need to run Windows to use it, thankfully. Just a browser that can do SSL will do.
Still..ONE LOUSY AP.:P
Oh yeah, the Community College System in the State of California is in way worse financial trouble than the University of California is.:P
"Neko" is the name of an applet from about 6 years ago that was written by a Japanese guy...basically it's a virtual pet type desktop toy. There is a xNIX version called xneko, there apparently is also a version for Windows, and I first came into contact with it as a MacOS program.
As far as my use of the word "kawaii" goes...most geeks are anime-literate. It's one of the first words you pick up even after casual viewing of anime. Maybe I should have used the word "cute." Sorry if I offended you..."kawaii" means "cute." "Neko" means "cat." Happy now?
I'm going to get flamed/modded down to oblivion here, but I actually like that damn cat you get with Office 2000 or above. Very nicely animated, its behavior is very cat-like, and yes, it's kawaii as hell.
Now if only I could set it up in a "Neko" mode where it can play "chase the mouse" with the mouse pointer...that would be cool.
Note that what I am talking about has nothing to do with the help system. I suspect that the majority of the people who actually "like" the Office Assistants are probably fond of them for toy value, not as a way of searching for help. I seem to remember that the "Dogz" and "Catz" system toy programs were somewhat popular a few years back. Those programs still seem to exist... http://petz.ubi.com/.
The Beat Your High Score Exercise Plan...
on
Running for Geeks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A pedometer is a good way to get a baseline of your current activity with the idea of increasing your activity in a gradual way. It's how I got back into exercise. It's also quite cheap...a good pedometer will only set you back from $5 to $20 US. You don't need a really good one if all you are doing is counting steps.
The US Government and a few other non-profit organizations has gotten a site together called America On The Move, where you can keep a step log and get some really good basic info about getting active. Here's the link: http://www.americaonthemove.org/
There is a downside about wearing a pedometer. One, you have to turn it off when you get in a vehicle. Sometimes you forget, and you then wonder why you got in way more steps than you thought you did. Two, you have to turn it back on after you get out of a vehicle or you cheat yourself out of some steps. Three, if you are wearing a particularly high-waisted pair of pants, you might not get a proper reading at all. Four, it can get physically annoying to have a little plastic box attached to your pants all the time.
I don't wear my pedometer anymore, but wearing one taught me what a proper amount of exercise feels like for me and gave me a feel for what I need to do to stay healthy. It is a truly geeky way to kick-start your exercise plan...it's like playing a video game where you are constantly motivated to beat your high score.
Here are a few other elements of my food and exercise plan. I wrote this journal post in November of last year, and I am still more or less sticking with it. I haven't lost a huge amount of weight, but I feel healthier and I'm capable of doing more physical activity than I used to when I was strictly sedentary.
It's a good start, Mr. Seigen. Keep going with it.
There is simply no way to easily move a feature from one distro to another, I simply can't use Knoppix "detect the soundcard" stuff easily on my Debian box.
Then follow the Yellow Brick Road. Poof, instant Debian!
The new Debian Sarge installer is supposed to be almost as easy as a Knoppix HD install. It also allows you to specify either an all-in-one-partition install or partition with a separate/home partition, a weakness of knx-hdinstall. Very soon, Debian will not only be the easy-to-maintain choice, but the easy-to-install choice. And Knoppix is there already.
Bill Gates was actually one of the people who physically wrote the software for the Tandy 100 portable computer. Neat hack, actually...those little suckers were being used daily by Associated Press reporters up until a few years ago. Supposedly it was the last time he did any substantive programming.
This does not change the fact that Gates, Allen and Ballmer bought QDOS from a little computer company in Seattle for $20,000 and subsequently built their gigabuck empire on its back. And that the vast majority of Microsoft's "innovations" were clever buys from little software companies like Loma Prieta (FrontPage) and Bungie.(Halo)
Bullshit. The Republicans have been pretty much taken over by the Religious Right and the pro-war Neo-Conservatives. The Libertarian wing is pretty much an endangered species. Most of them have died out, like Barry Goldwater, some of them migrated to, yes, the Libertarian Party, and the rest of them...well, there's John McCain and there's...who else? [shrug]
The Heritage Foundation is not a Libertarian organization, it's a Religious Right organization. You must have them confused with the Cato Foundation which is the parent of Reason Magazine.
Claris Organizer lives on...for now...in the Classic MacOS version of Palm Desktop.
I don't know about the MacOS X version...it might have some Claris Organizer code, it might not. I'll soon find out...my blue-and-white G3 will be Pantherized soon.
A lot of Claris developers (developers! developers! developers!) wound up at Microsoft Mac Business Unit. No fooling. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Emailer developers involved in Outlook Express for Mac.
While I was studying natural language processing I read an interesting book in which Horst Hendriks-Jansen describes how, during a child's development, intelligent behaviour is built on a "scaffolding" of instinctive behaviour. For example, adults treat babies as intelligent, purposeful beings who are aware of their surroundings - we've all seen new parents interpreting baby's every burp and grimace as an attempt at conversation. In reality, most of a baby's actions are instinctive, and often unrelated to the people it's "interacting" with, but adults nevertheless feel a strong urge to respond and comment, keeping the false interaction going.
Hendriks-Jansen argues that this misunderstanding allows the child to "bootstrap" itself into genuine interactions, by learning from the intelligent responses to its semi-random behaviour.
Actually, the person who came up with this theory was actually Lev Vygotsky, an educator in 1930s Soviet Russia. (No "In Soviet Russia..." jokes, please.) Vygotsky was building on the research of Swiss educator Jean Piaget.
I have seen bots "evolve" in very interesting ways when resident on IRC channels. Of course, inevitably someone with an ecchi sense of humor comes along and gives the bot a filthy new vocabulary. ^_^
Will a carefully tended bot become sentient or even sapient? Doubtful. But they're fun to play with nonetheless.
Well, there has been perennial talk of an LA to Vegas service.
However, now the LA City Council is dicking around with stuff like a train from West LA to Ontario Airport and another from West LA to Palmdale Airport. What's the goal? To shunt travelers who would normally fly out of LAX to lower traffic airports that are also managed by the same people who manage LAX.
After the hell that is the drive from the San Fernando Valley to the Silicon Valley, I am personally quite partial to an LA/SF route. Since there is Caltrain and BART service to feeder you out from SF to everywhere else in the Bay Area it would make a lot of sense. If there were a stop in Santa Barbara along the route it would be a tourist's dream. An hour to Santa Barbara? Two to San Francisco? I'm there.
Considering how badly fuxored the California economy is, I'm not holding my breath.
One last thing: Amtrak isn't a bad ride. Van Nuys to Santa Barbara/Goleta is a pleasant run, I make it several times a year. It's not really that expensive, either. Especially when you consider the expense of gasoline...
According to some IBM-ers I spoke to at SCALE last year all you need to do is wait a few more months and SuSE will be an option. Their roadmap does indeed include Linux on ThinkPads. At least that's what I heard anyway.
Another great thing about T-Mobile is that they have the geekiest add-on service of any mobile phone company. All you can eat GPRS data transfer is $20 extra per month. So is all you can eat 802.11b Hot Spot service. Of course getting both will set you back $40 extra per month. And you have to have a $30/month or more phone plan to get the deal on GPRS. My $20/month econo plan doesn't count. However, it's sufficient for the $20 a.y.c.e Hot Spot deal.
Oh yeah...phone sound quality and coverage rocks here in Los Angeles. Of course, they are using the same network as Cingular here, so Cingular users can probably say "Oh yeah? Mine's just as good." Cingular doesn't have the geeky propellerhead extra goodness, though. ^_^
1.) Scout out new and promising products created by indie programmers; 2.) Buy them, lock stock and barrel, for as cheap a price as you can get away with; 3.) Mod the software just enough to break compatibility with anything other than the Latest and Greatest Windows Product; 4.) Release the marketing hounds; 5.) Get Microsoft-friendly press types to bray about how "innovative" the product is and why you should run out and buy it; 6.) Profit!
Everything from MS-DOS to Front Page, Visio, Halo and VirtualPC have been bought and corrupted this way. It's the Microsoft way. They do not "innovate" in-house. They need other people to do their "innovating" for them.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Really, the time of DVD on desktop computers for anything other than loading software and (if it's a burner) burning DVDs is gone, gone, gone. Long live the cheapo "hacked by Chinese" DVD player.
The solution to this problem is more tech-savvy people getting into the teaching field. Considering how many unemployed techies there are nowadays, this is quite feasible.
As for myself, I am in the process of doing exactly this. It means I'm going to be in school for a long, long time, but I know I'm doing the right thing.
This is one of the excellent reasons why school districts and university systems need to think seriously about moving to Free/Open Source Software. Schools are hurting for money, they have impossible budgets, so who wouldn't be surprised that there might be a few warezed copies of expensive software floating around?
Since the BSA seems to have cojones of steel and no compunctions about storming into Junior and Missy's school and busting teachers and pupils, it is incumbent on school districts and university systems to reduce their exposure to this quasi-legal extortion. The best way is to wean themselves from proprietary software.
I am a student at a Los Angeles Community College District campus, Los Angeles Valley College. The school is running almost exclusively on Microsoft products. Are they 100% paid up? Can they whip out COAs on all their software on the BSA's whim? I am reasonably sure, in spite of the strong precautions taken on the student-accessible end of their network, (you cannot install anything on any of the student computers and even trying will get you banned from the network) that they are not 100% locked down.
However, if they were running a Free and/or Open Source operating system (technically the *BSDs are non-Free in the Stallman sense of the word) and F/OSS they would have no reason to worry. Even on the machines that absolutely, positively HAVE TO run on Windows, (some courseware is Windows-only and requires brain-dead Windows only tech like Active-X) they could protect themselves by running Win32 F/OSS like the Windows port of OpenOffice.Org, The GIMP, Mozilla Firefox, and so on.
This is an excellent article by Dan Kegel about the case for Linux in Universities. Just about all the arguments about Linux in Universities apply with equal veracity to Linux in Primary and Secondary schools.
Any Arizona LUG people out there? I suggest going to your local school district and volunteering your services to help migrate their computers to F/OSS.
He just got Farscape confused with Red Dwarf. Kryton is the servant droid that lives aboard the Red Dwarf with Lister, Rimmer and Cat.
I would think this procedure would perhaps even serve better to preserve the audio from a given movie than any procedure that stores the digital audio on the film itself, like Dolby Digital. Of course, it would serve just as long as the CD-ROMs were preserved along with the film. Lose those and you're stuck with a silent movie without intertitles.
I've always thought that Warner Bros. should have made a deal with DTS to call DTS Digital Sound "VitaPhone2K" or something like that. Then again it's only movie geeks like myself who'd care about how DTS and Vitaphone relate on a historical level...^_~
Umm...no. Not true in California, at least.
Standardized tests are bullshit and you know it, otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned problems that exist with the SAT.
The problem with test, test, test is that you wind up with children who don't know how to think, but how to memorize and regurgitate on command. Brains are not widgets that you can put together on an assembly line with a "one size fits all" curriculum.
Educate yourself. A great place to start is a book called "Insult To Intelligence" by Frank Smith. The ISBN on the book is 0877958270. Anyone who cares about the current sad state of education needs to take a look at it. It's out of print now but can still be found at used book sites and at Amazon Marketplace.
Actually there is some splendid information in the book about how not to write educational software. I suggest the fellow who wrote the initial question for "ask Slashdot" should give it a read.
I won't even dignify the rest of your post with any further comment, except to say that the lesson plans that teachers are forced to teach from nowadays in the US are imposed on them from On High (ultimately from the Department of Education) and are almost without exception soul-sucking programmatic crap that neither teaches nor enlightens nor fosters a love of reading. Google for Open Court Reading sometime. This is but one example of the shit that is being forced on school districts across America. Then consider yourself lucky that you are out of school now.
Didn't know a formal port of it to OSX happened yet. Thanks for the link.
For those using Windows, here is the Real Alternative. If you are running Linux, mplayer will play a Real stream just fine, thanks. Unfortunately for MacOS people, the only thing that will play a Real stream is RealPlayer. Or mplayer if you take the trouble to recompile the source code for Darwin.
Well, be happy you have more than just ONE LOUSY AP ON THE ENTIRE CAMPUS like Los Angeles Valley College has. ONE LOUSY AP!!! It's in the cafeteria. You have to have an LA Community College District Windows Domain Logon to use it, but you don't necessarily need to run Windows to use it, thankfully. Just a browser that can do SSL will do.
:P
:P
Still..ONE LOUSY AP.
Oh yeah, the Community College System in the State of California is in way worse financial trouble than the University of California is.
"Neko" is the name of an applet from about 6 years ago that was written by a Japanese guy...basically it's a virtual pet type desktop toy. There is a xNIX version called xneko, there apparently is also a version for Windows, and I first came into contact with it as a MacOS program.
As far as my use of the word "kawaii" goes...most geeks are anime-literate. It's one of the first words you pick up even after casual viewing of anime. Maybe I should have used the word "cute." Sorry if I offended you..."kawaii" means "cute." "Neko" means "cat." Happy now?
Now if only I could set it up in a "Neko" mode where it can play "chase the mouse" with the mouse pointer...that would be cool.
Note that what I am talking about has nothing to do with the help system. I suspect that the majority of the people who actually "like" the Office Assistants are probably fond of them for toy value, not as a way of searching for help. I seem to remember that the "Dogz" and "Catz" system toy programs were somewhat popular a few years back. Those programs still seem to exist... http://petz.ubi.com/.
The US Government and a few other non-profit organizations has gotten a site together called America On The Move, where you can keep a step log and get some really good basic info about getting active. Here's the link: http://www.americaonthemove.org/
There is a downside about wearing a pedometer. One, you have to turn it off when you get in a vehicle. Sometimes you forget, and you then wonder why you got in way more steps than you thought you did. Two, you have to turn it back on after you get out of a vehicle or you cheat yourself out of some steps. Three, if you are wearing a particularly high-waisted pair of pants, you might not get a proper reading at all. Four, it can get physically annoying to have a little plastic box attached to your pants all the time.
I don't wear my pedometer anymore, but wearing one taught me what a proper amount of exercise feels like for me and gave me a feel for what I need to do to stay healthy. It is a truly geeky way to kick-start your exercise plan...it's like playing a video game where you are constantly motivated to beat your high score.
Here are a few other elements of my food and exercise plan. I wrote this journal post in November of last year, and I am still more or less sticking with it. I haven't lost a huge amount of weight, but I feel healthier and I'm capable of doing more physical activity than I used to when I was strictly sedentary.
It's a good start, Mr. Seigen. Keep going with it.
It's simple, really:
you@yourbox /~/you$su /~/you#knx-hdinstall
you@yourbox
Then follow the Yellow Brick Road. Poof, instant Debian!
The new Debian Sarge installer is supposed to be almost as easy as a Knoppix HD install. It also allows you to specify either an all-in-one-partition install or partition with a separate /home partition, a weakness of knx-hdinstall. Very soon, Debian will not only be the easy-to-maintain choice, but the easy-to-install choice. And Knoppix is there already.
Bill Gates was actually one of the people who physically wrote the software for the Tandy 100 portable computer. Neat hack, actually...those little suckers were being used daily by Associated Press reporters up until a few years ago. Supposedly it was the last time he did any substantive programming.
This does not change the fact that Gates, Allen and Ballmer bought QDOS from a little computer company in Seattle for $20,000 and subsequently built their gigabuck empire on its back. And that the vast majority of Microsoft's "innovations" were clever buys from little software companies like Loma Prieta (FrontPage) and Bungie.(Halo)
I checked Google...your phone number did not yield any relevant data. Consider yourself lucky.
Bullshit. The Republicans have been pretty much taken over by the Religious Right and the pro-war Neo-Conservatives. The Libertarian wing is pretty much an endangered species. Most of them have died out, like Barry Goldwater, some of them migrated to, yes, the Libertarian Party, and the rest of them...well, there's John McCain and there's...who else? [shrug]
The Heritage Foundation is not a Libertarian organization, it's a Religious Right organization. You must have them confused with the Cato Foundation which is the parent of Reason Magazine.
Oh well indeed.
Claris Organizer lives on...for now...in the Classic MacOS version of Palm Desktop.
I don't know about the MacOS X version...it might have some Claris Organizer code, it might not. I'll soon find out...my blue-and-white G3 will be Pantherized soon.
A lot of Claris developers (developers! developers! developers!) wound up at Microsoft Mac Business Unit. No fooling. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Emailer developers involved in Outlook Express for Mac.
Hendriks-Jansen argues that this misunderstanding allows the child to "bootstrap" itself into genuine interactions, by learning from the intelligent responses to its semi-random behaviour.
Actually, the person who came up with this theory was actually Lev Vygotsky, an educator in 1930s Soviet Russia. (No "In Soviet Russia..." jokes, please.) Vygotsky was building on the research of Swiss educator Jean Piaget.
I have seen bots "evolve" in very interesting ways when resident on IRC channels. Of course, inevitably someone with an ecchi sense of humor comes along and gives the bot a filthy new vocabulary. ^_^
Will a carefully tended bot become sentient or even sapient? Doubtful. But they're fun to play with nonetheless.
Well, there has been perennial talk of an LA to Vegas service.
However, now the LA City Council is dicking around with stuff like a train from West LA to Ontario Airport and another from West LA to Palmdale Airport. What's the goal? To shunt travelers who would normally fly out of LAX to lower traffic airports that are also managed by the same people who manage LAX.
After the hell that is the drive from the San Fernando Valley to the Silicon Valley, I am personally quite partial to an LA/SF route. Since there is Caltrain and BART service to feeder you out from SF to everywhere else in the Bay Area it would make a lot of sense. If there were a stop in Santa Barbara along the route it would be a tourist's dream. An hour to Santa Barbara? Two to San Francisco? I'm there.
Considering how badly fuxored the California economy is, I'm not holding my breath.
One last thing: Amtrak isn't a bad ride. Van Nuys to Santa Barbara/Goleta is a pleasant run, I make it several times a year. It's not really that expensive, either. Especially when you consider the expense of gasoline...
See you, space cowboy...
According to some IBM-ers I spoke to at SCALE last year all you need to do is wait a few more months and SuSE will be an option. Their roadmap does indeed include Linux on ThinkPads. At least that's what I heard anyway.
Another great thing about T-Mobile is that they have the geekiest add-on service of any mobile phone company. All you can eat GPRS data transfer is $20 extra per month. So is all you can eat 802.11b Hot Spot service. Of course getting both will set you back $40 extra per month. And you have to have a $30/month or more phone plan to get the deal on GPRS. My $20/month econo plan doesn't count. However, it's sufficient for the $20 a.y.c.e Hot Spot deal.
Oh yeah...phone sound quality and coverage rocks here in Los Angeles. Of course, they are using the same network as Cingular here, so Cingular users can probably say "Oh yeah? Mine's just as good." Cingular doesn't have the geeky propellerhead extra goodness, though. ^_^
Present day...present time! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
No, more like:
:P
1.) Scout out new and promising products created by indie programmers;
2.) Buy them, lock stock and barrel, for as cheap a price as you can get away with;
3.) Mod the software just enough to break compatibility with anything other than the Latest and Greatest Windows Product;
4.) Release the marketing hounds;
5.) Get Microsoft-friendly press types to bray about how "innovative" the product is and why you should run out and buy it;
6.) Profit!
Everything from MS-DOS to Front Page, Visio, Halo and VirtualPC have been bought and corrupted this way. It's the Microsoft way. They do not "innovate" in-house. They need other people to do their "innovating" for them.