"Even if I did, I make it a policy never to buy from companies that spam me, using e-mail or snail mail or telemarketeering or whatever. "
Actually I did accept a product from a telemarketer once. Qwest called me to offer its new privacy plus service..the conversation went like this:
Me: You mean if I get this installed on my phone people like you won't be able to call me anymore? Telemarketer: Yes sir, thats absolut..oh well yes I guess thats right. Me: SIGN ME UP!
Needless to say, I NEVER got another call from Qwest or anyother marketer!
"And the people buying PCs from Wal-Mart....Need to run Linux? Their boxen would get r00ted faster than people who didn't patch their apache yet."
Uh huh, and just last week you were complaining that these same people are zelots and run windows because its spoon fed to them. Why don't we just kill them and forget the whole thing? Oh wait, that would be mean.
Well since the origional poster didn't really want to hear all your old sweaty geek PE stories I'll get back to topic.
These DDR machines started showing up at movie theatre arcades here in MN about 4 months ago. At first I had the same thought as everyone...who in their right mind would do that!?!
After about a month I noticed that it seemed to be fairly popular with the HS kids waiting for movies, or just burning some time on a friday night.
No when I go to see a movie there is a line to get to the machine, a crowd watching, and usually a male/femal pair on it in full aerobic gear with water bottles near by. I don't think they intended to see a movie that night.
I think this is the cheeze wiz of excercise, with the added bonous of producing somone who can hold their own on a dance floor.
I've always been a man who believes that you get what you pay for. Sure I can save money by purchasing this new 2200+ (which acts like a P4 2.4 by tom's tests) but then I have to worry about getting an AMD approved board so my chip doesn't fry. And then I have to make sure my heat sink has a copper connect. And then I have to worry about crushing the core of the CPU when applying this new heatsink. Seems like a risky endevor all together!
SO to avoid all these headaches and pitfalls I'm just going to spend a few bucks more and get me a P4 with a solid heat spreader, built in CPU heat protection, and dozens of motherboard to choose from. I don't upgrade in less than 500MHZ bumps, so I don't do it all that often. Its worth the money for the peace of mind.
Acording to your logic everything you don't know how to use is unintuitive until you learn how to use it. After that its an intuitive interface until someone changes the "normal" mode of operation. Which just means that you have to learn how to use it. So, technically nothing is unintuitive. Woot, give yourself a hand.
The use of AIM over P2P is very important. They could have easily set up a machine with 6000 songs on huge bandwidth and then just transfer them over to the "test" machines. In reality it takes a good deal of time to search for the song your looking for, then find a decent connection to DL it from, and finally hope that connection stays open long enough for you to get the file. All this takes TIME. Just having my AIM buddy on the next block send me his hard drive doesn't prove that people can actually DL 6000 Useful songs in 3 days (or 9 days for one person).
Just look where the head is in the last two photograps on the BP6 one. Don't all IDE hard drives since like the 90s park their heads on the spindle? The heads on that drive are sitting in the middle of the platter...obviously touching it since its not spinning to create lift. That drive may work, but he didn't do the mod to make a working drive.
Probably the biggest hurdle I had to overcome learning C when I was 12 was that it took a long time to get any kind of results, and doing anything graphical in C takes an advanced programmer. However, rather than tossing a huge language at them why not start with somthing basic like HTML (or whatever version of mark up you prefer), get them used to using editors and what not. HTML provides instant results which will keep their interests high. Once they have the basics down (2 weeks tops) move them into your favorite type scripting language, Java, JavaScript, for rollovers and neat effects, then if you want maybe some ASP, or even ASP to control simple database queries. After all they'll be able to build sites about the things they know best...themselves! It will also get them used to searching the internet for examples and tutorials. I realize many of you will simply see this as producing a hack programmer who doesn't really know much, but remember they are only 13 years old. By building some basic skills with instant visual results children will be naturally curious about other languages and possibilities. Later in college they will have a more formal training (inevitably C or C++, or if your really lucky Scheme like myself...Ugh!) I think is absurd to think you'd be able to churn out a C programmer at 13 unless they spend some serious time on it. Before you know it girl/boyfriends will adjust their thinking. This method will give them strong insight in to the capabilities of the web and allow them to share with their friends and family. "Course that's just my opinion and I could be wrong." Dennis Miller
Ahh yes, the ramblings of someone who had it the hard way and is now bitter that they didn't have nifty "tools" to help them out. I'll counter your argument with this. How many times have you had to take the derivitave of anything in your daily life??? (Engineer's excluded..that's understood) I've had 5 quarters of advanced calc, and more than half of it would have taken days to do without some sort of computer aid. In my courses the calc's allow students to rush past the simple things and focus more on advanced topics. No one really needs to know the mechanics of taking a derivitive. What is more important is what it means, what its graph can tell you about the function. Understanding Green's Theorm cannot be accomplished in 2 days (as it was in my course) without the use of some pretty ballsy linux machines and mathmatica. I couldn't even dream of trying to visualize any of the more advanced theorms without computer aid. The tool is not teaching us less, its allowing us to for go simpler mechanics to see the big picture.
Slashdot Mirror
"Even if I did, I make it a policy never to buy from companies that spam me, using e-mail or snail mail or telemarketeering or whatever. "
Actually I did accept a product from a telemarketer once. Qwest called me to offer its new privacy plus service..the conversation went like this:
Me: You mean if I get this installed on my phone people like you won't be able to call me anymore?
Telemarketer: Yes sir, thats absolut..oh well yes I guess thats right.
Me: SIGN ME UP!
Needless to say, I NEVER got another call from Qwest or anyother marketer!
"And the people buying PCs from Wal-Mart....Need to run Linux? Their boxen would get r00ted faster than people who didn't patch their apache yet."
Uh huh, and just last week you were complaining that these same people are zelots and run windows because its spoon fed to them. Why don't we just kill them and forget the whole thing? Oh wait, that would be mean.
Well since the origional poster didn't really want to hear all your old sweaty geek PE stories I'll get back to topic.
These DDR machines started showing up at movie theatre arcades here in MN about 4 months ago. At first I had the same thought as everyone...who in their right mind would do that!?!
After about a month I noticed that it seemed to be fairly popular with the HS kids waiting for movies, or just burning some time on a friday night.
No when I go to see a movie there is a line to get to the machine, a crowd watching, and usually a male/femal pair on it in full aerobic gear with water bottles near by. I don't think they intended to see a movie that night.
I think this is the cheeze wiz of excercise, with the added bonous of producing somone who can hold their own on a dance floor.
I've always been a man who believes that you get what you pay for. Sure I can save money by purchasing this new 2200+ (which acts like a P4 2.4 by tom's tests) but then I have to worry about getting an AMD approved board so my chip doesn't fry. And then I have to make sure my heat sink has a copper connect. And then I have to worry about crushing the core of the CPU when applying this new heatsink. Seems like a risky endevor all together!
SO to avoid all these headaches and pitfalls I'm just going to spend a few bucks more and get me a P4 with a solid heat spreader, built in CPU heat protection, and dozens of motherboard to choose from. I don't upgrade in less than 500MHZ bumps, so I don't do it all that often. Its worth the money for the peace of mind.
Perhaps now I will go out and buy one of these. Say YES to good precident!
"(Europians coming to North America) came on a one way trip"
Yea, but they knew they could eat, drink and BREATH in the new world.
Acording to your logic everything you don't know how to use is unintuitive until you learn how to use it. After that its an intuitive interface until someone changes the "normal" mode of operation. Which just means that you have to learn how to use it. So, technically nothing is unintuitive. Woot, give yourself a hand.
The use of AIM over P2P is very important. They could have easily set up a machine with 6000 songs on huge bandwidth and then just transfer them over to the "test" machines. In reality it takes a good deal of time to search for the song your looking for, then find a decent connection to DL it from, and finally hope that connection stays open long enough for you to get the file. All this takes TIME. Just having my AIM buddy on the next block send me his hard drive doesn't prove that people can actually DL 6000 Useful songs in 3 days (or 9 days for one person).
Just look where the head is in the last two photograps on the BP6 one. Don't all IDE hard drives since like the 90s park their heads on the spindle? The heads on that drive are sitting in the middle of the platter...obviously touching it since its not spinning to create lift. That drive may work, but he didn't do the mod to make a working drive.
Probably the biggest hurdle I had to overcome learning C when I was 12 was that it took a long time to get any kind of results, and doing anything graphical in C takes an advanced programmer. However, rather than tossing a huge language at them why not start with somthing basic like HTML (or whatever version of mark up you prefer), get them used to using editors and what not. HTML provides instant results which will keep their interests high. Once they have the basics down (2 weeks tops) move them into your favorite type scripting language, Java, JavaScript, for rollovers and neat effects, then if you want maybe some ASP, or even ASP to control simple database queries. After all they'll be able to build sites about the things they know best...themselves! It will also get them used to searching the internet for examples and tutorials. I realize many of you will simply see this as producing a hack programmer who doesn't really know much, but remember they are only 13 years old. By building some basic skills with instant visual results children will be naturally curious about other languages and possibilities. Later in college they will have a more formal training (inevitably C or C++, or if your really lucky Scheme like myself...Ugh!) I think is absurd to think you'd be able to churn out a C programmer at 13 unless they spend some serious time on it. Before you know it girl/boyfriends will adjust their thinking. This method will give them strong insight in to the capabilities of the web and allow them to share with their friends and family. "Course that's just my opinion and I could be wrong." Dennis Miller
Ahh yes, the ramblings of someone who had it the hard way and is now bitter that they didn't have nifty "tools" to help them out. I'll counter your argument with this. How many times have you had to take the derivitave of anything in your daily life??? (Engineer's excluded..that's understood) I've had 5 quarters of advanced calc, and more than half of it would have taken days to do without some sort of computer aid. In my courses the calc's allow students to rush past the simple things and focus more on advanced topics. No one really needs to know the mechanics of taking a derivitive. What is more important is what it means, what its graph can tell you about the function. Understanding Green's Theorm cannot be accomplished in 2 days (as it was in my course) without the use of some pretty ballsy linux machines and mathmatica. I couldn't even dream of trying to visualize any of the more advanced theorms without computer aid. The tool is not teaching us less, its allowing us to for go simpler mechanics to see the big picture.