Unfortunately, this is one of the things that hurt a student's math career. I really don't see the place for calculators in high school math classes. Physics? Chemistry? Sure, but not math. High school math classes should be aimed at teaching the material, and making sure the students have a very intimate knowledge of how and why things work out as they do. If the students use calculators, vital intermediary steps are removed from the process, and most of the students will miss quite a bit from those steps.
The problem here isn't that calculators are used, it's how they are used. If the curriculum isn't designed to account for the strengths and weaknesses of the type of calculators being used (basic, scientific, and graphing, and yes, it does matter which type is selected for a course and all students must use the same type), then what you describe will take place. This has been the common result as calculators have been used more widely in schools in recent years, simply because there is a severe shortage of real teachers out there. Calculators have been used as a crutch to help poor students deal with poor teachers, allowing the educational system to claim improvement while the situation worsens. Beyond the quality of education issue, many teachers simply don't know how to properly integrate calculators into their curriculum, but find that they must due to the widespread social acceptance. I was shocked when the SAT II Math 1c and 2c tests came out, having taken the regular Math 1 test the year before and finding it to be reasonable (and not requiring a calculator at all). I took the Math 2c test the first year it was offered, ending up below the 90th percentile with a perfect score. That's right, over 10% of the people who took it got everything right. The exam was obviously not properly designed for calculators.
However, this does not mean that calculators can't be used properly in a high school setting. A course at that level that makes use of calculators but does not teach the use of the calculators is doing it wrong. A course that was taught successfully without calculators and adopts the use of calculators without a change in curriculum is doing it wrong. Calculator use must be limited to fundamentals that have already been learned - nothing beyond the basics should be needed before calculus for general use. The strengths and weaknesses of the calculator must also be taught - quick computation vs. time and effort spent on entering in numbers instead of solving the problem. Calculators allow people to make mistakes faster, so checking the results to make sure they make sense (which requires understanding the operations) must be emphasized. And of course, an occasional "no calculators" quiz or exam is good, as are equations that simplify quickly without a calculator but take forever with one. You can't just drop calculators into education and pretend they aren't there.
However, I regret that I used it at all. I don't have a particularly good sense about numbers. I am fairly well apt at most mathematics, but admit that I can't do basic division in my head. I had my Chemistry teacher teach me how to do long division last year - MY SENIOR YEAR. He was amazed that I couldn't do it, as I was 4th in my class, and never complained about a math exam. It's all because I used my calculator earlier in life, and I lost my number sense.
You seem very quick to blame the calculator. I would seriously question this unless you were a math whiz before using calculators - did you even learn long division before being corrupted by the evil calculator? Quite simply, not everyone understands math as well as everyone else. Some people can think in terms of even the most abstract concepts, some just can't work with basic numbers, some fall into both categories at the same time. Sometimes people just take a while to latch onto certain concepts - I'm still figuring out better ways of visualizing things and performing basic operations that I had trouble with in school. If your education was really impaired due to the use of calculators, I would place the blame on the school system and your parents for not teaching you properly (and yes, parents need to be involved in education, and I'm not just saying this because my father was a math teacher).
So, the moral of the story is: do not use the calculator when you are still learning the very basics. It will rob you of something that you can never get back: the prima facia experience of the methods and solutions.
One of my first toys was an ordinary pocket calculator. Later on, I got my first scientific calculator before I knew what most of the functions did. When I got a graphing calculator, I learned a lot about programming and algorithms that I never understood before (never having used a computer for programming despite growing up with at least one in the house at all times), while playing games during classes or just being creative (I had so much fun with my Space Invaders "game" that was just two alternating pictures - it took some people quite a while to realize that it was a trick). Having these tools never robbed me of anything. If anything, calculators allowed me to explore things before understanding them, helping me along and giving me insight that I may not have had the patience to discover otherwise (like the relationship between 9 and repeating decimals). I used calculators to supplement education and not replace it. Maybe I'm just an anomaly, but this is proof that calculators don't have to be harmful.
Ok, I admit that I'm a bit out of touch with advances in calculator technology. What I'm
curious about is what advantages these new gizmos have over earlier graphing calculators -
what do people actually do with them? In high school, graphing calculators were
mandatory for calculus, so of course we did all kinds of neat things just because we had
the calculators, but in college I really only used my TI-85 for repetitive calculations. Now
that I deal with words more than numbers, I don't use it at all. This new calculator seems
to be marketed for educational use, so what wonderful things are younger kids doing with
these things in school (other than playing games and cheating on exams)? And yes, this is
a serious question. I honestly want to know what role these newer calculators play in
education (not enough to hunt down the answers myself of course, just out of curiosity).
It's because of those horrible people who give away things that most people wouldn't pay for in the first place that we can't have nice things. Those pirates who "share" the quality musical works of "artists" like N(insert random punctuation here)Sync, Britney Spears, and whatever celebrity or his brother/sister/child/neighbor/dentist/etc. feels the need to shout at the general public... Pirates who have the nerve to try to watch movies from other parts of the world, use alternate DVD player software, or copy still images or audio or video clips from a movie... Pirates who can't be bothered to buy a new copy of a movie or audio CD in the event that the original is lost or damaged, or every time the version of the movie or CD won't work right with a player... Now it's their fault we can't get decent broadband access. The solution is clear - we can't allow the pirates to get access to this "broadband." We must thoroughly regulate it to make sure that no improper files are transferred and no protected materials are recorded, or even remembered. Only then will we be safe from overdue market corrections, um, I mean evil, naughty pirates.
Ok, so in Oregon it is a crime to "unlawfully, knowingly and without authorization alter a computer and computer network." The obvious solution here (for people working on computer networks in Oregon) is to obtain written permission from the appropriate authorities before altering a computer and/or computer network. Print up forms with the full text of the appropriate laws and give them to the appropriate people. Whenever you need to do anything, request permission in writing. If they complain, have them provide authorization in writing for performing specific common tasks at the discretion of the individual, but keep requiring written authorization for anything else. If the law really is as broad as it is being described, there is too great a risk of prosecution to do otherwise, especially if you deal with security testing. Either get permission or don't do it - there's no sense putting yourself at risk to do something that the network's owner probably won't care about anyway.
In 1930, there were 10,027 books published. Today, 174 of those books are still in print. Yet it would be illegal because of copyright law for Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg to take those 9,853 books not in print and make them available on the Internet for free - at least without tracking down the present owners of those copyrights and getting permission.
This is one of the most significant arguments for reasonable copyright terms, but it should not be forgotten that this goes far beyond books alone. What about all of the films from this era that are quickly disappearing because the copyright holders either don't care or don't even know that they hold the copyright? What about songs about our heritage or songs that have become part of our culture (Happy Birthday comes to mind)? We are in the information age, when our very culture is shifting toward a distributed electronic form, but key elements that either have become fundamental parts of our culture or are forgotten elements of previous cultures are being blocked for no reason other than corporate greed. At the very least, copyright should expire if the work is not being produced after a set time period (10-20 years seems reasonable). Ideally, everything should fall into the public domain after a set period of time (half a lifetime or so should be sufficient). Otherwise, we run the risk of becoming a cultureless people at the mercy of corporate copyright holders (if we aren't already).
In fact, they can quite legally make it technically challenging for you to do so.
And quite technically they can make it legally challenging as well. I still can't figure out how to legally use something I can't legally develop or possess...
This is precisely what Disney CEO Michael Eisner, in a speech to Congress in summer of 2000, was referring to when he warned of "the perilous irony of the digital age." Eisner's statement of the problem is shared by virtually everybody in the movie industry: "Just as computers make it possible to create remarkably pristine images, they also make it possible to make remarkably pristine copies."
Then perhaps there is no longer enough value in the "making and copying remarkably pristine images" business to sustain so many huge companies. Either make your content something people want to pay for, or find another business strategy. People tend to dislike having the government tell them what to do in the privacy of their own homes, how do you think they will feel about Disney doing it instead?
Matthew Gerson, the vice president for public policy at Vivendi Universal S.A., which produces and sells both music (Universal Music Group) and movies (Universal Studios, Inc.), is quick to dispute the prediction that the music companies face cottage-industry status. "We know that if we build a safe, consumer friendly site that has all the 'bells and whistles' and features that music fans want, it will flourish. My hunch is that fans will have no trouble paying for the music that they love, and compensating the artists who bring it to them -- established stars as well as the new voices the labels introduce year after year."
Um, I don't know where to start... Let's see, "safe, consumer friendly site," isn't that a contradiction? I have a feeling that "all the 'bells and whistles' and features that music fans want" doesn't include crippled CDs, but Universal seems to like that idea... Sure, "fans will have no trouble paying for the music that they love," but that assumes that you produce that music and not the usual garbage. Lots of people are interested in "compensating the artists who bring it to them," which is why they don't want to deal with the major labels. As for "the new voices the labels introduce year after year," exactly which ones are these? They all look and sound the same to me...
Do you honestly believe that at some point you were getting more value than you are right now?
Let's see: a year ago I only had to worry about not wanting to listen to the music on a CD, now I have to worry about not being able to listen to it. That's a clear decrease in value.
You're a dumbfuck and I can't believe some son of a bitch modded you up.
Despite the eloquent phrasing of this convincing argument, I'm going to have to politely disagree.
You're saying that everyone ought to quit everything just because someone is rich and they aren't?
Um, no. I don't even want to know where you pulled that out of...
Not buying shit advertised in magaziens and on television means magazines go out of print and television shows go off their air.
Bingo. I had a feeling you understood more than you were letting on. The problem isn't with a product or a company, it is with a business model. If "reality" shows fail, the networks will just latch onto the next thing. If Fox goes under, someone else will build another network. However, when American auto manufacturers were losing ground to the Japanese because the market had shifted toward fuel economy, they had to produce more value to stay in business. The entertainment industry on the other hand acts ahead of market shifts (Survivor clones were everywhere as soon as there was any popularity in the US) and forces market shifts by tightly controlling availability and distribution, ensuring market dominance. There is no real competition to support and demonstrate your opposition (anything that could pose a threat to the current market dominance is quickly absorbed or blocked, as with Napster, DeCSS, anyone who got in Microsoft's way, etc.), so the only option is not to support the entertainment industry itself. Let it fall. Let the advertising driven media crumble; after all, when you buy into this advertising you pay for the product, the advertising, the source of the ad placement, and everything in between - TANSTAAFL. If there truly is a need, the industry will either adapt or die. In the words of Jay Sherman, "If the movie stinks, just don't go!" Finally, in the spirit of movie advertising:
"The whole entertainment industry is based on... fucking... you[,] jackass."
So a label has announced that it will cripple all of its CDs... Did they announce that they will be cutting their prices in half to make up for the decreased functionality? I doubt it. So now all Universal CDs are effectively more expensive because you get less for the same price. Where do these guys learn their economics, from drug dealers? Get people hooked on the "good" stuff, then cut down on the amount of actual product they get for their money...
The simple solution, as others have pointed out, is not to buy the crap. More than that though, don't buy anyone else's crap either. Don't buy any CDs, DVDs, e-books, etc. Don't go to movies, don't rent movies, don't order pay-per-view, don't subscribe to premium cable channels, or possibly even cable itself. Don't buy anything because of ads on TV, radio, or billboards, in magazines, etc. Cut back on consumer electronics purchases, buy only used books, don't go to sporting events. If you do buy anything, only buy it when it is so cheap that someone must be taking a loss somewhere. The only way to change things is to get the entire entertainment industry to rethink its business model. Otherwise, we will keep getting less value.
If that is too drastic a step for you, then return the CDs right after you buy them:
Universal told retailers that it would honor refunds on all returned discs -- even for CDs that have been opened.
We're in this mess because the entertainment industry is driven by maximization of profits through decreasing value and not by delivering quality products at reasonable prices. Through marketing and legislation, they have fought to preserve this flawed model, which will succeed as long as people remain mindless drones who buy anything someone is trying to sell them. Yes, I realize that there really is no hope...
I can't think of ONE person who would rather pay $3000 for a G4 with a pretty case instead of $1000 for a PC in a grey box that's easily twice as fast.
$2500 for an 867MHz G4 with built-in DVD-R/CD-RW sounds like a nice deal to me. Prices should go down even more if anything interesting is announced at MWSF next month. I don't care about the case (I would actually prefer a case with corners and flat surfaces), but the software is the selling point for me. The MacOS works the way I expect an OS to work, while Windows is just painful (I haven't used X yet, so I can't comment on its interface, but the UNIX/BSD/whatever foundation is something I am really looking forward to playing around with). Add to that all of Apple's multimedia software, and the price tag seems like a bargain. I've spent my fair share of time using Windows, and I could never use something like that as my main machine. I'm not going to buy (or build) another Windows box anytime soon because I refuse to pay for a second-rate OS dropped onto a mess of generic hardware. I know what I'm getting with a Mac, and I know it will work.
Apple's real problem isn't the price of their systems, but the price of BTO options. Last I checked, RAM was priced at $100/128MB and hard drives were $100/20GB, and you have to get at least 128MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive with any system, which will just get discarded when you max out the RAM and drop in a couple of larger hard drives. I have no need for this stuff, but I don't have the option of getting a system without them. Apple needs to either bring the prices of standard components down to something resembling reality or make "none" an option. I don't even care if the amount they reduce the price by is equal to the going price for the components, I just don't want to waste my time and money on stuff I have no need for.
Ok, here's what is supposed to convince you that desktops are the way to go:
The desktop fills the screen and the mouse cannot get past it.
vs. With directories you can move the mouse past the boundaries of a directory.
And why exactly should I want to feel boxed in by my GUI elements?
There's a limited feeling of space in the desktop. You can only add items to it that hide things (folders, etc.).
vs. With directories you can add unlimited files without fear of clutter. (You can change views in a directory.)
It sounds like these "directories" are far more versatile and useful than "desktops" so far...
The desktop cannot be moved or deleted. It is the anchor for the information placed on the hard disk.
vs. With directories you can add, delete, and "move" directories "anywhere" inside the hard disk.
Great, I can do what I want with them. Well, I'm sold, directories are the way to go. Oh, right, the article was arguing for desktops...
Ideally, your machine should be a collection of desktops that you have created and named, that are easy to track via a menu or toggle button,
Yes, these "desktops" could be organized in a tree so that you can have desktops within desktops, allowing you see a broader or more specific view. You could "toggle" between them by, say, clicking on a representative icon twice in rapid succession, or through other means defined by the rules of the interface. By giving these "desktops" descriptive names and grouping them in some logical fashion, you could effectively "file" them away in something like a filing cabinet...
In other words, this article was complete and utter nonsense. Of course, you probably already knew that.
Here's an idea for the next GUI paradigm - the apartment. When you log in to your computer, it shows a door opening. You then have the option of going to various "rooms" with your stuff. The bedroom would be for porn (obviously), the living room for entertainment, home office for work stuff, library for references, e-mail and other junk in the bathroom, etc. Everything else would just be left laying around wherever it falls, just like in a real apartment.
Seriously though, there is a bit of truth here. People can find things easiest when they are in a place that makes sense. Your food is in the kitchen (food preparation area), grooming supplies in the bathroom (personal preparation area), clothes in the bedroom (where you usually take them off and put them on), etc. Everything is organized by its function, and anything that doesn't fit in a certain place just goes wherever you feel like putting it at the time. The beauty of this kind of a system on a computer is that you build it yourself so it will work best for you, and it can be done with any common interface.
The hard drive only has "vague space" if you let it. Let's say I'm looking for the pictures from my trip to NH in August. At the top level of my hard drive are two folders of digital pictures - one with the originals and one with modified versions. I go into the folder of originals and find a folder marked 200108-NH, which contains the pictures I was looking for. Wow, that was tough. Finding other things, like a PDF of the ruling in one of the Napster cases, would be similarly easy. In this case, it would be something like Files->Other (anything not covered by one of the other choices)-> Court Cases->Napster (this doesn't actually exist, because at the moment stuff like that is in a generic location for stuff that hasn't been sorted yet, kind of like my living room...). The problem with a system like this is that it is up to the users to organize their data themselves, but you can't really get around that part. Other paradigms and metaphors still require setup by the user, and usually this setup is more than dumping files into folders - you really can't get much simpler than dumping stuff into a container. Ok, so maybe we should go to a refrigerator metaphor then...
How can a vocal few (not making broad generalizations here) be fine with more government regulation against MS, but want them to keep their hands out of everything else? If Redhat actually ended up doing very well financially, will you support the government stepping in and saying "No, you can't be that big."
Easy - Microsoft has been found guilty of doing serious damage to the computer industry, and therefore they deserve to be punished appropriately. The same rules apply to everyone else; this isn't a case of a company being "too big" or too successful, it is a case of a company utilizing a dominant position in one market to force its way into other markets. This has the effect of less competition, lower quality products, higher prices, and other fun things. If any other company were to do the same thing, the results should be the same - severe punishment.
Why is there so much less out-cry against, Sun-AOL-TW-etc.?
Why should there be? Please explain what anticompetitive business practices were used by these companies. If you have a case, the outrage will come.
Given the chance to go back in time, any of the CEOs of any of the big software companies would do the exact same things as Gates and MS has done in the past.
Which is exactly why the punishment should be significant - to keep those ideas from being taken seriously. Just because other people will do something if given the opportunity, that doesn't make it right. "Well gee your honor, lots of people would steal things if given the opportunity, why should I be punished?"
What are, in the industry's eyes, the rights of the consumer?
A "consumer" really only has one right - the right to buy more stuff. Anything that interferes with this "right" must therefore be made illegal. At least, that's what Congress seems to think. Personally, I'm not a consumer; I'm a citizen who occasionally buys things when necessary. The only thing that would cause me to buy more stuff would be better value. Unfortunately, there are enough mindless "consumers" out there who will buy any piece of crap they see on TV that value isn't necessary to sell a product, and as a result I buy less and have no influence over the quality of products produced. After the failures of DIVX and eBooks, I'm sure companies will spend more time figuring out how to get people to buy their useless digital crap than they will working on making it worth buying. A law here, a monopoly there, some prime time ad campaigns... Wake me up when the world descends into chaos, entertainment will probably be rather dull until then.
Microsoft Windows DRM has detected an error. In order to facilitate the management of digital rights, Microsoft would like to remind you of your rights.
Windows XP features a new Graphical User Interface (GUI) with pretty colors, higher quality images and icons, more inviting sounds, and a spate of other enhancements that make it easier to use than any previous version of Windows.
I guess Microsoft is slowing down the feature bloat and ramping up GUI bloat development. This is just what I need - all of these "pretty colors, higher quality images and icons" taking up screen real estate and leaving less room for anything useful. Apple's Aqua style is bad enough, and I doubt Microsoft will do a better job. Whatever happened to the days of a simple, common interface? Why does every application/OS/web site/etc. have to have its own unique interface style that is designed for looks and not functionality? I guess we can look forward to the computer equivalent of breast implants, painted-on eyebrows, and botox...
Wow, the most dangerous toys out there are a bunch of stupid action figures and video games. Where exactly is the extreme danger here? It doesn't look like they have anything with sharp edges or small parts that could be choking hazards, or even a good old electrocution hazard. One of them shoots 10 "missiles" that combined probably don't do as much damage as a rubber band fired from across a room. If these are the most dangerous toys around, then it must suck to be a kid these days.
Now before you start complaining "But they didn't mean that kind of dangerous," I know what they meant. They meant "violent and potentially psychologically damaging to innocent young children." Now, if this is what parents are most concerned about these days, then either the world is a whole lot safer now than it was a few years ago, or those parents are unfit to raise a child. I'm sure there are many other toys out there that could physically hurt a child (if there aren't, I propose creating a small metal baseball bat and calling it the "Big Brother Basher"), and those are the toys I would consider "dangerous." If you don't want your kids exposed to violence and need someone to tell you that stuff with guns is violent, perhaps it isn't the toys that present the most danger to your kids.
Moving on to the humor side:
A series of plastic action figures based on the violent anime cartoon program Dragon Ball Z.
There's violence in that show? I admit that I don't follow the show, but I've flipped through it several times (some in an attempt to understand the appeal), and the characters are always either standing around talking, flying, staring at each other, or all blurred in scenes that resemble bizarre mating rituals. If anything, I'd be worried about kids being exposed to too much stupidity from that show, not to mention the promotional material for the toys: "front kicking action!" "side kicking action!" "double punch action!" Was this stuff written by people who make lesbian porn action figures or something?
Do you really want a version of Office for Linux? Really?
Office for Linux wouldn't be for the hardcore anti-Microsoft/. reading "GUIs are for losers" old-school Linux geek, it would be for the people who want an alternative to Windows that runs on the same hardware and can still run Office. These are the people who aren't running Linux but would be inclined to switch if Office were available for it. Not all Linux enhancements (I use the term loosely) are designed to appeal to current users...
The Atlantis legend is quite widespread and a number of sites have been considered as possible matches. But none have been really convincing so far.
The most likely reason for this is that there may be no one "Atlantis." Think about it - what is Atlantis? First, you need a volcanic island of some sort. There are plenty of those, so you need to drop some people on this island a few thousand years ago. People have a habit of ending up in strange places, so that isn't too unrealistic either. Now they need to develop some advanced technology and build a nice society. Being on a remote island thousands of years ago was probably a pretty good form of defense, and people can be rather resourceful when they have to rely on themselves and they aren't being killed all the time. Finally, make the volcano go boom and destroy the place, with a few people escaping with little more than their lives and their memories. After this happens a few times, mix the legends together, add in some similar stories in various places for local flavor, have some Greek guy try to make sense of it and write down a single description, and watch people search the entire world for a single place that matches this description...
Here we go again, someone finds an interesting rock formation underwater, and it is automatically an ancient civilization, which some people will claim to be Atlantis... Here's what they actually found: "huge, smooth blocks with the appearance of cut granite..." Now notice how the assumption of man-made structures is present from this point on: "Some of the blocks were built in pyramid shapes." Once the speculation of origin is applied, they speculate on use: "It's a really wonderful structure which really looks like it could have been a large urban centre." All of this with nothing to back it up other than some interesting rock formations, so they stuck in a disclaimer: "However, it would be totally irresponsible to say what it was before we have evidence." In other words, nobody will fund the exploration of neat rocks, so they give it the description of Atlantis to generate interest. I'm not impressed.
This has got to be the most common Apple rumor in recent years. The flat-panel iMac is always predicted at every major MacWorld Expo, and so far it hasn't materialized. Maybe it will this time, but Mac rumors have been so far off in the past that a lot of people don't pay attention to them anymore.
If only there were a way to hear music for free...
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Rent Music Over the Net
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· Score: 5, Funny
Imagine if you could get multiple free streams of music broadcast to you wherever you are, for free. Something where you just turn on some receiving device and select a stream. Something wireless, with receivers that could be placed in cars or worn on the body. The audio content could even be recorded if someone just wanted a copy of a song and didn't care too much about quality. If someone could come up with something like this, nobody would even think of paying for something as silly and worthless as this rental scam...
You just know everyone is going to use this for a "The Movie Sucked!" vs. "The miniseries sucked!" flamefest. Let's just hope these people don't organize into rival houses and fight for control of the world's supply of Dune criticism...
(My take on the whole thing as someone who hasn't gotten around to reading the books (which are sitting with the rest of the classic sci-fi books I haven't read yet) is that things in the movie make more sense after watching the miniseries, and that the miniseries has more emotional depth than the movie. And despite its constant darkness, the movie seems rather upbeat, to the point of silly humor at times, not even counting the screwed up ending. I found the miniseries to be much more subtle, and that made it preferable to the movie for me.)
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Unfortunately, this is one of the things that hurt a student's math career. I really don't see the place for calculators in high school math classes. Physics? Chemistry? Sure, but not math. High school math classes should be aimed at teaching the material, and making sure the students have a very intimate knowledge of how and why things work out as they do. If the students use calculators, vital intermediary steps are removed from the process, and most of the students will miss quite a bit from those steps.
The problem here isn't that calculators are used, it's how they are used. If the curriculum isn't designed to account for the strengths and weaknesses of the type of calculators being used (basic, scientific, and graphing, and yes, it does matter which type is selected for a course and all students must use the same type), then what you describe will take place. This has been the common result as calculators have been used more widely in schools in recent years, simply because there is a severe shortage of real teachers out there. Calculators have been used as a crutch to help poor students deal with poor teachers, allowing the educational system to claim improvement while the situation worsens. Beyond the quality of education issue, many teachers simply don't know how to properly integrate calculators into their curriculum, but find that they must due to the widespread social acceptance. I was shocked when the SAT II Math 1c and 2c tests came out, having taken the regular Math 1 test the year before and finding it to be reasonable (and not requiring a calculator at all). I took the Math 2c test the first year it was offered, ending up below the 90th percentile with a perfect score. That's right, over 10% of the people who took it got everything right. The exam was obviously not properly designed for calculators.
However, this does not mean that calculators can't be used properly in a high school setting. A course at that level that makes use of calculators but does not teach the use of the calculators is doing it wrong. A course that was taught successfully without calculators and adopts the use of calculators without a change in curriculum is doing it wrong. Calculator use must be limited to fundamentals that have already been learned - nothing beyond the basics should be needed before calculus for general use. The strengths and weaknesses of the calculator must also be taught - quick computation vs. time and effort spent on entering in numbers instead of solving the problem. Calculators allow people to make mistakes faster, so checking the results to make sure they make sense (which requires understanding the operations) must be emphasized. And of course, an occasional "no calculators" quiz or exam is good, as are equations that simplify quickly without a calculator but take forever with one. You can't just drop calculators into education and pretend they aren't there.
However, I regret that I used it at all. I don't have a particularly good sense about numbers. I am fairly well apt at most mathematics, but admit that I can't do basic division in my head. I had my Chemistry teacher teach me how to do long division last year - MY SENIOR YEAR. He was amazed that I couldn't do it, as I was 4th in my class, and never complained about a math exam. It's all because I used my calculator earlier in life, and I lost my number sense.
You seem very quick to blame the calculator. I would seriously question this unless you were a math whiz before using calculators - did you even learn long division before being corrupted by the evil calculator? Quite simply, not everyone understands math as well as everyone else. Some people can think in terms of even the most abstract concepts, some just can't work with basic numbers, some fall into both categories at the same time. Sometimes people just take a while to latch onto certain concepts - I'm still figuring out better ways of visualizing things and performing basic operations that I had trouble with in school. If your education was really impaired due to the use of calculators, I would place the blame on the school system and your parents for not teaching you properly (and yes, parents need to be involved in education, and I'm not just saying this because my father was a math teacher).
So, the moral of the story is: do not use the calculator when you are still learning the very basics. It will rob you of something that you can never get back: the prima facia experience of the methods and solutions.
One of my first toys was an ordinary pocket calculator. Later on, I got my first scientific calculator before I knew what most of the functions did. When I got a graphing calculator, I learned a lot about programming and algorithms that I never understood before (never having used a computer for programming despite growing up with at least one in the house at all times), while playing games during classes or just being creative (I had so much fun with my Space Invaders "game" that was just two alternating pictures - it took some people quite a while to realize that it was a trick). Having these tools never robbed me of anything. If anything, calculators allowed me to explore things before understanding them, helping me along and giving me insight that I may not have had the patience to discover otherwise (like the relationship between 9 and repeating decimals). I used calculators to supplement education and not replace it. Maybe I'm just an anomaly, but this is proof that calculators don't have to be harmful.
Ok, I admit that I'm a bit out of touch with advances in calculator technology. What I'm curious about is what advantages these new gizmos have over earlier graphing calculators - what do people actually do with them? In high school, graphing calculators were mandatory for calculus, so of course we did all kinds of neat things just because we had the calculators, but in college I really only used my TI-85 for repetitive calculations. Now that I deal with words more than numbers, I don't use it at all. This new calculator seems to be marketed for educational use, so what wonderful things are younger kids doing with these things in school (other than playing games and cheating on exams)? And yes, this is a serious question. I honestly want to know what role these newer calculators play in education (not enough to hunt down the answers myself of course, just out of curiosity).
It's because of those horrible people who give away things that most people wouldn't pay for in the first place that we can't have nice things. Those pirates who "share" the quality musical works of "artists" like N(insert random punctuation here)Sync, Britney Spears, and whatever celebrity or his brother/sister/child/neighbor/dentist/etc. feels the need to shout at the general public... Pirates who have the nerve to try to watch movies from other parts of the world, use alternate DVD player software, or copy still images or audio or video clips from a movie... Pirates who can't be bothered to buy a new copy of a movie or audio CD in the event that the original is lost or damaged, or every time the version of the movie or CD won't work right with a player... Now it's their fault we can't get decent broadband access. The solution is clear - we can't allow the pirates to get access to this "broadband." We must thoroughly regulate it to make sure that no improper files are transferred and no protected materials are recorded, or even remembered. Only then will we be safe from overdue market corrections, um, I mean evil, naughty pirates.
Ok, so in Oregon it is a crime to "unlawfully, knowingly and without authorization alter a computer and computer network." The obvious solution here (for people working on computer networks in Oregon) is to obtain written permission from the appropriate authorities before altering a computer and/or computer network. Print up forms with the full text of the appropriate laws and give them to the appropriate people. Whenever you need to do anything, request permission in writing. If they complain, have them provide authorization in writing for performing specific common tasks at the discretion of the individual, but keep requiring written authorization for anything else. If the law really is as broad as it is being described, there is too great a risk of prosecution to do otherwise, especially if you deal with security testing. Either get permission or don't do it - there's no sense putting yourself at risk to do something that the network's owner probably won't care about anyway.
In 1930, there were 10,027 books published. Today, 174 of those books are still in print. Yet it would be illegal because of copyright law for Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg to take those 9,853 books not in print and make them available on the Internet for free - at least without tracking down the present owners of those copyrights and getting permission.
This is one of the most significant arguments for reasonable copyright terms, but it should not be forgotten that this goes far beyond books alone. What about all of the films from this era that are quickly disappearing because the copyright holders either don't care or don't even know that they hold the copyright? What about songs about our heritage or songs that have become part of our culture (Happy Birthday comes to mind)? We are in the information age, when our very culture is shifting toward a distributed electronic form, but key elements that either have become fundamental parts of our culture or are forgotten elements of previous cultures are being blocked for no reason other than corporate greed. At the very least, copyright should expire if the work is not being produced after a set time period (10-20 years seems reasonable). Ideally, everything should fall into the public domain after a set period of time (half a lifetime or so should be sufficient). Otherwise, we run the risk of becoming a cultureless people at the mercy of corporate copyright holders (if we aren't already).
In fact, they can quite legally make it technically challenging for you to do so.
And quite technically they can make it legally challenging as well. I still can't figure out how to legally use something I can't legally develop or possess...
This is precisely what Disney CEO Michael Eisner, in a speech to Congress in summer of 2000, was referring to when he warned of "the perilous irony of the digital age." Eisner's statement of the problem is shared by virtually everybody in the movie industry: "Just as computers make it possible to create remarkably pristine images, they also make it possible to make remarkably pristine copies."
Then perhaps there is no longer enough value in the "making and copying remarkably pristine images" business to sustain so many huge companies. Either make your content something people want to pay for, or find another business strategy. People tend to dislike having the government tell them what to do in the privacy of their own homes, how do you think they will feel about Disney doing it instead?
Matthew Gerson, the vice president for public policy at Vivendi Universal S.A., which produces and sells both music (Universal Music Group) and movies (Universal Studios, Inc.), is quick to dispute the prediction that the music companies face cottage-industry status. "We know that if we build a safe, consumer friendly site that has all the 'bells and whistles' and features that music fans want, it will flourish. My hunch is that fans will have no trouble paying for the music that they love, and compensating the artists who bring it to them -- established stars as well as the new voices the labels introduce year after year."
Um, I don't know where to start... Let's see, "safe, consumer friendly site," isn't that a contradiction? I have a feeling that "all the 'bells and whistles' and features that music fans want" doesn't include crippled CDs, but Universal seems to like that idea... Sure, "fans will have no trouble paying for the music that they love," but that assumes that you produce that music and not the usual garbage. Lots of people are interested in "compensating the artists who bring it to them," which is why they don't want to deal with the major labels. As for "the new voices the labels introduce year after year," exactly which ones are these? They all look and sound the same to me...
Do you honestly believe that at some point you were getting more value than you are right now?
Let's see: a year ago I only had to worry about not wanting to listen to the music on a CD, now I have to worry about not being able to listen to it. That's a clear decrease in value.
You're a dumbfuck and I can't believe some son of a bitch modded you up.
Despite the eloquent phrasing of this convincing argument, I'm going to have to politely disagree.
You're saying that everyone ought to quit everything just because someone is rich and they aren't?
Um, no. I don't even want to know where you pulled that out of...
Not buying shit advertised in magaziens and on television means magazines go out of print and television shows go off their air.
Bingo. I had a feeling you understood more than you were letting on. The problem isn't with a product or a company, it is with a business model. If "reality" shows fail, the networks will just latch onto the next thing. If Fox goes under, someone else will build another network. However, when American auto manufacturers were losing ground to the Japanese because the market had shifted toward fuel economy, they had to produce more value to stay in business. The entertainment industry on the other hand acts ahead of market shifts (Survivor clones were everywhere as soon as there was any popularity in the US) and forces market shifts by tightly controlling availability and distribution, ensuring market dominance. There is no real competition to support and demonstrate your opposition (anything that could pose a threat to the current market dominance is quickly absorbed or blocked, as with Napster, DeCSS, anyone who got in Microsoft's way, etc.), so the only option is not to support the entertainment industry itself. Let it fall. Let the advertising driven media crumble; after all, when you buy into this advertising you pay for the product, the advertising, the source of the ad placement, and everything in between - TANSTAAFL. If there truly is a need, the industry will either adapt or die. In the words of Jay Sherman, "If the movie stinks, just don't go!" Finally, in the spirit of movie advertising:
"The whole entertainment industry is based on ... fucking ... you[,] jackass."
I couldn't agree more.
So a label has announced that it will cripple all of its CDs... Did they announce that they will be cutting their prices in half to make up for the decreased functionality? I doubt it. So now all Universal CDs are effectively more expensive because you get less for the same price. Where do these guys learn their economics, from drug dealers? Get people hooked on the "good" stuff, then cut down on the amount of actual product they get for their money...
The simple solution, as others have pointed out, is not to buy the crap. More than that though, don't buy anyone else's crap either. Don't buy any CDs, DVDs, e-books, etc. Don't go to movies, don't rent movies, don't order pay-per-view, don't subscribe to premium cable channels, or possibly even cable itself. Don't buy anything because of ads on TV, radio, or billboards, in magazines, etc. Cut back on consumer electronics purchases, buy only used books, don't go to sporting events. If you do buy anything, only buy it when it is so cheap that someone must be taking a loss somewhere. The only way to change things is to get the entire entertainment industry to rethink its business model. Otherwise, we will keep getting less value.
If that is too drastic a step for you, then return the CDs right after you buy them:
Universal told retailers that it would honor refunds on all returned discs -- even for CDs that have been opened.
We're in this mess because the entertainment industry is driven by maximization of profits through decreasing value and not by delivering quality products at reasonable prices. Through marketing and legislation, they have fought to preserve this flawed model, which will succeed as long as people remain mindless drones who buy anything someone is trying to sell them. Yes, I realize that there really is no hope...
I can't think of ONE person who would rather pay $3000 for a G4 with a pretty case instead of $1000 for a PC in a grey box that's easily twice as fast .
$2500 for an 867MHz G4 with built-in DVD-R/CD-RW sounds like a nice deal to me. Prices should go down even more if anything interesting is announced at MWSF next month. I don't care about the case (I would actually prefer a case with corners and flat surfaces), but the software is the selling point for me. The MacOS works the way I expect an OS to work, while Windows is just painful (I haven't used X yet, so I can't comment on its interface, but the UNIX/BSD/whatever foundation is something I am really looking forward to playing around with). Add to that all of Apple's multimedia software, and the price tag seems like a bargain. I've spent my fair share of time using Windows, and I could never use something like that as my main machine. I'm not going to buy (or build) another Windows box anytime soon because I refuse to pay for a second-rate OS dropped onto a mess of generic hardware. I know what I'm getting with a Mac, and I know it will work.
Apple's real problem isn't the price of their systems, but the price of BTO options. Last I checked, RAM was priced at $100/128MB and hard drives were $100/20GB, and you have to get at least 128MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive with any system, which will just get discarded when you max out the RAM and drop in a couple of larger hard drives. I have no need for this stuff, but I don't have the option of getting a system without them. Apple needs to either bring the prices of standard components down to something resembling reality or make "none" an option. I don't even care if the amount they reduce the price by is equal to the going price for the components, I just don't want to waste my time and money on stuff I have no need for.
Ok, here's what is supposed to convince you that desktops are the way to go:
The desktop fills the screen and the mouse cannot get past it.
vs.
With directories you can move the mouse past the boundaries of a directory.
And why exactly should I want to feel boxed in by my GUI elements?
There's a limited feeling of space in the desktop. You can only add items to it that hide things (folders, etc.).
vs.
With directories you can add unlimited files without fear of clutter. (You can change views in a directory.)
It sounds like these "directories" are far more versatile and useful than "desktops" so far...
The desktop cannot be moved or deleted. It is the anchor for the information placed on the hard disk.
vs.
With directories you can add, delete, and "move" directories "anywhere" inside the hard disk.
Great, I can do what I want with them. Well, I'm sold, directories are the way to go. Oh, right, the article was arguing for desktops...
Ideally, your machine should be a collection of desktops that you have created and named, that are easy to track via a menu or toggle button,
Yes, these "desktops" could be organized in a tree so that you can have desktops within desktops, allowing you see a broader or more specific view. You could "toggle" between them by, say, clicking on a representative icon twice in rapid succession, or through other means defined by the rules of the interface. By giving these "desktops" descriptive names and grouping them in some logical fashion, you could effectively "file" them away in something like a filing cabinet...
In other words, this article was complete and utter nonsense. Of course, you probably already knew that.
Seriously though, there is a bit of truth here. People can find things easiest when they are in a place that makes sense. Your food is in the kitchen (food preparation area), grooming supplies in the bathroom (personal preparation area), clothes in the bedroom (where you usually take them off and put them on), etc. Everything is organized by its function, and anything that doesn't fit in a certain place just goes wherever you feel like putting it at the time. The beauty of this kind of a system on a computer is that you build it yourself so it will work best for you, and it can be done with any common interface.
The hard drive only has "vague space" if you let it. Let's say I'm looking for the pictures from my trip to NH in August. At the top level of my hard drive are two folders of digital pictures - one with the originals and one with modified versions. I go into the folder of originals and find a folder marked 200108-NH, which contains the pictures I was looking for. Wow, that was tough. Finding other things, like a PDF of the ruling in one of the Napster cases, would be similarly easy. In this case, it would be something like Files->Other (anything not covered by one of the other choices)-> Court Cases->Napster (this doesn't actually exist, because at the moment stuff like that is in a generic location for stuff that hasn't been sorted yet, kind of like my living room...). The problem with a system like this is that it is up to the users to organize their data themselves, but you can't really get around that part. Other paradigms and metaphors still require setup by the user, and usually this setup is more than dumping files into folders - you really can't get much simpler than dumping stuff into a container. Ok, so maybe we should go to a refrigerator metaphor then...
Easy - Microsoft has been found guilty of doing serious damage to the computer industry, and therefore they deserve to be punished appropriately. The same rules apply to everyone else; this isn't a case of a company being "too big" or too successful, it is a case of a company utilizing a dominant position in one market to force its way into other markets. This has the effect of less competition, lower quality products, higher prices, and other fun things. If any other company were to do the same thing, the results should be the same - severe punishment.
Why is there so much less out-cry against, Sun-AOL-TW-etc.?
Why should there be? Please explain what anticompetitive business practices were used by these companies. If you have a case, the outrage will come.
Given the chance to go back in time, any of the CEOs of any of the big software companies would do the exact same things as Gates and MS has done in the past.
Which is exactly why the punishment should be significant - to keep those ideas from being taken seriously. Just because other people will do something if given the opportunity, that doesn't make it right. "Well gee your honor, lots of people would steal things if given the opportunity, why should I be punished?"
A "consumer" really only has one right - the right to buy more stuff. Anything that interferes with this "right" must therefore be made illegal. At least, that's what Congress seems to think. Personally, I'm not a consumer; I'm a citizen who occasionally buys things when necessary. The only thing that would cause me to buy more stuff would be better value. Unfortunately, there are enough mindless "consumers" out there who will buy any piece of crap they see on TV that value isn't necessary to sell a product, and as a result I buy less and have no influence over the quality of products produced. After the failures of DIVX and eBooks, I'm sure companies will spend more time figuring out how to get people to buy their useless digital crap than they will working on making it worth buying. A law here, a monopoly there, some prime time ad campaigns... Wake me up when the world descends into chaos, entertainment will probably be rather dull until then.
You have the right to remain silent...
I guess Microsoft is slowing down the feature bloat and ramping up GUI bloat development. This is just what I need - all of these "pretty colors, higher quality images and icons" taking up screen real estate and leaving less room for anything useful. Apple's Aqua style is bad enough, and I doubt Microsoft will do a better job. Whatever happened to the days of a simple, common interface? Why does every application/OS/web site/etc. have to have its own unique interface style that is designed for looks and not functionality? I guess we can look forward to the computer equivalent of breast implants, painted-on eyebrows, and botox...
Now before you start complaining "But they didn't mean that kind of dangerous," I know what they meant. They meant "violent and potentially psychologically damaging to innocent young children." Now, if this is what parents are most concerned about these days, then either the world is a whole lot safer now than it was a few years ago, or those parents are unfit to raise a child. I'm sure there are many other toys out there that could physically hurt a child (if there aren't, I propose creating a small metal baseball bat and calling it the "Big Brother Basher"), and those are the toys I would consider "dangerous." If you don't want your kids exposed to violence and need someone to tell you that stuff with guns is violent, perhaps it isn't the toys that present the most danger to your kids.
Moving on to the humor side:
A series of plastic action figures based on the violent anime cartoon program Dragon Ball Z.
There's violence in that show? I admit that I don't follow the show, but I've flipped through it several times (some in an attempt to understand the appeal), and the characters are always either standing around talking, flying, staring at each other, or all blurred in scenes that resemble bizarre mating rituals. If anything, I'd be worried about kids being exposed to too much stupidity from that show, not to mention the promotional material for the toys: "front kicking action!" "side kicking action!" "double punch action!" Was this stuff written by people who make lesbian porn action figures or something?
Office for Linux wouldn't be for the hardcore anti-Microsoft /. reading "GUIs are for losers" old-school Linux geek, it would be for the people who want an alternative to Windows that runs on the same hardware and can still run Office. These are the people who aren't running Linux but would be inclined to switch if Office were available for it. Not all Linux enhancements (I use the term loosely) are designed to appeal to current users...
The most likely reason for this is that there may be no one "Atlantis." Think about it - what is Atlantis? First, you need a volcanic island of some sort. There are plenty of those, so you need to drop some people on this island a few thousand years ago. People have a habit of ending up in strange places, so that isn't too unrealistic either. Now they need to develop some advanced technology and build a nice society. Being on a remote island thousands of years ago was probably a pretty good form of defense, and people can be rather resourceful when they have to rely on themselves and they aren't being killed all the time. Finally, make the volcano go boom and destroy the place, with a few people escaping with little more than their lives and their memories. After this happens a few times, mix the legends together, add in some similar stories in various places for local flavor, have some Greek guy try to make sense of it and write down a single description, and watch people search the entire world for a single place that matches this description...
Here we go again, someone finds an interesting rock formation underwater, and it is automatically an ancient civilization, which some people will claim to be Atlantis... Here's what they actually found: "huge, smooth blocks with the appearance of cut granite..." Now notice how the assumption of man-made structures is present from this point on: "Some of the blocks were built in pyramid shapes." Once the speculation of origin is applied, they speculate on use: "It's a really wonderful structure which really looks like it could have been a large urban centre." All of this with nothing to back it up other than some interesting rock formations, so they stuck in a disclaimer: "However, it would be totally irresponsible to say what it was before we have evidence." In other words, nobody will fund the exploration of neat rocks, so they give it the description of Atlantis to generate interest. I'm not impressed.
This has got to be the most common Apple rumor in recent years. The flat-panel iMac is always predicted at every major MacWorld Expo, and so far it hasn't materialized. Maybe it will this time, but Mac rumors have been so far off in the past that a lot of people don't pay attention to them anymore.
Damn, and I really wanted to register cojon.es...
Imagine if you could get multiple free streams of music broadcast to you wherever you are, for free. Something where you just turn on some receiving device and select a stream. Something wireless, with receivers that could be placed in cars or worn on the body. The audio content could even be recorded if someone just wanted a copy of a song and didn't care too much about quality. If someone could come up with something like this, nobody would even think of paying for something as silly and worthless as this rental scam...
You just know everyone is going to use this for a "The Movie Sucked!" vs. "The miniseries sucked!" flamefest. Let's just hope these people don't organize into rival houses and fight for control of the world's supply of Dune criticism...
(My take on the whole thing as someone who hasn't gotten around to reading the books (which are sitting with the rest of the classic sci-fi books I haven't read yet) is that things in the movie make more sense after watching the miniseries, and that the miniseries has more emotional depth than the movie. And despite its constant darkness, the movie seems rather upbeat, to the point of silly humor at times, not even counting the screwed up ending. I found the miniseries to be much more subtle, and that made it preferable to the movie for me.)