When I was in my 20's, I realized that avoiding caffiene was the cause of most of my problems. The caffiene did not keep me awake, but did help me concentrate. I suppose ritilin would do the same, and I did take it for a while when I was youger, but getting it would require a doctors visit.
We know now that ritilin is a the gateway drug of certain schools. Kids who need it sell it instead of taking it. Paxil and the like are the number one drug at many other schools. Some kids toke a jay to self medicate. So I suppose that we are now in a world where no one earns anything, but just takes shortcuts, just like the lame atheletes. In both cases I agree with south park. Such drug use is like cheating in the special olympics.
What is funny is that the article treats this as it is something new. It is like the new generation thinks they invented drugs, sex, and music that is unintelligible to the parents. It is just funny. But not learning from the past means that you are doomed to repeat the mistakes. What two to three generations of rampant drug use has taught many people is the issue is all about dosage and quality. And the difference between the drugs that are prescribed in the US and the drugs that are bought off the street is that there is no way to determine the proper dosage of the later, since thier is no way to know the quality.
What I have been told by people who have into this for longer than I have been alive is the drug world is different. The pot is much more potent, and much less reliable. Other drugs are often of unknown composition. The situation, I am told, is that modern street drugs are much less predictable. So, even if the drug has no theoretical effects if taken a safe dosage, that has no bearing on the safety of the particular compound a particular person might take.
So, while the summary might be correct in fantasy land where all dealers are selling what they say they are, or in a case where a sympathetic doctor is prescribing these drugs for off lable use, I do not agree that 21st century street drugs or safe, nor do they benifit the long term academician. Certainly if an adult wants to risk his or her life for the sake of a goal, that is thier choice, but we should not assume they are safe. After all, even with proper medical advice, people die from these things.
Which is why net posting is probably only an issue if you are a marginal candidate in search of specific job.
The problem with getting a job is that the interviewer is often instructed to find a particular person that will "fit into" the company. Sometimes this is done by a personality test, sometimes by interviews, sometimes on the basis of superficial qualities. The challange, expecially to the large firm, is that the government often limits on what can disqualify a candidate. In these cases, finding evidence of illegal or lewd behavior can avoid a lawsuit.
We are all very aware that sometimes the joint smoking, draft dodging perv is put on trial and sometimes the draft dodging, coke snorting, drunk driving perv is put up as a role model. It has nothing to do with behavior. It has to do with what people want to believe.
For the most part companies get many resumes, and after pruning for skill sets they will prune for other characteristics to try to limit the interviews. Might they do a quick search and try to find a disqualifying attribute if the do not like the way the peson looks. Probably. Might we say that this is thier loss of productivitiy. Maybe, buy the US has survived for 200 years on a such a basis, and no one is admitting we have a problem.
First, public shool is paid for by public dollars for the express purpose of encouraging students to engage in activities that build the mind of said student. As such there are experiences that are considered to be of of a net benifit to the student, and therefore are encouraged, or at least allowed, and activities that are of little or no net benift, and therefore are prohbited. For instance, socialization is of a benifit to student, therefore social intercourse is allowed and encouraged. OTOH, sexual incourse is not so schools do not provide bedroom for student to penetrate each other, and in fact try to discourage such acts.
The end result of this is that not everything is allowed at school because not everything satisfies the constraints placed on the schol by the state and federal government. On of the consequences is that the internet is censored, which I believe is defensable, as opposed to censorship at the library which is not.
Second, consider this analogy. A student creates a secret location in an apparently disused locker to stash his personal supply of porno which he shares with a select group. A student outside the group finds out about the stash, and begins to not only use it for stashing porno, but do drug drops. The school finds out, and shuts down the drop. The student then forms another location, and again lets the secret out. Eventually the student is told to stop building drops or not graduate. Most would say this is a reasonable request.
Here is the issue with this kid. First, the proxy could only be construed as an attempt to circumvent school policy, which the kid agreed to follow by attending the school, and the parents agreed to support by enrolling the kid. As alluded to other posts, if the policies were a big problem, the kid could find a more accomodating private school.
It also sounds like the school reacted reasonably, until the student got greedy and started blabbing about the fact that he could surf porno, or whatever, at the school. Now, teens are the really jelous type and hate it when someone get extra rights. They will then do everything in thier power to either get those rights themselves, or make sure no ne has them. What probably happened in this case is the greedy crimanal, uh student, probably started giving other acess, which lead to everyone knowing, which lead to the shut down.
You see the school knows that students will test limits, and the school needs enforce them. This is normal, and nobody is the bad guy. The student is exersising creativity, the school is trying to educate the best it can. So the school gave a warning. The kid ignored it. The school gave another warning, tried to discourage the behavior, and the kid continued to ignore it. This is what is called insurbordination, and can get you fired from a job, with a bad reccomendation, and therefore schools try to teach kids not to engage in it, but as gently as possibe. At some point, however, the kid is just being mean and greedy and the discipline escalates. Such is life.
So, lets be clear. Schools are there for education, and necesarily limit what is allowed on campus. Somethings are tolerated because even if they are disruptive they have a net benifit. Many things are tolerated becasuse no one knows. A student could have cigarettes or even a gun as long as he or she did not brag about it.
In this case the student not only brought a gun to school but continued to do so even when told not to. The student not only brought a gun, but showed it to everyone and declared that it was a free speech right. Certainly the NRA would support the kid in that right, but most others would not.
Leaving the world of hyperbole, here is the deal. The school is not telling a student not to run a website. The school is merely moderating the disruption to the school day so that education can be had. For instance, the school might want students to use the internet to plagerise papers rather than surfing for porno. If this website is so critical
Let's make this a bit less outrageous with some real world examples. Recorded music is easily lost or stolen, and, if left in a car, are often stolen. Therefore the wise person is going to make a copy of an original copy on CD or tape or whatever. If, at some point the duplicate gets lost or stolen, and i keep the original, if this breaking the license. One can extend this to an iPod, with every recording one owns. If the iPod got stolen, does the industry expect the original to be destroyed. Even MS Play for Sure allows music to be copied to a Play for Sure device, and I don't think that the song is destroyed if the device is lost, although this could change as the exact user rights seems to be fluid. The Apple crippled music format allows a song to be copies to nearly unlimited iPods.
The only reason that people are arguing over power consumption is that power consumption has become a market point. Two years ago it pure performance, and no one cared how much energy was needed, mostly because electricity was essentially free, and it did not matter that for each watt of power that was wasted, another 10 watts was neccesary for cooling and other secondary effects. So the lusers got sucked up into clock speed, and the arguments raged over clocking and artificial benchmarks that hardware engineers customized hardware for, sometimes to the point of negatively affected real world performance.
But now all of the sudden we are about MIPS per Watt. Wow, what a novel concept. Designing machines that don't waste power. That has never beend done. Of course it is all just an advertising scam. The measurements will be skewed to promote a particular vendor, and customers will be disappointed when the real world performance is different.
The problem is that a GPC will not be equally good at all tasks. So we should ask out what the primary function will be, and what the secondary functions will be, and what irrational constraints we have that will limit the choices. For instance, my laptop is pretty power conservative, and cool, for most application that I run. However,when I do heavy number crunching, it get hot and I make sure to plug it in.
The same will hold for most people. If you need a browser and email, a power sipper will do. If you need office application, you can probably sacrifice effeciency for more power. If you are going to crunch number, for instance animation, then all the power in the world doesn't matter. And if you just want a hummer, then get one and stop complaining that the thing costs $500 a month to run. Make your choice.
So nothing has really changed. Basing purchasing decision primarily on these artificial indications is still a silly thing to do. It is nice that manufacturers are finally admitting that perhaps their hardware is bloated, but what I want is real optimization, not just larger caches to fool certain benchmarks.
I really would not believe that blackberry would think of adding a camera. After all this is not a machine for a snaphappy moms or curios teens. This is a pro machine for people who are interested in work. A camera would just serve to limit the use of the machine, especially when one considers the truly wireless nature.
Lets take two example. A salesperson goes into a high tech research lab, perhpas biomed, and pulls out the blackberry. The lab manager notices the camera. Sales lost. A lawyer is in the courtroom and pulls out the blackberry. Baliff notices the camera. Contempt of court.
Perhaps other research facilities and factories are not as sensitive to IP theft as the ones I am familiar with, and perhaps other courts allow cameras, but I doubt it. I believe there is a reason why Apple puts cameras on the low end laptops, and not the pro. I think Blackberry has conciously made the same decision.
So, if Apple is interested is the enterprise market I would not think an apple blackberry would have a camera. OTOH if blackberry is interested in entering the consumer market, and I have seen kids with blackberries, then perhpas a multimedia kit would work. I would really question if blackberry would be a value proposition, especially since many other devices will do a better job in consumer tasks at a lower price.
You know, everything is the fault of market share. The computer crashes. Market share. The toilet stops up. Market share. A bird poops on your car. 911, uh, market share.
The reality is that most people that want to play games can easily afford a mac and a pc and a console. Mac home users, unlike PC users, tend not to be people who were looking for the cheapest deal, but wanted a Mac for a specific purpose. The purpose is often not games. This is different from a kid who states the need for a PC is homework, but in fact just wants to play games.
There are other things such as development issues and modding issues which all culminates in the fact that gaming space for a mac is very small.
On one the the write is, in a way, correct. It does comes down to what be called a cultural issue. The fact that if I want to play games I can buy a console. The fact that perhaps more creative games are of interest to me that distructive games. The fact that certain fx are distracting because I get curious how they are done. The fact that I am unwilling to put up the PC BS which is why I bought a Mac. For instance, I used to spend money on games, until I started have to prove I owned the game every time I wanted to play. I bought the game. I should be able to play where I want and when I want and not to beg for access with some silly incantantion followed by a the presence of the proper rune. I am not some drug addict. I am a discretionary paying customer and the vendor should treat me as such. Frankly the PC market can have the pompous game manufacturers. I will stick with nintendo.
I don't think it really matters, but the zeolite used in sorbtion pumps has a surface area of almost 1000 m^2 for every cc. A very small amount of this stuff, no one will notice is is missing, and there are nucleation sites galor. It might even sink to the bottom.
This list reads like the top cars of the year list in an automotive magazine. Enough catagories so that each major mass market automobile manufactur gets one winner for each major automobile they produce. These lists are more like an effort to get more advertising from the manufacturers than editorial content.
So apple gets two listing for the ipod. Both Intel and AMD gets the top two spots. Hey, I wonder who makes chips for most computers? Googles gets a number of spots all the way through, and even Amazon, someone who probably advertises a lot but has done almost nothing interesting, gets an honorable mention for it's lame search facility. Throw in an award for every printer, every camera, and a few nods to popular technology, and can we say suck up.
I know that people like to complain about stealth ads on/. In this case, the complaints are warrented. This has no editorial content, and simply is a way for pcworld to prove to advertisers that pcworld cares about them.
I couldn't agree with you more. One of the reasons that IE took control of the browser market was because it was tied to the MS Windows API and therefore could easily act as an application interface, where more standard complient browsers could not. This meant that untrained persons could write usable interfaces using the IE framework.
With the techniques developed over the past few years, we now have the capability to do what IE could do, but in a standard complient way that is generally more stable. It makes web applications that were nearly unusable, even in IE, become practical. A second innovation is moving beyond the web browser. Application like Google earth and Apple Dashboard applies general standards to specific OS. The front end is specilized, but the back end does not need to be.In fact this takes us back 20 years to the happy time when one could log into any service using any computer, with the modification that we now use a GUI instead of kermit.
Some naysayers may say this is dangerous because not everyone has an internet connection everywhere. Well, in the early 80's everyone said it was dangerous becuase everyone did not have a modem, but we all got one. Then in the 90's the internet was dangerous because it was sometimes hard to get a dialup line. Now, we are in situation where the telcos are trying to limit this commodity product that is bandwidth, and have even manage to reduce the availability of honest to goodness DSL by denying compition. The best way to break this nonsense to make wireless broadband as neccesary as radio, then have the common person complain continuously until we arrive at a solution. This is basically what broke the long distance nonsense. Kiddos, remember, there was a time when calling your neighbor cost tens of dolalrs an hour.
I was thinking the opposite. Any job that can be done by a full time ore near full time telecommute can be outsourced offshore. If a person is not in the main office, not with clients, and the bigwigs don't ever see them, then it becomes reasonable to ask, is that person needed at all?
I see this in a number of industries, where most of the work a person does in behind the scenes, few people see any physical evidence of work, and the people complain to high heaven if they are asked to come in for a day. Then these same people wonder why thier jobs are now in India? Five years ago it was fashionable to be an uppity geek. If I were still working in the industry, I would be at work on time every day.
I think this will be a good idea if the major studios are willig to put forward a significant capital investment and then allow the stores to burn the movies they please, as long they collect a standard royalty, to be paid to the content holder, not the owner of the kiosk.
Here is what I was thinking. There are a fair number of movies that are not being served by the DVD market. Either they are not going to sell enough to justify the cost to press, or will not move enough in the stores to justify the space, or are older content and not even worth the cost to remaaster. However, a 3-4 terabyte server for each store, along with several burning stations, is not incredible costly, or space consuming and would hold maybe 1000 movies. Other content could be downloaded on demand. This would allow increased sales in stores, and increased profit, especially on old libraries.
For this the studios would have to play nice. Since there is little cost to produce these, or the cost of keeping stock, they need to keep the prices down to $10. Again, the burning kiosk should not be for movies that do well on DVD, but to push the back library. Second, no unskippable conent. I just bought another CD with 10 minutes of previews that I could not skip. It realy made me wonder why I did not just download the damn thing.
I am sure the major studios will screw this up just as they have the digital projector. Anything like this lossens their grip on distribution, and further weakens their market share. If done right, it will allow the studio a cost effective way to push content and compete with the majors. I am sure this will not be allowed.
The journal is published by springer. which has journals I have heard of, at least in the physical and material science area. You may have a point, however, that a physicist, and a journal reviewed by physicsist, may not be best judge of biological issues.
The New Orleans levies. Increasing evidence has shown a number of design decisions that lead to a the failure of the system. From placement, to construction, to backup systems.
building working space hardware is difficult. You may think that getting that robot ready for the wars is difficult, but that is nothing when compared to creating hardware that can survive launch, insertion, and LEO enviroment, much less produce useful results.
We see in the sheer ignorance of the average person when our president says we will have happy moon bases in a few years, or when others say manned space travel is unneccesary, or the space station is just a waste. Space is generally beyond our compreshension and outside of common experience. We will always insert assumptions in our design, assumption that come from real expereince, and those assumption will cost us missions. The only way to conteract those assumption is through experience. Expensive, time consuming, fustrating, with no monetary profit, experience.
And this is why such project are so important. Space develop is generally stagnant because most of the people who have real experience are old. How many people under thirty do you know that have build a sattilite? How do we expect to explore space if the only people with space experience are locked up in government laboratories?
People complain tha all NASA does is PR stuff. Then someone tries to do real space work, for the sole purpose of building experience in space, and created authentic human experience, the same people complain it is a waste of money. Most of what every engineer does in school is a waste of money. It has mostly been done before. But before we can shoot a person to mars, someone has to have launched a little sattilite in orbit. As a person who build rockets since childhood, and had the opportunity to work on a sattilite, I can tell you that no matter how little the sattilite actually did, the exeperience is invaluable. And if we are going to have a working space program, we have to college kids the opportunity to work on real space hardware. Otherwise we can just shut down the space program, which, of course, is what a lot of people want. More money to kill them foreners, ya know.
I think it is a bit more complicated than this. Gas stations aare wierd because people will often stop at whatever gas station is on thier way because it is not a long term stop. For example the station that is accesible directly to the off and on ramp of a freeway has an advantage to one in which the driver has to take a convoluted route. This is the same for fast food stores. OTOH, banks, stores, and the like, is often more a time commitment.
But even banks will pay extra to build where the customers are. For instance, there are two new banks near me. Both are built on pretty recently expensive real estate, real estate that could have been had much cheaper a few miles down the road. But they built where the money was.
So there is some element of "location" here, like being a.com, and bussiness routinely make decisions to pay exhorbanant fees for location. But there is a second issue here, and that is branding. If one is burger king, then building a consistant brand means that you must use something like BK.com, and, if the brand is established, then the law pretty much gives access to those domain.
However, a new service still has to worry about presenting a consistant brand and a veneer of credibility. It may be shallow but I think twice about dealing with a so-called pro that has an address at aol.com, or ms.com, or even mac.com. I mean I would sooner conduct bussiness out of the trunk on a olds. When banks merge they spend massive amount of cash rebuilding the brand. So why is it not rational, when one is trying to build a new brand to not invest money in it?
I am not trying to defend these creeps. I do not even like the fact that allegedly reputable registrars like godaddy have the service of stealing domains from those who forget to register, and then try to scare their clients into long term registrations based on the fact that godaddy has a service that can steal them if the client is one second late. But a cool name seems be helpful for bussiness, and a domain matching the cool name does seem to provide some added value.
So, what is the advice to the original question that no one want to answer, but rather demean the poster and criticize the behavior that all of the money making world seems to believe, at least to some degree, is rational. Just like any other deal, figure out what it is worth. Not how much you can pay, but what it is worth to you. Just like any other product. Try to negotiate to that price. If you can live without the domain, lowball. If not try to find the current going rate and start there. It might be the 1K, it might less, or more. If you can't justify the cost, move on. Perhaps there is another name use can use. Perhaps there is another way to represent the name.
At the end of the day it is a bussiness decision, and all this emotional crap that all these allegedly rational posters are pulling is just not useful. To get anything done we all have to deal with scum. If you can't take the scum, then stay out of the bedroom.
This is what I was thinking when I looked at the runner up, and am grateful that/. is one of the sane websites on the planet.
I do believe that runnerup in many ways is a superior design. However, it falls into the trap that most web 2.0 sites fall into: the overdominance of secondary elements. For instance on Amazon big boxes slooowly expand for catagories, meaning that if accidently passes over an active text element one is forced into a wasted detour. The secondary element has become a distration. There are hundreds of othe examples. On the runnerup, the only big flaw is the dominance of the secondary stories and highlighting of the sidebar elements, instead of the expected underlining of the link. Maybe if the highlighting was attached to a hover instead of a move, it would not be so bad.
One of the annoying things in all bad writing is the gratuitous plot twists and gags that really does not drive the story. Instead of writing a better story, put in a gag so no one notices the crap around it. In fact, I feel that the biggest difference between a good write and a hack writer is the former has the discipline to let go of elements that might be good but are not part of the story.
Deckard as replicant is one of those things added at the last minute. It is an interesting twist, and perhpas has some interesting philisophical ramifications, but does not do anything to push the story. It might serve to show that androids are so advanced that we cannot tell the difference, but I think we knew that anyway. It is why humans are so afraid of machines, and generally the machine/human story, as far back as Metropolis, has proved a cautionary tale.
It always annoys me that any discussion on Blade Runner dgenerates to the rather banal question of whether Deckard was replicant, when, in fact, the intersting question is if Deckard really did dream of electric sheep, was he for all intents and purposes a person?
It seems to me that any amusement center have degenerated into either an excuses to drink or places for parent to get rid of the kids for day. D&B is the later, and a falling number of other places are the later. I think we have seen a fall in the number of kid freindly places because it was just not economically viable to selter the kids for the price parents wanted to pay. How much can a park reallty make on $30 a day or a $100 a season, expecialy since they cannot make real money through the sales of beer.
I have seen many entertainment complexes come and go over my lifetime. The ones that are surviving seem to be targeted to adults, like D&B, while the others, that just provide indoor distrations to kids, are failing. This seems expecially true of the places that require parents to stay and supervise. If you can't get rid of the kid, might as well just play video games at home.
On a high note, I am happy to report, that the afternoons and weekends find all our parks full of kids and parents, and even the museums full of patrons. I do hope that someone can figure out a way to make money on a large scale from the indoor electronic games, especailly in the hot summers, but I can't help but wonder if a problem with the business model is that kids just appreciate being outside and together in unstructured activity.
read a bit further into the summary, and you will see that the question of why indie games fail.
They spend money to license everything from comic book heroes to graphics engines. They record A-list actor
First, indie films are generally somewhat original and mundane ideas. They do not depend on popularity of concept to compensate for lame writing. This measn that indie films do not spend money on licensing. Niether do they generally spend the millions on licensing books and then millions more on rewrites of the script. Often even music is not used due to costs.
Indie films also do not tend to have license technology. The creators use what can be had on the budget. This has become much more sophiticated, but still not what big studios have. As far as actors, many will cut thier pay to scale to work on a indie film. This has lead to some aggrivation when the film is really succesful, as the actors then kick themselves from not negotiating a part of the sales.
In the end an indie film has few if any big name actors, few if any popular characters, shots that are out of focus, lame special effects, and, except in the case where a big studio picks up the picture, no promotion budget.
An indie film is usually high concept, good script, and personal. Given that video games for the most part are about cool special effects, mass murder, and pushing technology, the two do not seem to be comparable.
So, why are they not indie games. Becuase indie films are possible because films can be produced on a low budget and there are a network of indie film houses that will show them, even though they is little money made. Console vendors want to sell games, so why bother with a game that is not going to be blockbuster? Stores want to sell games so why stock games that may not sell. Moviegoers will tolerate out of focus shots, unknown actors, and less than ideal theatres just for the hope to see something slightly original. Will gamers make the same compromises?
Unlike the PC market where selling most hardware above commodity prices is suicide and the entire market is crippled by MS, games and consoles have a broader market that is willing to pay for style and name. Just look at the number of people who pay more for a graphics card than they would for a Mac.
Most of the decisions on the console seem to be based on pushing Blu-Ray. Unlike MS, Sony waited for the new format. MS chose to ship product and offer an add on. The addition of Blu-Ray probably is a key issue in pushing the price up.
Sony is betting it's share in the console market on the success of Blu-Ray. This is probably a rational risk. If Sony loses the dominant position as a result of the choice pundits will certainly sqawk. But if the gamble pays off and sony can keep the 50% of the market, then by 2010 we might be looking at 100 millions homes equipped to run Blu-Ray. Even if this costs Sony it's dominant position, they might still sell 50 million+ units
So yes, Sony is trying to push it's content and that is hurting the consumers of the hardware. But worst case scenario is that the market is evenly split between Sony, MS and Nintendo, and only Sony is shipping next gen DVD. Every one else will have to pay $400 for an HD DVD player. This does not seem to be an irrational move on the part of Sony
At 50% I would be greatly concerned. At 25%,at least for the industrilized western world, there is little reason to be. First, the vendors do not need to package or support pirated software, so while this results in lost sales to retail, it probably results in no significant loss for the manufacturer. What is likely represent is that many pros have an unlicensed copy on an extra machine, something that not every manufacturer allows, or many casual users have borrowed a copy. A large percentage of the piracy in the western world is caused by the one-machine one-copy policy rather than the more sane, at least for private family units, one copy for group, perhaps with a little tacked on for added support.
In the end piracy allows software vendors wide margin to increase software prices, which they have clearly done to compensate for piracy. I have seen any significant number of major manufactures with squeezed margins, and there does not seem to be any pressure on them to liberalize the license. If anything, the licenses are getting more draconian.
I think that the real harm depends on what you are measuring.
For example, piracy may help the economy achieve a kind of uniformity of software that is very easy to work with. For example, even is a small firm cannot afford a copy of MS Windows and Autocad, they can always pirate a copy. We benifit because the draftperson does not have to learn multiple systems, and, as the skillset is much easier to garner, can be hired much cheaper than a traditional draftsman. OTOH, as Autocad has no compitition, they probably charge quite a bit more that market, and can continue to do so as they do not need to cater to the small shop.
So, the primary harm that piracy exacts is probably in terms of promoting high prices and reducing the responsiveness to consumers. In competative markets, like the database, there is an effort to get versions out to users that are either low or no cost. This allows the student or amatuer to gain the experience with product without paying professional prices. This is similiar to what once would happen with equipement, such as typewriters. One could buy an old selectric and gain expereince.
In noncompetatve markets, however, the only way to get a low cost version of many applications is to pirate. MS would like us to believe that we can buy a used PC, but we must buy a new license to the OS. The student edition of MS Office is $120, which is already way too much, but to get access it rises to $200, which is really a joke. They are charging more for Access than Foxpro! Autocad is little better charging $150 per year. Mathematica is little better. Labview shows what can happen when a competitve market exists, with a version at $80.
So, what we have is situation in which piracy has lead to extreme economic damage by promoting monopolies in certain sectors. The vendors are perfectly happy to allow the piracy, as it is partially why they are succesful. I will always remember the time in the late 80's when my boss told me he was going to get his first PC because he would not have to pay for any software, unlike on the Mac where most of our software was properly acquired. However, a vendor cannot survive with no sales, so the BSA tries to create opportunity costs, at least for certain customers, that are higher than acquisition costs.
As a student I got MS Office, Mathematics, Foxpro, etc, for a song, so I did not prirate. If I were a student, or new to the IT industry and just wanted to learn, I would think long and hard about buying the software at the offered prices or borrowing a copy.
Ideally I would like to see most piracy stopped. I would like to see offer prices that are in line with what a competative market will bear. I also hope that the BSA pulls the rug on china and forces either the software vendors to cut thier price of the Chinese to find another solution. We will then learn hard and fast what it means to not communicate with an important trading partner.
I believe that programming, as many things, are taught in at least three stages. The first is concept development, the second is a framework in which which to restate the problem in standard form, and the third is the solution from the standard form. During this process the student will learn various tools that helps them organize and amplify their efforts. Some may call these tools crutches. Some may decry the errors promoted by these tools. But the tools do not create errors, it is the lack of understanding of the process that causes the errors. This lack of understanding is caused by an incomplete education, which in turn can be attributed to any number of factors.
Look at it this way. A parent is teaching a child to build a dog house. The parent explains that the nails hold the wood together, and for that to work the nails have to be straight and true. The parent then using increasingly difficult tasks and teaches the child to use a hammer to complete this task. Note that if the child did not understand the goal of a hammer, the child would not be able to adjust to the proper use. Also note the parent did not give the child a rock, as we have hammer technology that is very mature. Also note that the parent did not give the child a nail gun as that would not have taught the concept. Also, depending on what the child might want to do, he or she might have to be very skilled in the use of a hammer, as a nail gun might be inappropriate for the job.
So here is what I think, and generally the way I was educated. Start with the basics, which is process development and flow control. Have the students develop incresingly complex processes. Examples might be getting ready for school, sharpening a pencil, washing clothes, etc. The processes should be personal and common as they must develop the steps themselves, not just copy instuctions.
Once they understand the basics of process, they can start working on the standard cannon of practice programs, i.e. 'hello world', and convert the process into a standard language. What the standard language is, and how it is used to compute the solution, depends on the expected outcomes and needs of the students.
Specifically, many say that the kids should use vi, ed, or emacs. The question must be asked are those tools the kind that will useful for developing the complex code that are expected to develop. Unless these kids at CS majors, is the overhead of learning the command structures of these application of any use, in other words are the opportunity costs justified. The kids must know the baics of code development, and the generalities of modern languages, as well as specific languages. But why make it more difficult. When I was in middle school we started on a teletype and in high school moved to a VT52, in college a VT 100, then quickly to an IDE on microcomputer. Did the school ever make me work a card punch? No. Did it do any harm? Maybe, but not enough to justify the loss of coding time. Perhaps I should have been taught to hardwire code?
So I gues what I am saying is don't look at it from a tool point of view. Look at it froma concept and objective point of view. Introducing advance tools will reduce skill, but it will also increase effeciency. Very few people are going to have to do assembly any low level code. For the most part, people will put widgets together to form large applications. To be honest, most people will just use a macro language to write scripts. If they understand the basics, they will have a huge advantage over thier co workers. Those that are going to low level stuff need to be in classes that caters to those details, and those that aren't don't need the distraction. This does not mean that the kids don't need to know the tools. Start in a text editor. Play with gcc. But they can learn much more of the language if they ar in a simple IDE and not fighting with the tool. Furthermore, when we are taking very high level languages like Java, with heavy API dependence, not using and IDE is just going backwardsOn that VT100 I wasted a day because I forgot to reset a redirect. Was it a good lesson to learn. Yes. Did it prevent me from learning even more useful stuff? Absolutely.
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We know now that ritilin is a the gateway drug of certain schools. Kids who need it sell it instead of taking it. Paxil and the like are the number one drug at many other schools. Some kids toke a jay to self medicate. So I suppose that we are now in a world where no one earns anything, but just takes shortcuts, just like the lame atheletes. In both cases I agree with south park. Such drug use is like cheating in the special olympics.
What is funny is that the article treats this as it is something new. It is like the new generation thinks they invented drugs, sex, and music that is unintelligible to the parents. It is just funny. But not learning from the past means that you are doomed to repeat the mistakes. What two to three generations of rampant drug use has taught many people is the issue is all about dosage and quality. And the difference between the drugs that are prescribed in the US and the drugs that are bought off the street is that there is no way to determine the proper dosage of the later, since thier is no way to know the quality.
What I have been told by people who have into this for longer than I have been alive is the drug world is different. The pot is much more potent, and much less reliable. Other drugs are often of unknown composition. The situation, I am told, is that modern street drugs are much less predictable. So, even if the drug has no theoretical effects if taken a safe dosage, that has no bearing on the safety of the particular compound a particular person might take.
So, while the summary might be correct in fantasy land where all dealers are selling what they say they are, or in a case where a sympathetic doctor is prescribing these drugs for off lable use, I do not agree that 21st century street drugs or safe, nor do they benifit the long term academician. Certainly if an adult wants to risk his or her life for the sake of a goal, that is thier choice, but we should not assume they are safe. After all, even with proper medical advice, people die from these things.
The problem with getting a job is that the interviewer is often instructed to find a particular person that will "fit into" the company. Sometimes this is done by a personality test, sometimes by interviews, sometimes on the basis of superficial qualities. The challange, expecially to the large firm, is that the government often limits on what can disqualify a candidate. In these cases, finding evidence of illegal or lewd behavior can avoid a lawsuit.
We are all very aware that sometimes the joint smoking, draft dodging perv is put on trial and sometimes the draft dodging, coke snorting, drunk driving perv is put up as a role model. It has nothing to do with behavior. It has to do with what people want to believe.
For the most part companies get many resumes, and after pruning for skill sets they will prune for other characteristics to try to limit the interviews. Might they do a quick search and try to find a disqualifying attribute if the do not like the way the peson looks. Probably. Might we say that this is thier loss of productivitiy. Maybe, buy the US has survived for 200 years on a such a basis, and no one is admitting we have a problem.
The end result of this is that not everything is allowed at school because not everything satisfies the constraints placed on the schol by the state and federal government. On of the consequences is that the internet is censored, which I believe is defensable, as opposed to censorship at the library which is not.
Second, consider this analogy. A student creates a secret location in an apparently disused locker to stash his personal supply of porno which he shares with a select group. A student outside the group finds out about the stash, and begins to not only use it for stashing porno, but do drug drops. The school finds out, and shuts down the drop. The student then forms another location, and again lets the secret out. Eventually the student is told to stop building drops or not graduate. Most would say this is a reasonable request.
Here is the issue with this kid. First, the proxy could only be construed as an attempt to circumvent school policy, which the kid agreed to follow by attending the school, and the parents agreed to support by enrolling the kid. As alluded to other posts, if the policies were a big problem, the kid could find a more accomodating private school.
It also sounds like the school reacted reasonably, until the student got greedy and started blabbing about the fact that he could surf porno, or whatever, at the school. Now, teens are the really jelous type and hate it when someone get extra rights. They will then do everything in thier power to either get those rights themselves, or make sure no ne has them. What probably happened in this case is the greedy crimanal, uh student, probably started giving other acess, which lead to everyone knowing, which lead to the shut down.
You see the school knows that students will test limits, and the school needs enforce them. This is normal, and nobody is the bad guy. The student is exersising creativity, the school is trying to educate the best it can. So the school gave a warning. The kid ignored it. The school gave another warning, tried to discourage the behavior, and the kid continued to ignore it. This is what is called insurbordination, and can get you fired from a job, with a bad reccomendation, and therefore schools try to teach kids not to engage in it, but as gently as possibe. At some point, however, the kid is just being mean and greedy and the discipline escalates. Such is life.
So, lets be clear. Schools are there for education, and necesarily limit what is allowed on campus. Somethings are tolerated because even if they are disruptive they have a net benifit. Many things are tolerated becasuse no one knows. A student could have cigarettes or even a gun as long as he or she did not brag about it.
In this case the student not only brought a gun to school but continued to do so even when told not to. The student not only brought a gun, but showed it to everyone and declared that it was a free speech right. Certainly the NRA would support the kid in that right, but most others would not.
Leaving the world of hyperbole, here is the deal. The school is not telling a student not to run a website. The school is merely moderating the disruption to the school day so that education can be had. For instance, the school might want students to use the internet to plagerise papers rather than surfing for porno. If this website is so critical
Let's make this a bit less outrageous with some real world examples. Recorded music is easily lost or stolen, and, if left in a car, are often stolen. Therefore the wise person is going to make a copy of an original copy on CD or tape or whatever. If, at some point the duplicate gets lost or stolen, and i keep the original, if this breaking the license. One can extend this to an iPod, with every recording one owns. If the iPod got stolen, does the industry expect the original to be destroyed. Even MS Play for Sure allows music to be copied to a Play for Sure device, and I don't think that the song is destroyed if the device is lost, although this could change as the exact user rights seems to be fluid. The Apple crippled music format allows a song to be copies to nearly unlimited iPods.
But now all of the sudden we are about MIPS per Watt. Wow, what a novel concept. Designing machines that don't waste power. That has never beend done. Of course it is all just an advertising scam. The measurements will be skewed to promote a particular vendor, and customers will be disappointed when the real world performance is different.
The problem is that a GPC will not be equally good at all tasks. So we should ask out what the primary function will be, and what the secondary functions will be, and what irrational constraints we have that will limit the choices. For instance, my laptop is pretty power conservative, and cool, for most application that I run. However,when I do heavy number crunching, it get hot and I make sure to plug it in.
The same will hold for most people. If you need a browser and email, a power sipper will do. If you need office application, you can probably sacrifice effeciency for more power. If you are going to crunch number, for instance animation, then all the power in the world doesn't matter. And if you just want a hummer, then get one and stop complaining that the thing costs $500 a month to run. Make your choice.
So nothing has really changed. Basing purchasing decision primarily on these artificial indications is still a silly thing to do. It is nice that manufacturers are finally admitting that perhaps their hardware is bloated, but what I want is real optimization, not just larger caches to fool certain benchmarks.
Lets take two example. A salesperson goes into a high tech research lab, perhpas biomed, and pulls out the blackberry. The lab manager notices the camera. Sales lost. A lawyer is in the courtroom and pulls out the blackberry. Baliff notices the camera. Contempt of court.
Perhaps other research facilities and factories are not as sensitive to IP theft as the ones I am familiar with, and perhaps other courts allow cameras, but I doubt it. I believe there is a reason why Apple puts cameras on the low end laptops, and not the pro. I think Blackberry has conciously made the same decision.
So, if Apple is interested is the enterprise market I would not think an apple blackberry would have a camera. OTOH if blackberry is interested in entering the consumer market, and I have seen kids with blackberries, then perhpas a multimedia kit would work. I would really question if blackberry would be a value proposition, especially since many other devices will do a better job in consumer tasks at a lower price.
You know, everything is the fault of market share. The computer crashes. Market share. The toilet stops up. Market share. A bird poops on your car. 911, uh, market share.
The reality is that most people that want to play games can easily afford a mac and a pc and a console. Mac home users, unlike PC users, tend not to be people who were looking for the cheapest deal, but wanted a Mac for a specific purpose. The purpose is often not games. This is different from a kid who states the need for a PC is homework, but in fact just wants to play games.
There are other things such as development issues and modding issues which all culminates in the fact that gaming space for a mac is very small.
On one the the write is, in a way, correct. It does comes down to what be called a cultural issue. The fact that if I want to play games I can buy a console. The fact that perhaps more creative games are of interest to me that distructive games. The fact that certain fx are distracting because I get curious how they are done. The fact that I am unwilling to put up the PC BS which is why I bought a Mac. For instance, I used to spend money on games, until I started have to prove I owned the game every time I wanted to play. I bought the game. I should be able to play where I want and when I want and not to beg for access with some silly incantantion followed by a the presence of the proper rune. I am not some drug addict. I am a discretionary paying customer and the vendor should treat me as such. Frankly the PC market can have the pompous game manufacturers. I will stick with nintendo.
I don't think it really matters, but the zeolite used in sorbtion pumps has a surface area of almost 1000 m^2 for every cc. A very small amount of this stuff, no one will notice is is missing, and there are nucleation sites galor. It might even sink to the bottom.
So apple gets two listing for the ipod. Both Intel and AMD gets the top two spots. Hey, I wonder who makes chips for most computers? Googles gets a number of spots all the way through, and even Amazon, someone who probably advertises a lot but has done almost nothing interesting, gets an honorable mention for it's lame search facility. Throw in an award for every printer, every camera, and a few nods to popular technology, and can we say suck up.
I know that people like to complain about stealth ads on /. In this case, the complaints are warrented. This has no editorial content, and simply is a way for pcworld to prove to advertisers that pcworld cares about them.
With the techniques developed over the past few years, we now have the capability to do what IE could do, but in a standard complient way that is generally more stable. It makes web applications that were nearly unusable, even in IE, become practical. A second innovation is moving beyond the web browser. Application like Google earth and Apple Dashboard applies general standards to specific OS. The front end is specilized, but the back end does not need to be.In fact this takes us back 20 years to the happy time when one could log into any service using any computer, with the modification that we now use a GUI instead of kermit.
Some naysayers may say this is dangerous because not everyone has an internet connection everywhere. Well, in the early 80's everyone said it was dangerous becuase everyone did not have a modem, but we all got one. Then in the 90's the internet was dangerous because it was sometimes hard to get a dialup line. Now, we are in situation where the telcos are trying to limit this commodity product that is bandwidth, and have even manage to reduce the availability of honest to goodness DSL by denying compition. The best way to break this nonsense to make wireless broadband as neccesary as radio, then have the common person complain continuously until we arrive at a solution. This is basically what broke the long distance nonsense. Kiddos, remember, there was a time when calling your neighbor cost tens of dolalrs an hour.
I see this in a number of industries, where most of the work a person does in behind the scenes, few people see any physical evidence of work, and the people complain to high heaven if they are asked to come in for a day. Then these same people wonder why thier jobs are now in India? Five years ago it was fashionable to be an uppity geek. If I were still working in the industry, I would be at work on time every day.
Here is what I was thinking. There are a fair number of movies that are not being served by the DVD market. Either they are not going to sell enough to justify the cost to press, or will not move enough in the stores to justify the space, or are older content and not even worth the cost to remaaster. However, a 3-4 terabyte server for each store, along with several burning stations, is not incredible costly, or space consuming and would hold maybe 1000 movies. Other content could be downloaded on demand. This would allow increased sales in stores, and increased profit, especially on old libraries.
For this the studios would have to play nice. Since there is little cost to produce these, or the cost of keeping stock, they need to keep the prices down to $10. Again, the burning kiosk should not be for movies that do well on DVD, but to push the back library. Second, no unskippable conent. I just bought another CD with 10 minutes of previews that I could not skip. It realy made me wonder why I did not just download the damn thing.
I am sure the major studios will screw this up just as they have the digital projector. Anything like this lossens their grip on distribution, and further weakens their market share. If done right, it will allow the studio a cost effective way to push content and compete with the majors. I am sure this will not be allowed.
The journal is published by springer. which has journals I have heard of, at least in the physical and material science area. You may have a point, however, that a physicist, and a journal reviewed by physicsist, may not be best judge of biological issues.
The New Orleans levies. Increasing evidence has shown a number of design decisions that lead to a the failure of the system. From placement, to construction, to backup systems.
We see in the sheer ignorance of the average person when our president says we will have happy moon bases in a few years, or when others say manned space travel is unneccesary, or the space station is just a waste. Space is generally beyond our compreshension and outside of common experience. We will always insert assumptions in our design, assumption that come from real expereince, and those assumption will cost us missions. The only way to conteract those assumption is through experience. Expensive, time consuming, fustrating, with no monetary profit, experience.
And this is why such project are so important. Space develop is generally stagnant because most of the people who have real experience are old. How many people under thirty do you know that have build a sattilite? How do we expect to explore space if the only people with space experience are locked up in government laboratories?
People complain tha all NASA does is PR stuff. Then someone tries to do real space work, for the sole purpose of building experience in space, and created authentic human experience, the same people complain it is a waste of money. Most of what every engineer does in school is a waste of money. It has mostly been done before. But before we can shoot a person to mars, someone has to have launched a little sattilite in orbit. As a person who build rockets since childhood, and had the opportunity to work on a sattilite, I can tell you that no matter how little the sattilite actually did, the exeperience is invaluable. And if we are going to have a working space program, we have to college kids the opportunity to work on real space hardware. Otherwise we can just shut down the space program, which, of course, is what a lot of people want. More money to kill them foreners, ya know.
But even banks will pay extra to build where the customers are. For instance, there are two new banks near me. Both are built on pretty recently expensive real estate, real estate that could have been had much cheaper a few miles down the road. But they built where the money was.
So there is some element of "location" here, like being a .com, and bussiness routinely make decisions to pay exhorbanant fees for location. But there is a second issue here, and that is branding. If one is burger king, then building a consistant brand means that you must use something like BK.com, and, if the brand is established, then the law pretty much gives access to those domain.
However, a new service still has to worry about presenting a consistant brand and a veneer of credibility. It may be shallow but I think twice about dealing with a so-called pro that has an address at aol.com, or ms.com, or even mac.com. I mean I would sooner conduct bussiness out of the trunk on a olds. When banks merge they spend massive amount of cash rebuilding the brand. So why is it not rational, when one is trying to build a new brand to not invest money in it?
I am not trying to defend these creeps. I do not even like the fact that allegedly reputable registrars like godaddy have the service of stealing domains from those who forget to register, and then try to scare their clients into long term registrations based on the fact that godaddy has a service that can steal them if the client is one second late. But a cool name seems be helpful for bussiness, and a domain matching the cool name does seem to provide some added value.
So, what is the advice to the original question that no one want to answer, but rather demean the poster and criticize the behavior that all of the money making world seems to believe, at least to some degree, is rational. Just like any other deal, figure out what it is worth. Not how much you can pay, but what it is worth to you. Just like any other product. Try to negotiate to that price. If you can live without the domain, lowball. If not try to find the current going rate and start there. It might be the 1K, it might less, or more. If you can't justify the cost, move on. Perhaps there is another name use can use. Perhaps there is another way to represent the name.
At the end of the day it is a bussiness decision, and all this emotional crap that all these allegedly rational posters are pulling is just not useful. To get anything done we all have to deal with scum. If you can't take the scum, then stay out of the bedroom.
I do believe that runnerup in many ways is a superior design. However, it falls into the trap that most web 2.0 sites fall into: the overdominance of secondary elements. For instance on Amazon big boxes slooowly expand for catagories, meaning that if accidently passes over an active text element one is forced into a wasted detour. The secondary element has become a distration. There are hundreds of othe examples. On the runnerup, the only big flaw is the dominance of the secondary stories and highlighting of the sidebar elements, instead of the expected underlining of the link. Maybe if the highlighting was attached to a hover instead of a move, it would not be so bad.
Deckard as replicant is one of those things added at the last minute. It is an interesting twist, and perhpas has some interesting philisophical ramifications, but does not do anything to push the story. It might serve to show that androids are so advanced that we cannot tell the difference, but I think we knew that anyway. It is why humans are so afraid of machines, and generally the machine/human story, as far back as Metropolis, has proved a cautionary tale.
It always annoys me that any discussion on Blade Runner dgenerates to the rather banal question of whether Deckard was replicant, when, in fact, the intersting question is if Deckard really did dream of electric sheep, was he for all intents and purposes a person?
I have seen many entertainment complexes come and go over my lifetime. The ones that are surviving seem to be targeted to adults, like D&B, while the others, that just provide indoor distrations to kids, are failing. This seems expecially true of the places that require parents to stay and supervise. If you can't get rid of the kid, might as well just play video games at home.
On a high note, I am happy to report, that the afternoons and weekends find all our parks full of kids and parents, and even the museums full of patrons. I do hope that someone can figure out a way to make money on a large scale from the indoor electronic games, especailly in the hot summers, but I can't help but wonder if a problem with the business model is that kids just appreciate being outside and together in unstructured activity.
They spend money to license everything from comic book heroes to graphics engines. They record A-list actor
First, indie films are generally somewhat original and mundane ideas. They do not depend on popularity of concept to compensate for lame writing. This measn that indie films do not spend money on licensing. Niether do they generally spend the millions on licensing books and then millions more on rewrites of the script. Often even music is not used due to costs.
Indie films also do not tend to have license technology. The creators use what can be had on the budget. This has become much more sophiticated, but still not what big studios have. As far as actors, many will cut thier pay to scale to work on a indie film. This has lead to some aggrivation when the film is really succesful, as the actors then kick themselves from not negotiating a part of the sales.
In the end an indie film has few if any big name actors, few if any popular characters, shots that are out of focus, lame special effects, and, except in the case where a big studio picks up the picture, no promotion budget.
An indie film is usually high concept, good script, and personal. Given that video games for the most part are about cool special effects, mass murder, and pushing technology, the two do not seem to be comparable.
So, why are they not indie games. Becuase indie films are possible because films can be produced on a low budget and there are a network of indie film houses that will show them, even though they is little money made. Console vendors want to sell games, so why bother with a game that is not going to be blockbuster? Stores want to sell games so why stock games that may not sell. Moviegoers will tolerate out of focus shots, unknown actors, and less than ideal theatres just for the hope to see something slightly original. Will gamers make the same compromises?
Most of the decisions on the console seem to be based on pushing Blu-Ray. Unlike MS, Sony waited for the new format. MS chose to ship product and offer an add on. The addition of Blu-Ray probably is a key issue in pushing the price up.
Sony is betting it's share in the console market on the success of Blu-Ray. This is probably a rational risk. If Sony loses the dominant position as a result of the choice pundits will certainly sqawk. But if the gamble pays off and sony can keep the 50% of the market, then by 2010 we might be looking at 100 millions homes equipped to run Blu-Ray. Even if this costs Sony it's dominant position, they might still sell 50 million+ units
So yes, Sony is trying to push it's content and that is hurting the consumers of the hardware. But worst case scenario is that the market is evenly split between Sony, MS and Nintendo, and only Sony is shipping next gen DVD. Every one else will have to pay $400 for an HD DVD player. This does not seem to be an irrational move on the part of Sony
In the end piracy allows software vendors wide margin to increase software prices, which they have clearly done to compensate for piracy. I have seen any significant number of major manufactures with squeezed margins, and there does not seem to be any pressure on them to liberalize the license. If anything, the licenses are getting more draconian.
For example, piracy may help the economy achieve a kind of uniformity of software that is very easy to work with. For example, even is a small firm cannot afford a copy of MS Windows and Autocad, they can always pirate a copy. We benifit because the draftperson does not have to learn multiple systems, and, as the skillset is much easier to garner, can be hired much cheaper than a traditional draftsman. OTOH, as Autocad has no compitition, they probably charge quite a bit more that market, and can continue to do so as they do not need to cater to the small shop.
So, the primary harm that piracy exacts is probably in terms of promoting high prices and reducing the responsiveness to consumers. In competative markets, like the database, there is an effort to get versions out to users that are either low or no cost. This allows the student or amatuer to gain the experience with product without paying professional prices. This is similiar to what once would happen with equipement, such as typewriters. One could buy an old selectric and gain expereince.
In noncompetatve markets, however, the only way to get a low cost version of many applications is to pirate. MS would like us to believe that we can buy a used PC, but we must buy a new license to the OS. The student edition of MS Office is $120, which is already way too much, but to get access it rises to $200, which is really a joke. They are charging more for Access than Foxpro! Autocad is little better charging $150 per year. Mathematica is little better. Labview shows what can happen when a competitve market exists, with a version at $80.
So, what we have is situation in which piracy has lead to extreme economic damage by promoting monopolies in certain sectors. The vendors are perfectly happy to allow the piracy, as it is partially why they are succesful. I will always remember the time in the late 80's when my boss told me he was going to get his first PC because he would not have to pay for any software, unlike on the Mac where most of our software was properly acquired. However, a vendor cannot survive with no sales, so the BSA tries to create opportunity costs, at least for certain customers, that are higher than acquisition costs.
As a student I got MS Office, Mathematics, Foxpro, etc, for a song, so I did not prirate. If I were a student, or new to the IT industry and just wanted to learn, I would think long and hard about buying the software at the offered prices or borrowing a copy.
Ideally I would like to see most piracy stopped. I would like to see offer prices that are in line with what a competative market will bear. I also hope that the BSA pulls the rug on china and forces either the software vendors to cut thier price of the Chinese to find another solution. We will then learn hard and fast what it means to not communicate with an important trading partner.
Look at it this way. A parent is teaching a child to build a dog house. The parent explains that the nails hold the wood together, and for that to work the nails have to be straight and true. The parent then using increasingly difficult tasks and teaches the child to use a hammer to complete this task. Note that if the child did not understand the goal of a hammer, the child would not be able to adjust to the proper use. Also note the parent did not give the child a rock, as we have hammer technology that is very mature. Also note that the parent did not give the child a nail gun as that would not have taught the concept. Also, depending on what the child might want to do, he or she might have to be very skilled in the use of a hammer, as a nail gun might be inappropriate for the job.
So here is what I think, and generally the way I was educated. Start with the basics, which is process development and flow control. Have the students develop incresingly complex processes. Examples might be getting ready for school, sharpening a pencil, washing clothes, etc. The processes should be personal and common as they must develop the steps themselves, not just copy instuctions.
Once they understand the basics of process, they can start working on the standard cannon of practice programs, i.e. 'hello world', and convert the process into a standard language. What the standard language is, and how it is used to compute the solution, depends on the expected outcomes and needs of the students.
Specifically, many say that the kids should use vi, ed, or emacs. The question must be asked are those tools the kind that will useful for developing the complex code that are expected to develop. Unless these kids at CS majors, is the overhead of learning the command structures of these application of any use, in other words are the opportunity costs justified. The kids must know the baics of code development, and the generalities of modern languages, as well as specific languages. But why make it more difficult. When I was in middle school we started on a teletype and in high school moved to a VT52, in college a VT 100, then quickly to an IDE on microcomputer. Did the school ever make me work a card punch? No. Did it do any harm? Maybe, but not enough to justify the loss of coding time. Perhaps I should have been taught to hardwire code?
So I gues what I am saying is don't look at it from a tool point of view. Look at it froma concept and objective point of view. Introducing advance tools will reduce skill, but it will also increase effeciency. Very few people are going to have to do assembly any low level code. For the most part, people will put widgets together to form large applications. To be honest, most people will just use a macro language to write scripts. If they understand the basics, they will have a huge advantage over thier co workers. Those that are going to low level stuff need to be in classes that caters to those details, and those that aren't don't need the distraction. This does not mean that the kids don't need to know the tools. Start in a text editor. Play with gcc. But they can learn much more of the language if they ar in a simple IDE and not fighting with the tool. Furthermore, when we are taking very high level languages like Java, with heavy API dependence, not using and IDE is just going backwardsOn that VT100 I wasted a day because I forgot to reset a redirect. Was it a good lesson to learn. Yes. Did it prevent me from learning even more useful stuff? Absolutely.
Wireless involves crystals and maybe vacuum tubes. Not IC, VLSI, or m scale processes. If you are going to correct someones usage, do it right!