Someplace I have a Handspring Visor with a Xircom WiFi adapter that does this, too; it was from early in 2002. It might even still work, if Palm hasn't unplugged the proxy servers yet.
Absolutely - varied techniques are the best way, in part because different people learn in different ways, but also because different types of knowledge need to be presented and examined in different ways.
However, since I was part of that project, I'd like to say that the prof in question does not rely on multiple choice questions for the entire course - rather, when multiple choice questions can be used, he then uses the wireless network as described, and then follows up with an open discussion about the question and the responses (which are received from every student in the class, not just one). There are also essays and discussion sessions, but the Wired article didn't talk about those because they're not as "hip" as playing with a wireless gadget.
Other than that, though, I wish all teachers would pay attention to the need for varied techniques; education would be a lot more interesting then.
Cute, but what the professor in that class is saying is that students just plain don't take their lumps -- at least, not in public, in front of their peers. I've taught a couple of courses in the past few years, and it's true. Of course technology isn't necessary for a good education, but it is a lot more convenient and interesting with appropriate use of technology. You can write out your next book with a quill pen if you don't believe me. I also wouldn't characterize the idea of anonymous communication with the professor as radical - I said that the effect in the classroom was radical, and so did the author of the article in Wired.
The technology really isn't all that radical - the point is rather that pervasive use of the technology makes for a radical change in behavior.
Did you bother to read the article? There was an awfully big section about how a psychology class was radically changed with the use of the wireless network. Maybe I'm biased because I wrote that software, but I thought that was a significant part of the article. The network (both wired and wireless) changes the nature of the entire institution.
True; someone else suggested a name change which stuck, and what he wrote is now called "Linux"; he even has a trademark for it.
RMS can only name what he wrote; the fact of the matter may be that he (and many other volunteers at the FSF) wrote a large piece of a free operating system, which they are still working on, and have named "GNU".
Red Hat, Inc., gets to name their product, also. So does Caldera, and SUSE, and Mandrake, and Slackware, and Debian, and TurboLinux, and even LinuxOne as lame as they may be, among many many others, and not one of them has to provide a single acknowledgment in their advertising (which includes the name!) to Linus, RMS, or any other person or entity who wrote most of the code. This is a key freedom, according to the FSF (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html)
I believe that freedom is in fact the largest and most important advantage that the group of operating systems we are talking about has over the proprietary alternatives. Personally, I like the fact that my data is not being held hostage by a potentially hostile corporation, and that I will always be able to control my own destiny when using a Free system. Many of the people I support had no end of problems when one of their favorite software packages had no Y2K updates, because the publisher had gone out of business in 1998; other people I know are stuck because their favorite game was produced by a company which went out of business a while ago and never fixed the memory leaks before they collapsed. These are not problems when the software is Free.
However, it is rather disingenuous to insist that Freedom must include the freedom to fork the project and then insist that the old name must be kept as part of the new name, as is the case in insisting that it be called "GNU/Linux". That's just lame; the project was forked multiple times (once for each different distribution out there), as the people who created each of those forks has a perfect right to do, according to the freedom guaranteed to each of them, and they are not required to even give any credit in their advertising.
Now it may be a fact that completely ripping off someone else's project without any attribution and without providing any added value is in very bad taste and probably means that the individual or group in question is just a free-loader, but it also happens to be completely legal according to most Free software licenses.
If the FSF ever "fixes" this problem, they also ought to simultaneously issue the world's largest apology to the BSD project for the implied insult which has been up on the GNU webpage for years. Otherwise, the noise in "Linux" vs. "GNU/Linux" just sounds like petty jealousy.
Rockford Fosgate has one - the RFX MP3.8. It takes up to 8 memory cards -I think they are flash, but I'm not positive. I thought about it for a while, but I didn't want to spend that much money on it, so I got the Aiwa CDC-MP3 instead. It's about $350 + a Rockford stereo to control it (another $350) + the cost of the memory cards.
Hey, if my memory is right, that's the way Roberta Williams started out (co-founder of Sierra, responsible for a number of top-selling games). She's in good company.
This comment is too long and uses too many words. Can't you just give me a picture or an icon that I could click on instead? Maybe a series of pictures representing your ideas so I could just recognize them instead of having to recall all the meanings of these complex words?
(Hint: hierohlyphs went out of fashion a *long* time ago.)
I have four or five of these scroll-wheel mice; under Microsoft Half-Life Loader 98 (misleadingly titled "Windows" in stores), it is excruciatingly annoying in exactly the manner in which you describe. Under Linux / X, it is crisp and snappy, not to mention consistent, which the MS HL Loader experience is not - same mouse, same computer, just different software.
Personally, I'm replacing all of my mice with scroll-wheel mice.
Copying and redistributing Metallica albums is not the same thing as being a Free Software advocate. The difficulty is that Slashdot is a confusing place, with several overlapping communities. Without claiming to present an exhaustive list, I suggest the following.
One is a "community" of thieves; maybe they have been ripped off and think they are therefore entitled to steal something back, but in any case they steal things. These include the warez d00ds and the skript kiddyz. Free Software is roughly the same to them as a pirated copy of Windows 2000. You may have guessed that I don't have much respect for them.
One is a community of people who do not have the money or the inclination to spend money on software; these people like getting things for no money, and these people include graduate students (I know, I was one). Free Software is No-Cost-Ware to them. These people don't necessarily want to steal, and Free Software means that they don't have to, and yet they still don't have to spend any money (which they may not even have to spend).
One is a community of people who value their freedom. Many times these people are programmers, but sometime they are just people who wouldn't buy a car with the hood welded shut. Free Software is Freedom-Software to them.
I think that there is in fact very little overlap between the first group and the last; the first group copies Metallica albums; the last group is concerned about the conflict between the GPL and the QPL.
*Sigh*. You've completely missed the point. Freedom, not no cost. The desire for freedom is not the same as being "so damn cheap". Freedom is something money can't buy; it has more value to many of us than even the "best" technology out there.
I'm not even going to get into how Be is offering BeOS for free if OEMs will preload it and give it equal time, while many versions of Linux are now selling for nearly $90 (i.e., BeOS is "cheaper" than Linux in some instances), because the issue is FREEDOM. LIBERTY. Not price. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.ht ml (and read a bunch more on the GNU website, while you're at it.)
Yes. Has been for quite a while, actually. Try http://www.inria.fr/koala/colas/mouse-wheel-scroll/ for information on making it all work. StarOffice supports it out-of-the-box, Gnome mostly does, KDE is working on it, and a bunch of other applications are or already have added support for it.
You're absolutely right; there is no way they got the best bang-for-the-buck in this deal. It's not entirely irrational, though, as there are a couple of other factors besides price that weigh in here. Although 1024 P2-450's are cheaper to purchase, they still need space to put the boxes in, power to run them, network connections, hard drives, someplace to run all those cables and cooling capacity for all those CPUs and RAM and power supplies.
Also, the quad Xeon's, while not a great deal, are probably not as bad as it looks because each node requires a case, power supply, a minimum of one network interface and probably more for a big cluster, a port or more in the Ethernet switch, and a hard drive. The price tag on all of these does add up, even when you're buying cheap hardware, let alone when it comes from sgi.
I think a lot (most?) Beowulf clusters do have local storage on each node, and for good reason. The network is usually a bottleneck already, and it costs a lot more than the price of a hard drive to upgrade beyond fast ethernet (per node, that is).
No. If you check to see why neither Red Hat nor Debian shipped the old KDE with the old QT libraries, you'll find that it was because it is *illegal* to do so; some of the code in KDE is under the GPL, which forbids linking with proprietary libraries, which the old QT certainly was. You must have the permission of the copyright holder in order to copy or modify any piece of copyrighted material, including any piece of source code. In the case of GPL'd software, the permission is granted within certain bounds; those bounds do not include linking with proprietary libraries. Period.
Is this the same Debian that has been getting slammed for being too militantly free? Is this the same Debian that is considered to be a marginal player because it isn't commericial enough? Is this the same Debian that is the only Linux distribution to carry the word "GNU" in the name? Is this the same Debian that is the only Linux distribution worthy of carrying the GNU name (IMHO, of course)? Is this the same Debian that wouldn't include KDE because it wasn't careful enough about free software licenses? Is this the same Debian that refuses to ask for permission to ship software that is "free so long as you ask", on the grounds that it isn't free to re-redistribute?
No, I think you'll find that Debian is still rather more careful about remaining free than most distibutions are; talk to the developers; if you don't get laughed at or ignored as a troll (which you are, BTW), they'll tell you that Corel!=Debian, even if Corel is based on Debian.
I think you'll also find, should you ever care to become educated, that freedom includes the right to build a commercial product on top of a free product, so long as the relevant licenses aren't violated. One of Debian's original goals was to build a system that others would be free to use for any purpose; this includes building a commercial distribution on top of it. You'll also find, should you care to look, that Corel is doing a *lot* of work under the GPL, including wine and winelib. I personally think Corel "gets it" better than most, and is actually leading the pack when it comes to commercial software companies and free software.
I look forward to the day when I can give my father a Debian CD set with Word Perfect and erase Windows from his hard drive.
Slashdot Mirror
Someplace I have a Handspring Visor with a Xircom WiFi adapter that does this, too; it was from early in 2002. It might even still work, if Palm hasn't unplugged the proxy servers yet.
Absolutely - varied techniques are the best way, in part because different people learn in different ways, but also because different types of knowledge need to be presented and examined in different ways.
However, since I was part of that project, I'd like to say that the prof in question does not rely on multiple choice questions for the entire course - rather, when multiple choice questions can be used, he then uses the wireless network as described, and then follows up with an open discussion about the question and the responses (which are received from every student in the class, not just one). There are also essays and discussion sessions, but the Wired article didn't talk about those because they're not as "hip" as playing with a wireless gadget.
Other than that, though, I wish all teachers would pay attention to the need for varied techniques; education would be a lot more interesting then.
Cute, but what the professor in that class is saying is that students just plain don't take their lumps -- at least, not in public, in front of their peers. I've taught a couple of courses in the past few years, and it's true. Of course technology isn't necessary for a good education, but it is a lot more convenient and interesting with appropriate use of technology. You can write out your next book with a quill pen if you don't believe me. I also wouldn't characterize the idea of anonymous communication with the professor as radical - I said that the effect in the classroom was radical, and so did the author of the article in Wired.
The technology really isn't all that radical - the point is rather that pervasive use of the technology makes for a radical change in behavior.
Did you bother to read the article? There was an awfully big section about how a psychology class was radically changed with the use of the wireless network. Maybe I'm biased because I wrote that software, but I thought that was a significant part of the article. The network (both wired and wireless) changes the nature of the entire institution.
Actually, I'd be more worried about the fact that MS programmers (and programmers in general) are on caffeine. I think it explains a lot.
Spiders on Caffeine
RMS can only name what he wrote; the fact of the matter may be that he (and many other volunteers at the FSF) wrote a large piece of a free operating system, which they are still working on, and have named "GNU".
Red Hat, Inc., gets to name their product, also. So does Caldera, and SUSE, and Mandrake, and Slackware, and Debian, and TurboLinux, and even LinuxOne as lame as they may be, among many many others, and not one of them has to provide a single acknowledgment in their advertising (which includes the name!) to Linus, RMS, or any other person or entity who wrote most of the code. This is a key freedom, according to the FSF (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html)
I believe that freedom is in fact the largest and most important advantage that the group of operating systems we are talking about has over the proprietary alternatives. Personally, I like the fact that my data is not being held hostage by a potentially hostile corporation, and that I will always be able to control my own destiny when using a Free system. Many of the people I support had no end of problems when one of their favorite software packages had no Y2K updates, because the publisher had gone out of business in 1998; other people I know are stuck because their favorite game was produced by a company which went out of business a while ago and never fixed the memory leaks before they collapsed. These are not problems when the software is Free.
However, it is rather disingenuous to insist that Freedom must include the freedom to fork the project and then insist that the old name must be kept as part of the new name, as is the case in insisting that it be called "GNU/Linux". That's just lame; the project was forked multiple times (once for each different distribution out there), as the people who created each of those forks has a perfect right to do, according to the freedom guaranteed to each of them, and they are not required to even give any credit in their advertising.
Now it may be a fact that completely ripping off someone else's project without any attribution and without providing any added value is in very bad taste and probably means that the individual or group in question is just a free-loader, but it also happens to be completely legal according to most Free software licenses.
If the FSF ever "fixes" this problem, they also ought to simultaneously issue the world's largest apology to the BSD project for the implied insult which has been up on the GNU webpage for years. Otherwise, the noise in "Linux" vs. "GNU/Linux" just sounds like petty jealousy.
Rockford Fosgate has one - the RFX MP3.8. It takes up to 8 memory cards -I think they are flash, but I'm not positive. I thought about it for a while, but I didn't want to spend that much money on it, so I got the Aiwa CDC-MP3 instead. It's about $350 + a Rockford stereo to control it (another $350) + the cost of the memory cards.
Hey, if my memory is right, that's the way Roberta Williams started out (co-founder of Sierra, responsible for a number of top-selling games). She's in good company.
This comment is too long and uses too many words. Can't you just give me a picture or an icon that I could click on instead? Maybe a series of pictures representing your ideas so I could just recognize them instead of having to recall all the meanings of these complex words?
(Hint: hierohlyphs went out of fashion a *long* time ago.)
I have four or five of these scroll-wheel mice; under Microsoft Half-Life Loader 98 (misleadingly titled "Windows" in stores), it is excruciatingly annoying in exactly the manner in which you describe. Under Linux / X, it is crisp and snappy, not to mention consistent, which the MS HL Loader experience is not - same mouse, same computer, just different software.
Personally, I'm replacing all of my mice with scroll-wheel mice.
- One is a "community" of thieves; maybe they have been ripped off and think they are therefore entitled to steal something back, but in any case they steal things. These include the warez d00ds and the skript kiddyz. Free Software is roughly the same to them as a pirated copy of Windows 2000. You may have guessed that I don't have much respect for them.
- One is a community of people who do not have the money or the inclination to spend money on software; these people like getting things for no money, and these people include graduate students (I know, I was one). Free Software is No-Cost-Ware to them. These people don't necessarily want to steal, and Free Software means that they don't have to, and yet they still don't have to spend any money (which they may not even have to spend).
- One is a community of people who value their freedom. Many times these people are programmers, but sometime they are just people who wouldn't buy a car with the hood welded shut. Free Software is Freedom-Software to them.
I think that there is in fact very little overlap between the first group and the last; the first group copies Metallica albums; the last group is concerned about the conflict between the GPL and the QPL.And even more simply,
mv file1 thisfile anotherone
I'm not even going to get into how Be is offering BeOS for free if OEMs will preload it and give it equal time, while many versions of Linux are now selling for nearly $90 (i.e., BeOS is "cheaper" than Linux in some instances), because the issue is FREEDOM. LIBERTY. Not price. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.ht ml (and read a bunch more on the GNU website, while you're at it.)
Yes. Has been for quite a while, actually. Try http://www.inria.fr/koala/colas /mouse-wheel-scroll/ for information on making it all work. StarOffice supports it out-of-the-box, Gnome mostly does, KDE is working on it, and a bunch of other applications are or already have added support for it.
You're absolutely right; there is no way they got the best bang-for-the-buck in this deal. It's not entirely irrational, though, as there are a couple of other factors besides price that weigh in here. Although 1024 P2-450's are cheaper to purchase, they still need space to put the boxes in, power to run them, network connections, hard drives, someplace to run all those cables and cooling capacity for all those CPUs and RAM and power supplies.
Also, the quad Xeon's, while not a great deal, are probably not as bad as it looks because each node requires a case, power supply, a minimum of one network interface and probably more for a big cluster, a port or more in the Ethernet switch, and a hard drive. The price tag on all of these does add up, even when you're buying cheap hardware, let alone when it comes from sgi.
I think a lot (most?) Beowulf clusters do have local storage on each node, and for good reason. The network is usually a bottleneck already, and it costs a lot more than the price of a hard drive to upgrade beyond fast ethernet (per node, that is).
*sigh*
No. If you check to see why neither Red Hat nor Debian shipped the old KDE with the old QT libraries, you'll find that it was because it is *illegal* to do so; some of the code in KDE is under the GPL, which forbids linking with proprietary libraries, which the old QT certainly was. You must have the permission of the copyright holder in order to copy or modify any piece of copyrighted material, including any piece of source code. In the case of GPL'd software, the permission is granted within certain bounds; those bounds do not include linking with proprietary libraries. Period.
'scuse me?
Is this the same Debian that has been getting slammed for being too militantly free? Is this the same Debian that is considered to be a marginal player because it isn't commericial enough? Is this the same Debian that is the only Linux distribution to carry the word "GNU" in the name? Is this the same Debian that is the only Linux distribution worthy of carrying the GNU name (IMHO, of course)? Is this the same Debian that wouldn't include KDE because it wasn't careful enough about free software licenses? Is this the same Debian that refuses to ask for permission to ship software that is "free so long as you ask", on the grounds that it isn't free to re-redistribute?
No, I think you'll find that Debian is still rather more careful about remaining free than most distibutions are; talk to the developers; if you don't get laughed at or ignored as a troll (which you are, BTW), they'll tell you that Corel!=Debian, even if Corel is based on Debian.
I think you'll also find, should you ever care to become educated, that freedom includes the right to build a commercial product on top of a free product, so long as the relevant licenses aren't violated. One of Debian's original goals was to build a system that others would be free to use for any purpose; this includes building a commercial distribution on top of it. You'll also find, should you care to look, that Corel is doing a *lot* of work under the GPL, including wine and winelib. I personally think Corel "gets it" better than most, and is actually leading the pack when it comes to commercial software companies and free software.
I look forward to the day when I can give my father a Debian CD set with Word Perfect and erase Windows from his hard drive.