Parents don't punish children they give them time-outs (hey folks, it doesn't work).
Maybe it didn't on you. Do you have any kids of your own?
I can tell you from my own parenting experience that for small children, there's nothing more frustrating than being made to sit in one spot without leaving or talking or having anything to play with. The older they are, the longer you leave them there. If it doesn't work (which it won't if you use it too often or don't enforce the silenct rule), send them to an empty room instead. In most cases, you're constraining their natural energy in a most unnatural way. It's surprisingly effective if you use it consistently.
Re:Theft is not what anybody wants
on
Why Only Music?
·
· Score: 1
In my view, this statement is almost laughable. What's the purpose of it? To justify theft? That's a very, very slippery slope indeed.
I see it as a very simple fact. Consumers don't want to be "music thieves", they want to have popular singles available on demand at a price they can afford. Since they can't get it legitimately -- having to buy the whole album for $15 or more instead -- they get it for free. But if they could get it easily, without overwhelming DRM, for (just say) $0.99, they usually would.
Take movies, for instance. I can buy one for $18, or rent it for $3 or less (new) or $1 (older) to see if I like it first. I don't need to steal it online, because the low price is worth the added quality.
A student gets off the train onto a semi-darkened platform, the only one there. He checks his watch, tries not to panic. He needs to get back to his apartment, and fast. He has a term paper to write and only thirty-three hours left to do it.
As he heads for the revolving gate, he's blocked by a stranger in a dark suit, dark glasses, and a hat. The hat obscures whatever features the glasses leave visible. He speaks. His tone tells the student that he is very, very serious about what he has to say.
"Roger Thomas Richardson." The stranger adjusts his posture, hands in his pockets, features still obscured. "Age twenty-two, unmarried. Profession: university student. Major: Far Eastern religion. GPA: 3.8 and dropping, but your advisor believes you have a chance to change that." He pauses, takes a slow breath. "Am I correct?"
"Who... who are you?" says Roger, trying badly to hold his ground. "What do you want from me?"
"What do I want?" The stranger takes a piece of folded paper from his pocket, unfolds it, makes a gesture of reading it. "I want a book, Mister Richardson. Specifically the book A Contemporary Analysis of World Religions by Chang A. Yin, ISBN number 079236139X, published 1982. Copy number one of one held by the Chicago Public Library." He refolded the paper, stuck it back in his pocket, straightened his coat. "You're overdue, Mister Richardson."
"What? I... I thought I had three weeks... I called, they said...."
"You called to renew, Mister Richardson, but you have been denied that renewal. There is another student in your class who needs that book just as badly as you do. More badly, in fact. If he does not complete his paper in time with a spectacular passing grade, there are...certain people who will be very disappointed. Very disappointed indeed, Mister Richardson."
The stranger reached inside his coat, took something from the breast pocket. It was a pair of scissors. They gleamed in the fluorescent lights of the subway. Two men, unheard, grabbed Richard's arms from behind and twisted them around his back. Richard could feel his shoulder try to dislocate under the pressure. He winced, tried not to scream in pain, and failed.
"We want that book now, Mister Richardson. We know you have it on you. And when we have the book, we want you to give us..." he snipped the scissors once, the metallic snip echoing again and again down the subway tunnels. He grinned, and his perfect white teeth were reflected perfectly for Richard in the blades of the scissors.
Like its rivals, DivX offers a huge improvement in compression compared with the current TV video standard, MPEG-2, which is used by most broadcasters and in most DVDs: Using DivX, a standard 4.7GB DVD can be squeezed down to about 700MB without significant loss of quality. (Microsoft and RealNetworks claim similar ratios.)
Can anyone who uses DivX or has a DivX/DVD player hooked up to their TV attest to this?
Apple's Soundtrack software (and plenty of others besides, I'm sure) lets you have a recording studio with pre-recorded instruments ready for mixing. Perfect for when you're trying to convince your drummer that his temper tantrums are not, in fact, an essential part of the creative process.
Fsirt we dvsiceor taht plepoe can urenntdasd wtrtien wdors wehn the idnise lrtetes are all sralmbecd up...
...andnowwelearnthattheMicroMachineManwasn'tan is olatedphenomenonandthatalmostanyonecanunderstand spokenlanguageevenifit'sspedupbeyondallreason. Amazing, really. When you think about how much garbage the brain's communication centers are capable of interpreting, it's almost a wonder we got as far as written language at all.
these are the machines we should give to kids in grade school. Forget laptops.
Obvious drawbacks: Writing with a stylus isn't as intuitive as a keyboard. Small screens get hard on the eyes after a while. And, of course, they're nearly impossible to write a term paper on.
Laptops are there to help kids work. Handhelds exist as portable PIMs and carriers of data, but no one in their right might would try to do serious work on one exclusively.
I was wondering when we'd finally see 128MB in a palmtop system.
Most folks don't need that much memory unless they're storing multimedia files. However, you can easily buy memory cards for many Palm devices (not sure about these new ones, though) with 128MB or more of additional storage.
The Tungsten T3 retails at about $400 (US), the Tungsten E at $200, and the Zire 21 at $100.
Overall, it looks like the Tungsten E is the best value of Palm's offerings to date (320x320 color screen, multimedia, Graffiti 2, 32 MB of memory). For $200 more you get Bluetooth, wireless Internet, and a rotating screen; for $100 less you get a black-and-white screen and a no-frills, PIM-focused device. It really feels like Palm is listening to its users when they say what they want in a handheld.
The Internet has a large number of journal databases
This is true; however, most or all of those journals are for paid subscribers, are they not?
I don't consider gated commercial databases part of "the Internet", informally speaking, because they're not publicly accessible or searchable. (While I accept that "information wants to be free", it's even more true that "you get what you pay for.")
However, you're right. Journals like that have the best of both worlds, in-depth facts and easy-to-search, up-to-date information.
Of course, OO's button is certainly easier to use, but I think adding it either to the "save as..." dialog or the "print to..." list (or both) is more intuitive.
My favorite feature has to be the ability to export to PDF.
You know, in Mac OS X (or Windows, if you buy Adobe Acrobat), you can export a document from any application to PDF format, as long as that application supports printing.
Come to think of it, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a Linux printer driver to do the same thing....
Online, I can get the news quicker than waiting for the news or the morning paper -- and better yet, I can compare it from several different sources (thanks, Google News). I can find discussions which sometimes point me to additional sources. I can search for terms that I'm not familiar with. Plus, I'm on the computer eight hours every weekday, and the latest news is just a few keystrokes away.
On the other hand, the Internet is not so good at covering local news; I get that in my morning paper, which is actually easier to read than that same paper's website. (I live in Peoria, Illinois -- a city, but not a metropolis -- so the online news is only updated when the morning edition comes out.) It's also a little lacking when you're looking for non-contemporary topics -- the kind of thing that a good paper encyclopedia or the shelf at your local library gives you more thoroughly, because that kind of research costs money and most of the Internet is still free. More importantly, information online is often generalized and condensed, so if you're looking for in-depth facts on a particular topic, you usually need a book on just that one topic.
In short, information on the Internet is quick and broad, but rarely very deep or complete. A good trade-off in many cases, but certainly not all of them.
From the article: The experience for the end-user is fast and powerful game playing that boots in under one minute, without the usual overhead from the legacy operating systems traditionally used in the gaming industry, SCI claims.
This leads me to assume they mean the stand-up arcade consoles which might run thousands of dollars, instead of a few hundred bucks for a home gaming gadget.
Forgive me if this sounds clueless, but most people who are given the task of setting up a web site are going to be looking at ways to not have to do it from scratch.
Then this information is equally valuable to those coding those CMS systems, writing the modules that generate HTML and CSS and JS and all that good stuff. Actually, it's more important -- if you're generating HTML from a single module in a larger CMS site, it's essential to use good HTML-compliant code so that it doesn't accidentally break the modules written by others.
A few days ago, I was using Trillian until it started crashing at login every time. A few news articles later informed me that Yahoo's tweaks were to blame.
Frustrated, I did a quick search for other third-party clients and found Easy Message. It's small, not very customizable, but it does the job and connects to my Yahoo account with (as far as I can tell) no problems.
Very strange. But to be honest, I didn't like Trillian as much as I wanted to anyway.
...direct from Adobe, natch. Not sure exactly who it's for, but it looks like a cross between InDesign page layout software and a creative word processor.
Slashdot Mirror
Parents don't punish children they give them time-outs (hey folks, it doesn't work).
Maybe it didn't on you. Do you have any kids of your own?
I can tell you from my own parenting experience that for small children, there's nothing more frustrating than being made to sit in one spot without leaving or talking or having anything to play with. The older they are, the longer you leave them there. If it doesn't work (which it won't if you use it too often or don't enforce the silenct rule), send them to an empty room instead. In most cases, you're constraining their natural energy in a most unnatural way. It's surprisingly effective if you use it consistently.
In my view, this statement is almost laughable. What's the purpose of it? To justify theft? That's a very, very slippery slope indeed.
I see it as a very simple fact. Consumers don't want to be "music thieves", they want to have popular singles available on demand at a price they can afford. Since they can't get it legitimately -- having to buy the whole album for $15 or more instead -- they get it for free. But if they could get it easily, without overwhelming DRM, for (just say) $0.99, they usually would.
Take movies, for instance. I can buy one for $18, or rent it for $3 or less (new) or $1 (older) to see if I like it first. I don't need to steal it online, because the low price is worth the added quality.
I propose an opensource web based search engine... No more weirdness, no more screwups, no more censorship!
I'm all for it, but who's going to be the first to pony up the server space? (Hint: nobody)
Date: the not-so-distant future
Time: 9:37 PM
Location: Chicago, unspecified subway stop
A student gets off the train onto a semi-darkened platform, the only one there. He checks his watch, tries not to panic. He needs to get back to his apartment, and fast. He has a term paper to write and only thirty-three hours left to do it.
As he heads for the revolving gate, he's blocked by a stranger in a dark suit, dark glasses, and a hat. The hat obscures whatever features the glasses leave visible. He speaks. His tone tells the student that he is very, very serious about what he has to say.
"Roger Thomas Richardson." The stranger adjusts his posture, hands in his pockets, features still obscured. "Age twenty-two, unmarried. Profession: university student. Major: Far Eastern religion. GPA: 3.8 and dropping, but your advisor believes you have a chance to change that." He pauses, takes a slow breath. "Am I correct?"
"Who... who are you?" says Roger, trying badly to hold his ground. "What do you want from me?"
"What do I want?" The stranger takes a piece of folded paper from his pocket, unfolds it, makes a gesture of reading it. "I want a book, Mister Richardson. Specifically the book A Contemporary Analysis of World Religions by Chang A. Yin, ISBN number 079236139X, published 1982. Copy number one of one held by the Chicago Public Library." He refolded the paper, stuck it back in his pocket, straightened his coat. "You're overdue, Mister Richardson."
"What? I... I thought I had three weeks... I called, they said...."
"You called to renew, Mister Richardson, but you have been denied that renewal. There is another student in your class who needs that book just as badly as you do. More badly, in fact. If he does not complete his paper in time with a spectacular passing grade, there are...certain people who will be very disappointed. Very disappointed indeed, Mister Richardson."
The stranger reached inside his coat, took something from the breast pocket. It was a pair of scissors. They gleamed in the fluorescent lights of the subway. Two men, unheard, grabbed Richard's arms from behind and twisted them around his back. Richard could feel his shoulder try to dislocate under the pressure. He winced, tried not to scream in pain, and failed.
"We want that book now, Mister Richardson. We know you have it on you. And when we have the book, we want you to give us..." he snipped the scissors once, the metallic snip echoing again and again down the subway tunnels. He grinned, and his perfect white teeth were reflected perfectly for Richard in the blades of the scissors.
"...we want your library card."
Like its rivals, DivX offers a huge improvement in compression compared with the current TV video standard, MPEG-2, which is used by most broadcasters and in most DVDs: Using DivX, a standard 4.7GB DVD can be squeezed down to about 700MB without significant loss of quality. (Microsoft and RealNetworks claim similar ratios.)
Can anyone who uses DivX or has a DivX/DVD player hooked up to their TV attest to this?
Did you know that you can rearrange the letters of "EARTHSTATION FIVE" to spell "RIAA VOTES IN THEFT"?
They're behind the whole thing, I'm telling you.
Apple's Soundtrack software (and plenty of others besides, I'm sure) lets you have a recording studio with pre-recorded instruments ready for mixing. Perfect for when you're trying to convince your drummer that his temper tantrums are not, in fact, an essential part of the creative process.
The estimated viewing time for this training video is 15.62 minutes.
More than 18 minutes -- Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g. possible unauthorized restroom break).
16-18 minutes -- Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
15.63-16 minutes -- Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
Exactly 15.62 minutes -- Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
14-15.61 minutes -- Employee is an efficient worker, may someteimes miss emportant details.
10-14 minutes -- Keep an eye on this employee; maybe developing slipshod attitude.
6-10 minutes -- Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
Less than 6 minutes -- Disable fast-forward button on the user's video player, re-block Slashdot.org on the company firewall.
Fsirt we dvsiceor taht plepoe can urenntdasd wtrtien wdors wehn the idnise lrtetes are all sralmbecd up...
...andnowwelearnthattheMicroMachineManwasn'tans olatedphenomenonandthatalmostanyonecanunderstand
i
spokenlanguageevenifit'sspedupbeyondallreason.
Amazing, really. When you think about how much garbage the brain's communication centers are capable of interpreting, it's almost a wonder we got as far as written language at all.
these are the machines we should give to kids in grade school. Forget laptops.
Obvious drawbacks: Writing with a stylus isn't as intuitive as a keyboard. Small screens get hard on the eyes after a while. And, of course, they're nearly impossible to write a term paper on.
Laptops are there to help kids work. Handhelds exist as portable PIMs and carriers of data, but no one in their right might would try to do serious work on one exclusively.
I was wondering when we'd finally see 128MB in a palmtop system.
Most folks don't need that much memory unless they're storing multimedia files. However, you can easily buy memory cards for many Palm devices (not sure about these new ones, though) with 128MB or more of additional storage.
The Tungsten T3 retails at about $400 (US), the Tungsten E at $200, and the Zire 21 at $100.
Overall, it looks like the Tungsten E is the best value of Palm's offerings to date (320x320 color screen, multimedia, Graffiti 2, 32 MB of memory). For $200 more you get Bluetooth, wireless Internet, and a rotating screen; for $100 less you get a black-and-white screen and a no-frills, PIM-focused device. It really feels like Palm is listening to its users when they say what they want in a handheld.
The Internet has a large number of journal databases
This is true; however, most or all of those journals are for paid subscribers, are they not?
I don't consider gated commercial databases part of "the Internet", informally speaking, because they're not publicly accessible or searchable. (While I accept that "information wants to be free", it's even more true that "you get what you pay for.")
However, you're right. Journals like that have the best of both worlds, in-depth facts and easy-to-search, up-to-date information.
Ahh, good: there's a Linux print-to-PDF solution after all.
Of course, OO's button is certainly easier to use, but I think adding it either to the "save as..." dialog or the "print to..." list (or both) is more intuitive.
My favorite feature has to be the ability to export to PDF.
You know, in Mac OS X (or Windows, if you buy Adobe Acrobat), you can export a document from any application to PDF format, as long as that application supports printing.
Come to think of it, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a Linux printer driver to do the same thing....
Google News, /. and Fark are where I get my information about the world.
You use a combination of global headlines, geek discussion, and it's-not-news? Your teachers must have been utterly boggled by your research papers.
Google says: Your search - "is the internet my source of knowledge?" - did not match any documents.
Well then, you should have asked Jeeves instead.
Online, I can get the news quicker than waiting for the news or the morning paper -- and better yet, I can compare it from several different sources (thanks, Google News). I can find discussions which sometimes point me to additional sources. I can search for terms that I'm not familiar with. Plus, I'm on the computer eight hours every weekday, and the latest news is just a few keystrokes away.
On the other hand, the Internet is not so good at covering local news; I get that in my morning paper, which is actually easier to read than that same paper's website. (I live in Peoria, Illinois -- a city, but not a metropolis -- so the online news is only updated when the morning edition comes out.) It's also a little lacking when you're looking for non-contemporary topics -- the kind of thing that a good paper encyclopedia or the shelf at your local library gives you more thoroughly, because that kind of research costs money and most of the Internet is still free. More importantly, information online is often generalized and condensed, so if you're looking for in-depth facts on a particular topic, you usually need a book on just that one topic.
In short, information on the Internet is quick and broad, but rarely very deep or complete. A good trade-off in many cases, but certainly not all of them.
From the article: The experience for the end-user is fast and powerful game playing that boots in under one minute, without the usual overhead from the legacy operating systems traditionally used in the gaming industry, SCI claims.
This leads me to assume they mean the stand-up arcade consoles which might run thousands of dollars, instead of a few hundred bucks for a home gaming gadget.
WebFlix? I hope you meant NetFlix....
Forgive me if this sounds clueless, but most people who are given the task of setting up a web site are going to be looking at ways to not have to do it from scratch.
Then this information is equally valuable to those coding those CMS systems, writing the modules that generate HTML and CSS and JS and all that good stuff. Actually, it's more important -- if you're generating HTML from a single module in a larger CMS site, it's essential to use good HTML-compliant code so that it doesn't accidentally break the modules written by others.
A few days ago, I was using Trillian until it started crashing at login every time. A few news articles later informed me that Yahoo's tweaks were to blame.
Frustrated, I did a quick search for other third-party clients and found Easy Message. It's small, not very customizable, but it does the job and connects to my Yahoo account with (as far as I can tell) no problems.
Very strange. But to be honest, I didn't like Trillian as much as I wanted to anyway.
"You spent all this money building a mod like this, and you didn't even install a web browser?"
...direct from Adobe, natch. Not sure exactly who it's for, but it looks like a cross between InDesign page layout software and a creative word processor.
I don't know what a "motherload" is.
Nor do I, but it sounds awfully naughty.