Who is the target audience for this book? Kids who are already into math will be embarrassed/disgusted with the teen mag layout, and kids who aren't won't read a math book even if their parents buy it for them and say "look, this actress you may have seen on Nick at Nite wrote a math book!" I think just about anyone would wince at the "breaking a nail" cliche in the title, although I suspect Ms. McKellar's not to blame.
Many of these kinds of efforts look like they were produced by someone who is more concerned with being on record with supporting women going into science and math than actually having a real effect. That's why we end up with textbooks crammed with mini-biographies of Sophie Germain and Ada Lovelace that nobody will actually read and that anyone with enough brainpower to do basic algebra will recognize as tacit admissions that a woman mathematician is an odd duck indeed.
McKellar looks like her heart is in the right place - she's presumably wealthy and is a professional actress, and yet she still devoted serious time and energy to studying math. Presumably she wants others to share her enthusiasm for an interesting and potentially lucrative field of endeavor. But I very much doubt that she was "turned on" to math by a book like this. I imagine that her supportive family and the confidence boost that came from being a TV star helped overcome the anti-math stigma.
Of course, as much as the stereotypical mathematician is not feminine, he's not particularly masculine either, not an effeminate man precisely, probably more of a modern-day eunuch. Certainly no young men go into mathematics to impress their peers, so I think a more important question would be why young women are more influenced by "peer pressure" than young men.
Is it low self-esteem? Women think they can't get ahead except by being "cheerleader" types? Or high self-esteem? Women think they *can* become cheerleader types if they wear uncomfortable enough clothing and enough makeup, while nerdy guys figure they couldn't make the football team in a million years?
(Of course, this sidesteps discussion of whether IQ tests measure anything significant at all.)
This wasn't a general purpose IQ test. It was a specific test of people's ability to recall words. They're talking about memory in particular, not some fuzzy idea of general intelligence.
I just wish you could turn the feed off altogether - I miss the old, uncluttered homepage. I'm not that concerned about my privacy; as someone said earlier, if I wanted things to be private from my Facebook friends I wouldn't post them on Facebook.
They've managed to turn one of the more attractive looking pages on the Internet into an ugly mess cluttered with useless information about my friends joining groups I've never heard of, etc. I think they should either eliminate the feeds altogether or put them on a separate page.
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.93 www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.94 www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.95 www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.90 www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.91 www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.92
I don't believe this. Why would Google send one of their top execs to give a speech at an organization of music retailers saying they have no interest in selling music?
If you read the article, there are some interesting points where Sacca argues Google is already in the music business, meaning that when people hear about an artist or song, they search for it on Google. It seems like what they're saying is "we get a ton of traffic that we can easily identify of people who seem likely to buy music, we're not interested in building a music store because we know from Google Video we can't design stores, you guys sell music... maybe YOU can make a Google music store, and pay us a little sumthin sumthin."
In Windows Vista Beta 2, Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 would install but issue a warning when you ran it, noting that it was incompatible with Vista. You could ignore the warning and everything worked fine... Now, some key functionality simply doesn't work or, oddly, only partially works.
So, software that openly declares itself to be incompatible with the new OS doesn't work.. And somehow it's even worse when it only works a little bit instead of crashing theatrically or outright refusing to install.
use IE for one thing and one thing only: The magazine's Web portal requires IE to post articles, and because I post WinInfo articles every day, I need to use IE. Every day. In IE 7, the rich edit control that forms the basis of the third party ActiveX control we used to post article bodies not only doesn't work, it is actually deprecated in Vista so that it will never work, even if you manually install it.
So, his employer created a bizarre, inflexible web application, and the one browser it's compatible with will soon no longer support it? Oh, no! God forbid he should have to use older versions, let alone non-beta browsers, for his nonstandard web apps.
Why did I just waste four years making nice album art for music folders and custom folder art for photos?
Damned if I know...
But my favorite Windows Vista behavior--and believe you me, this was a tough contest--has to be the weird COM object errors I get while cutting and pasting between Paint and Word 2007.
So when using his beta word processor on top of his beta OS, he found some bugs.. Stop the presses.
I don't see why he's complaining. If all these problems were in a commercially released version of Vista, that would be a big problem, but he chose to use the beta version not only for occasional tooling around but for his primary OS. I'm sure it's frustrating that it doesn't work, but I can't really hold it against Microsoft. If he has all these problems with Vista, why not keep an XP machine, or at least an XP partition, around? In a few months these will either be show-stopping bugs or long-fixed, but until then, why does it even matter? Nobody, except apparently Paul, uses beta software for important tasks.
No, the story on NSA surveillance months ago was the NSA listening in on calls make from the US to foreign countries and vice-versa. I believe they were examining emails as well.
This story is different: here, the NSA is examining the times, durations and phone numbers involved in domestic-only calls although they're not actually listening in.
I don't see what's wrong with the New York Times. Everything they publish seems to be based on solid information. I'd love to see documentation of something specific about this issue published in the New York Times but demonstrably false or misleading.
It looks like you can download an evaluation version of VMWare workstation that "dies" in one month. I'm not sure if you can create a VM with that, then play it with player, or if they're DRMed, but it's at VMWare's site.
You could also download a virtual machine here it looks like. I'm sure if you google you can find others.
This seems to be a far too common occurence here: the article summary is misleading and the commenters don't even read the 300 word article. The article says nothing about companies wanting money for things people type into a search engine.
Apparently the record companies used to allow portals like Yahoo to show their videos for free, since they considered it free advertising for their music. Then, they realized that Yahoo was making lots of money off the deal through advertising, so they asked for a cut. Yahoo refused, but saw their hits go down, so they negotiated a deal. Basically, an exec at Universal realized what they considered advertising was more like giving away free product. This makes sense: people weren't discovering new music on Yahoo. Most of the time, they came there to see videos and songs they already knew.
I suppose you could say the record companies are being greedy, but they're not doing anything suspect. They realized other companies were making money off their products, and decided to charge for the privilege. Similarly, they're trying to renegotiate with Apple, and we'll see who wins there. They may harm their own market more than they expect by raising the prices, or the market may be happy to pay $1.30 for new hits. We'll just see. They're also renegotiating with satellite radio, now that that industry is pulling in lots of money, again with the RIAA's products.
There's no talk in the article of charging anyone for search engine keywords.
Some of this appears to be crap, or at least just lawyers playing hardball. She claims that there was no such material on her computer, and that the RIAA broke into the computer to locate such material. The first may be true - it may be a genuine mistake, but the second argument I really doubt. I believe that the RIAA does not do any more than search public P2P search engines for their copyrighted content, and her argument that this searching is trespass to chattels is nonsense.
That being said, I would blame her lawyer, not her personally. But still, it's hard to know how seriously the RICO allegations should be taken, or whether they're just a way to make the case a pain for the RIAA.
Many Back to the Future fans don't realize that what they hear as "jigga watts" is actually the preferred pronunciation (notice it's listed first) of the SI/metric prefix giga.
With respect to computer-related units, the hard g is of course strongly preferred, but 1.21 gW is certainly not a made up unit.
Is there some reason why large companies can't resist the temptation to acquire AOL?
First Time Warner's notoriously ill-fated merger, right as broadband was emerging... Now Microsoft? I realize AOL has a large number of subscribers, still the most of any ISP, but according to
Business Week, they lost 900,000 subscribers just in the second quarter! As broadband becomes cheaper and cheaper, why would anyone stay with AOL? Are they even getting any new subscribers?
That article also mentions AOL's goal to become a web portal, with AIM, AOL Music and MapQuest drawing users in. AIM I imagine is growing, as new preteens start using it all the time, but does this really make them any money? There's advertising on the client, I've never heard of anyone actually clicking it, or even really noticing it. MapQuest is okay, but I imagine people will gradually switch to Google Maps. I've never even heard of AOL Music, but it doesn't look like anything spectacular. And who would ever use AOL for search or free email? I think anyone under 35 wouldn't even think to look there.
Perhaps that's what these companies don't understand: AOL, and really MSN as well,
make most of their money off of customers' cluelessness. As customers get clued in by friends and relatives, they'll move to better services. The customers you have left will use one hour of Internet time a month and will probably eat up any profit AOL could make with their tech support calls alone.
Remember this is still in a very early beta stage. On the developer page, they claim that they're moving toward interoperability with other networks and fully documenting the custom VOIP protocol they use.
They encourage people to comment in the Google Talk Interoperability Google Group. It seems like they're trying to determine how to balance openness with security, privacy concerns (i.e., avoiding spam). I frankly don't know enough about Jabber, etc. to know if this is BS or not, but it sounds reasonable enough to me.
No, you're wrong. A judge initially ruled that just selling ads that appear when someone searches for a trademarked term is fine under the law but was unable to rule without a trial whether it was OK to include the trademark in the ad itself.
It looks like the trial has taken place, and the court ruled that having the trademark (Geico) in the ad is misleading, and could confuse people into thinking the insurance being sold is affiliated with Geico. So, that's not allowed.
You can disagree with the outcome, sure, but the judges' actions seem very reasonable: rule quickly in summary judgment on the obvious issues, defer the more complicated ones for a trial.
The textbook publishers shouldn't really be promoting e-books.... What if iPod-style eBook readers become widespread, or integrated into phones/iPods/PDAs/whatever? Why would anyone need the publisher to begin with? The professor could just sell his own textbook in eBook format and bypass the publisher altogether!
Um, no, it actually couldn't. They're talking about the number of pages indexed, not the number of searches made. Unless Yahoo is installing some kind of webcrawling bot on your machine with Macromedia products, the two are completely unrelated.
So, I think what we need is for someone to release an old Mighty Mouse cartoon with the Beatles' White Album as soundtrack, thereby inviting lawsuits from both Apple Computer and Apple Records!
I don't agree. I don't think there's any way that Microsoft envisions AP articles saying "Linux, an operating system designed for obsolete computers" or anything like that. Nor would this make that much of a difference, since really (mod me down if you must) nobody uses Linux desktops anyway...
Google is constantly giving talks like this at universities. I saw one at Harvard back in the fall. They aren't really news worth reporting on slashdot, since they all contain the same content.
Slashdot Mirror
Chuck Norris is 1/10 of one percent of the population
Who is the target audience for this book? Kids who are already into math will be embarrassed/disgusted with the teen mag layout, and kids who aren't won't read a math book even if their parents buy it for them and say "look, this actress you may have seen on Nick at Nite wrote a math book!" I think just about anyone would wince at the "breaking a nail" cliche in the title, although I suspect Ms. McKellar's not to blame.
Many of these kinds of efforts look like they were produced by someone who is more concerned with being on record with supporting women going into science and math than actually having a real effect. That's why we end up with textbooks crammed with mini-biographies of Sophie Germain and Ada Lovelace that nobody will actually read and that anyone with enough brainpower to do basic algebra will recognize as tacit admissions that a woman mathematician is an odd duck indeed.
McKellar looks like her heart is in the right place - she's presumably wealthy and is a professional actress, and yet she still devoted serious time and energy to studying math. Presumably she wants others to share her enthusiasm for an interesting and potentially lucrative field of endeavor. But I very much doubt that she was "turned on" to math by a book like this. I imagine that her supportive family and the confidence boost that came from being a TV star helped overcome the anti-math stigma.
Of course, as much as the stereotypical mathematician is not feminine, he's not particularly masculine either, not an effeminate man precisely, probably more of a modern-day eunuch. Certainly no young men go into mathematics to impress their peers, so I think a more important question would be why young women are more influenced by "peer pressure" than young men.
Is it low self-esteem? Women think they can't get ahead except by being "cheerleader" types? Or high self-esteem? Women think they *can* become cheerleader types if they wear uncomfortable enough clothing and enough makeup, while nerdy guys figure they couldn't make the football team in a million years?
This wasn't a general purpose IQ test. It was a specific test of people's ability to recall words. They're talking about memory in particular, not some fuzzy idea of general intelligence.
I just wish you could turn the feed off altogether - I miss the old, uncluttered homepage. I'm not that concerned about my privacy; as someone said earlier, if I wanted things to be private from my Facebook friends I wouldn't post them on Facebook.
They've managed to turn one of the more attractive looking pages on the Internet into an ugly mess cluttered with useless information about my friends joining groups I've never heard of, etc. I think they should either eliminate the feeds altogether or put them on a separate page.
Two queries, one after the other. First it does its "sitefinder," then it gives NXDOMAIN, and seems to alternate randomly...
#1:
> host www.yahoo.coma ns3.mindspring.com
Using domain server:
Name: ns3.mindspring.com
Address: 207.69.188.187#53
Aliases:
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.93
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.94
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.95
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.90
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.91
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.92
#2
> host www.yahoo.coma ns3.mindspring.com
Using domain server:
Name: ns3.mindspring.com
Address: 207.69.188.187#53
Aliases:
Host www.yahoo.coma not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
I don't believe this. Why would Google send one of their top execs to give a speech at an organization of music retailers saying they have no interest in selling music?
If you read the article, there are some interesting points where Sacca argues Google is already in the music business, meaning that when people hear about an artist or song, they search for it on Google. It seems like what they're saying is "we get a ton of traffic that we can easily identify of people who seem likely to buy music, we're not interested in building a music store because we know from Google Video we can't design stores, you guys sell music... maybe YOU can make a Google music store, and pay us a little sumthin sumthin."
Me: I just read an article saying Circuit City rips DVDs for customers... Is that true?
Clerk: Uh, no it's not.
Me: Thanks, bye.
I imagine this is just one store manager trying to make a little extra money on the side.
So, software that openly declares itself to be incompatible with the new OS doesn't work.. And somehow it's even worse when it only works a little bit instead of crashing theatrically or outright refusing to install.
So, his employer created a bizarre, inflexible web application, and the one browser it's compatible with will soon no longer support it? Oh, no! God forbid he should have to use older versions, let alone non-beta browsers, for his nonstandard web apps.
Damned if I know...
So when using his beta word processor on top of his beta OS, he found some bugs.. Stop the presses.
I don't see why he's complaining. If all these problems were in a commercially released version of Vista, that would be a big problem, but he chose to use the beta version not only for occasional tooling around but for his primary OS. I'm sure it's frustrating that it doesn't work, but I can't really hold it against Microsoft. If he has all these problems with Vista, why not keep an XP machine, or at least an XP partition, around? In a few months these will either be show-stopping bugs or long-fixed, but until then, why does it even matter? Nobody, except apparently Paul, uses beta software for important tasks.
No, the story on NSA surveillance months ago was the NSA listening in on calls make from the US to foreign countries and vice-versa. I believe they were examining emails as well.
This story is different: here, the NSA is examining the times, durations and phone numbers involved in domestic-only calls although they're not actually listening in.
I don't see what's wrong with the New York Times. Everything they publish seems to be based on solid information. I'd love to see documentation of something specific about this issue published in the New York Times but demonstrably false or misleading.
So now what... music patents?
Yeah, because my EMAIL account is really useful when I don't give my username to anyone...
It looks like you can download an evaluation version of VMWare workstation that "dies" in one month. I'm not sure if you can create a VM with that, then play it with player, or if they're DRMed, but it's at VMWare's site.
You could also download a virtual machine here it looks like. I'm sure if you google you can find others.
This seems to be a far too common occurence here: the article summary is misleading and the commenters don't even read the 300 word article. The article says nothing about companies wanting money for things people type into a search engine.
Apparently the record companies used to allow portals like Yahoo to show their videos for free, since they considered it free advertising for their music. Then, they realized that Yahoo was making lots of money off
the deal through advertising, so they asked for a cut. Yahoo refused, but saw their hits go down, so they negotiated a deal. Basically, an exec at Universal realized what they considered advertising was more like giving away free product. This makes sense: people weren't discovering new music on Yahoo. Most of the time, they came there to see videos and songs they already knew.
I suppose you could say the record companies are being greedy, but they're not doing anything suspect. They realized other companies were making money off their products, and decided to charge for the privilege. Similarly, they're trying to renegotiate with Apple, and we'll see who wins there. They may harm their own market more than they expect by raising the prices, or the market may be happy to pay $1.30 for new hits. We'll just see. They're also renegotiating with satellite radio, now that that industry is pulling in lots of money, again with the RIAA's products.
There's no talk in the article of charging anyone for search engine keywords.
Some of this appears to be crap, or at least just lawyers playing hardball. She claims that there was no such material on her computer, and that the RIAA broke into the computer to locate such material. The first
may be true - it may be a genuine mistake, but the second argument I really doubt. I believe that the RIAA does not do any more than search public P2P search engines for their copyrighted content, and her argument that this searching is trespass to chattels is nonsense.
That being said, I would blame her lawyer, not her personally. But still, it's hard to know how seriously the RICO allegations should be taken, or whether they're just a way to make the case a pain for the RIAA.
Many Back to the Future fans don't realize that what they hear as "jigga watts" is actually the preferred pronunciation (notice it's listed first) of the SI/metric prefix giga.
With respect to computer-related units, the hard g is of course strongly preferred, but 1.21 gW is certainly not a made up unit.
Is there some reason why large companies can't resist the temptation to acquire AOL? First Time Warner's notoriously ill-fated merger, right as broadband was emerging... Now Microsoft? I realize AOL has a large number of subscribers, still the most of any ISP, but according to Business Week, they lost 900,000 subscribers just in the second quarter! As broadband becomes cheaper and cheaper, why would anyone stay with AOL? Are they even getting any new subscribers? That article also mentions AOL's goal to become a web portal, with AIM, AOL Music and MapQuest drawing users in. AIM I imagine is growing, as new preteens start using it all the time, but does this really make them any money? There's advertising on the client, I've never heard of anyone actually clicking it, or even really noticing it. MapQuest is okay, but I imagine people will gradually switch to Google Maps. I've never even heard of AOL Music, but it doesn't look like anything spectacular. And who would ever use AOL for search or free email? I think anyone under 35 wouldn't even think to look there. Perhaps that's what these companies don't understand: AOL, and really MSN as well, make most of their money off of customers' cluelessness. As customers get clued in by friends and relatives, they'll move to better services. The customers you have left will use one hour of Internet time a month and will probably eat up any profit AOL could make with their tech support calls alone.
Since the site's already slashdotted, here's the registration code: ...
:-)
Oh wait. Dammit...
Remember this is still in a very early beta stage. On the developer page, they claim that they're moving toward interoperability with other networks and fully documenting the custom VOIP protocol they use.
They encourage people to comment in the Google
Talk Interoperability Google Group. It seems like they're trying to determine how to balance openness with security, privacy concerns (i.e., avoiding spam). I frankly don't know enough about Jabber, etc. to know if this is BS or not, but it sounds reasonable enough to me.
No, you're wrong. A judge initially ruled that just selling ads that appear when someone searches for a trademarked term is fine under the law but was unable to rule without a trial whether it was OK to include the trademark in the ad itself.
It looks like the trial has taken place, and the court ruled that having the trademark (Geico) in the ad is misleading, and could confuse people into thinking the insurance being sold is affiliated with Geico. So, that's not allowed.
You can disagree with the outcome, sure, but the judges' actions seem very reasonable: rule quickly in summary judgment on the obvious issues, defer the more complicated ones for a trial.
The textbook publishers shouldn't really be promoting e-books.... What if iPod-style eBook readers become widespread, or integrated into phones/iPods/PDAs/whatever? Why would anyone need the publisher to begin with? The professor could just sell his own textbook in eBook format and bypass the publisher altogether!
Um, no, it actually couldn't. They're talking about the number of pages indexed, not the number of searches made. Unless Yahoo is installing some kind of webcrawling bot on your machine with Macromedia products, the two are completely unrelated.
So, I think what we need is for someone to release
an old Mighty Mouse cartoon with the Beatles' White Album as soundtrack, thereby inviting lawsuits from both Apple Computer and Apple Records!
You can also just find a direct link to what you want to download. For instance, go to2 d60-49b5-44dc-ae35-fca2f2c6f0cc/MicrosoftAntiSpywa reInstall.exe
http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/1/5/815d
to get the anti-spyware program.
I don't agree. I don't think there's any way that Microsoft envisions AP articles saying "Linux, an operating system designed for obsolete computers" or anything like that. Nor would this make that much of a difference, since really (mod me down if you must) nobody uses Linux desktops anyway...
Google is constantly giving talks like this at universities. I saw one at Harvard back in the fall.
They aren't really news worth reporting on slashdot, since they all contain the same content.