I'm a sophomore in college. I am paying entirely for my education, as well as paying all my own bills and rent, without help from parents or investment accounts. I am not a rich person by any means.
And yet, I still have enough money to make rent and tuition AND afford a G4 and 17" Apple LCD monitor.
I agree Apple products are stinkingly expensive, but you do not, in fact, have to be rich to afford them. You DO have to be rich to afford a dual 2GHz G5 and 23" LCD, but reasonable hardware is within the grasp of poor college students.
My earliest memory of a teacher breaking down in front of a computer was in 4th grade. I ended up teaching her (suck that, evil bitch) how to open Word for Macintosh and how not to be scared of all those buttons. To look at teachers in my senior year of HS, there wasn't much improvement 8 years later.
Teaching with computers cannot be effective if the teachers spend class time fighting with simple problems they don't know how to fix. That was a problem in my English classes, the lesson plan just skidded to a halt until a student came to the rescue. I think computer LITERACY (not just familiarity) should be a hiring requirement for teachers who use computers as teaching tools. Yes, it's a bigger investment in summer training... but if they're that incompetent they shouldn't be teaching.
Many have already pointed out the problems with depth perception, angle viewing and shadows. I'm wondering about lag. Seems to me that such a device would need some kind of processor to continuously keep track of every "pixel" of light behind the cloaked object, and calculate the correct light to be generated in front. When the background is moving or extremely complex, it'd really have to cook to keep up.
Which raises a slew of tertiary issues: cooling, power (see wheelbarrow remarks), and the precise materials that transmit the light. Doesn't sound like fiber optics are part of the plan. Between processing time and the minute, but still present, transmission time, this method is gonna need some work.
I'm sure a fair number of people would do something tacky with the resultant stone, but that's their problem. I see no problem with mounting Grandma in a tasteful setting on the mantel, instead of a big urn that spills her all over the rug when Junior toddles by.
Your options are pretty limited when you're dead. You can be pumped full of pollutants and left to rot in a box, or burnt to a fine grey crisp. If the person requests to be made into a pretty rock, that's no more disgusting than asking to be embalmed.
All right, so most likely the parents who'd strap this on wouldn't allow their sheltered little brat near anything pointy. Looking at this, though.. it would be sickeningly easy to snap the plastic band with small hedge trimmers/boltcutters/large diagonal cutters or any other common hand tool. Reasonably intelligent children and potential abductors will both figure this out.
The only REALLY secure tracker is an implantable chip, and I pity the poor cattle^H^H^H^H^H^Hchild at that point.
How sad is it when your own father (who should, of all people, know you best) buys the almost-perfect present - and you know it could've saved half a day at the returns counter if he'd tried just a little harder? My dad got me an inflatable PFD, but didn't know which safety features to look for. I would've been MORE thrilled to open an email from West Marine with a "gift suggestion", signifying that he tried but wasn't sure, than a package under the tree.
It's a point well-taken that machine translation is imperfect; it's no substitute for careful third-party translation, let alone an implicit understanding of both languages. However, for tourist/business usage, especially for Romance languages, it can't be THAT bad. I like the stackable-dictionary idea, but that's for another post.
Many people have replied to the topic with MP's Hungarian Tourist in a Tobacconist's Shop skit. Still more have hypermutated text through 4 or 5 different languages on AV Babelfish. Hilarity ensues. But the above examples aren't that realistic; if in a Spanish hotel trying to translate your English for the receptionist, you are not, for example, going to run your speech through French and German first. She might look at you with that knowing smile specially reserved for turistas, but the Spanish will probably be intelligible, if not too grammatical, viz.:
"I would like a double room, please" will probably parse through your belt-pack Babelfish as "Quiero un cuarto doble, por favor" although it SHOULD be "Por favor, quisiera un cuarto con doble ocupancia." However, the poor receptionist will certainly notice that you are asking for a room, pick up the word "doble", and derive that you're a monolingual American who wants a double-occupancy room and is at least TRYING to get the point across.
English speakers can parse Yodaisms or Shakespeare - even broken English - without too much trouble. Instruction booklets of foreign-made electronics, for example, can use incredibly bad English, but one can follow it regardless. How are native speakers of other languages any different? If you're just trying to get by, a belt-borne Babelfish may not be THAT terrible of an option.
That said, I'd still advocate learning a bit of the language itself. Would that all were so motivated.
Does he? I'm *learning* Spanish, through school, and I acknowledge as such... I'm not fluent or anything, but I can hold a pretty good conversation and read Barrapunto.com and so forth:) What astounds me is the number of people, in high school and older, who claim that for knowing a few phrasebook sentences ("Cómo están?" and "Creo que educación tiene la mejor importancia" I suppose would be Dubya's favorites), they KNOW Spanish. I wouldn't be surprised if, among his hypothetical collection of political-science and remedial English books, there lurks a tourist's Spanish phrasebook:)
I'm also an AP Comp Sci student. I had no programming experience whatsoever beyond scripting - HTML and JS, for crying out loud, although I'm rather good at that, and making forays into XML dev at the moment - anyway, and that's the ambient level of pre-OOP experience in the class. At BEST.
A semester into the class, I'm pretty irritated with it. A fellow APeon wrote below that we're basically learning someone else's code, not any sort of developmental process, from using proprietary library files (such as the notorious AP*****.h breed) to adopting flatly ridiculous programming "terms." Classic example of College Board text writers on crack: in the first chapter on the syntax and application of functions, my particular text has the audacity to refer to the "main" function as a "driver." I thought the difference between a right and proper hardware driver, and a function that calls others, would be within the grasp of an adroit two-year-old. Pathetic, is it not?
I can't speak for all APCS texts here, but my text is very poorly organized and advocates Hello-Worldish "programming" over organized, logical development and education in all the key principles thereof. If you're using "Introduction to Computer Science with C++" by Kenneth Lambert, et al, caveat emptor! I picked up my boyfriend's ANSI C book, and in ten minutes, acquired a better idea of C/C++ structure and flow than in a semester of antiseptic labors.
Most of the class seems to think they'll emerge as l337 h4x0rs at the end of May. I am quite interested in a Java-based APCS; that's where I intend to go from here. But they could pick COBOL for all I care, if only the College Board would reevaluate the way the language and theory are taught.
Sure, it works to allocate space on file servers for individual students. This is the practice at the local university and certainly elsewhere; suitably enlightened students who live at home can also FTP into their directory. However, I'm still in high school, most of the school runs on Bondi iMacs and largely antiquarian HP Vectras (before all you post-high-schoolers bitch about poor cable/DSL choices at home, think of life on a T1 shared across a *district* with some goddamned N2H2 monitoring software on the proxy and FullControl on the individual boxen... pain and agony, indeed), and we have maybe three staff members who don't run away screaming when presented with some network error. Nope, and we can't FTP or telnet into the school servers anyway, even for those classes in which accounts are set up. To take any work home, you have one option: the floppy drive. 1.44 megs is sufficient for, say, a couple Word files or a single workspace in VC++. Nothing more. (Don't ask about emailing work home. We've tried.)
However, floppies are dirt cheap. They go for a quarter at school, ten cents if they're used, free if you have your own. CDRWs are comparably cheap, and useful on iCracks, though much more of a pain to use at school, and 650 megs is certainly overkill on a medium I can't even write to at school.
Another factor is cost. Floppy and CDRW are cheap, but limited in their respective ways. Zip is just about perfect in terms of size, as a small, portable medium. However, I consider it a relative failure as a format - I can't call a format portable and sharable that costs $10 a pop. I'll happily give a friend a floppy or CDRW, but I don't even trust myself with a ten-dollar disk.
Notwithstanding the iCrack's shameless lack of an internal drive, I'm betting floppy will remain in use for a while. It's not great, but functional, and more durable in the grubby little paws of idiot students (something CDRW sorely lacks.) I WOULD like a 50-meg floppy medium that costs less than $2 a disk. Is this feasible with current drives? Backwards compatibility with existing 3.25" drives is the idea here, seeing how the support for compatibility in many public schools is indeed backward... eh. So. Cheap, high-capacity floppy disks would be nothing short of a blessing.
I'm just curious why Adobe is accosting Macromedia specifically. The tabbed window interface was used very extensively (and effectively) in Paint Shop Pro 6, but I can't recall an Adobe/Jasc lawsuit. Anyone shed some light on this? Presumably, if Adobe truly had a leg to stand on and wasn't just picking a fight like the neighborhood pixel bully, they could go after AltaVista... and any number of sites and applications that use a tabbed interface without any idea that the Adobe patent exists.
I agree that puzzle games need a logical progression when using tools. This annoyed me a bit in the King's Quest series... progression seemed to depend on stumbling upon the correct tools in a preset order, instead of being really plucky, observing something and then tackling it in a logical manner. I also don't think all three of those ingredients would be required for a truly dynamic game - someone commented below that Myst was neither changeable nor especially realistic, but so many people were profoundly addicted (and still are, in my case) to the Myst/Riven saga. I believe both games still accorded the player some flexibility of mind: you could tackle a lot of problems in your own thinking style, as long as it got the job done. But I WOULD love to see a puzzle game that borrows the Diablo-ish concept of generating a new map and/or sequence for each game. Myst got boring once you figured out you didn't have to leave the main island or keep returning pages to the brothers' books to beat it.
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I'm a sophomore in college. I am paying entirely for my education, as well as paying all my own bills and rent, without help from parents or investment accounts. I am not a rich person by any means.
And yet, I still have enough money to make rent and tuition AND afford a G4 and 17" Apple LCD monitor.
I agree Apple products are stinkingly expensive, but you do not, in fact, have to be rich to afford them. You DO have to be rich to afford a dual 2GHz G5 and 23" LCD, but reasonable hardware is within the grasp of poor college students.
My earliest memory of a teacher breaking down in front of a computer was in 4th grade. I ended up teaching her (suck that, evil bitch) how to open Word for Macintosh and how not to be scared of all those buttons. To look at teachers in my senior year of HS, there wasn't much improvement 8 years later.
Teaching with computers cannot be effective if the teachers spend class time fighting with simple problems they don't know how to fix. That was a problem in my English classes, the lesson plan just skidded to a halt until a student came to the rescue. I think computer LITERACY (not just familiarity) should be a hiring requirement for teachers who use computers as teaching tools. Yes, it's a bigger investment in summer training... but if they're that incompetent they shouldn't be teaching.
Many have already pointed out the problems with depth perception, angle viewing and shadows. I'm wondering about lag. Seems to me that such a device would need some kind of processor to continuously keep track of every "pixel" of light behind the cloaked object, and calculate the correct light to be generated in front. When the background is moving or extremely complex, it'd really have to cook to keep up.
Which raises a slew of tertiary issues: cooling, power (see wheelbarrow remarks), and the precise materials that transmit the light. Doesn't sound like fiber optics are part of the plan. Between processing time and the minute, but still present, transmission time, this method is gonna need some work.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm sure a fair number of people would do something tacky with the resultant stone, but that's their problem. I see no problem with mounting Grandma in a tasteful setting on the mantel, instead of a big urn that spills her all over the rug when Junior toddles by.
Your options are pretty limited when you're dead. You can be pumped full of pollutants and left to rot in a box, or burnt to a fine grey crisp. If the person requests to be made into a pretty rock, that's no more disgusting than asking to be embalmed.
One only hopes this isn't a scam.
All right, so most likely the parents who'd strap this on wouldn't allow their sheltered little brat near anything pointy. Looking at this, though.. it would be sickeningly easy to snap the plastic band with small hedge trimmers/boltcutters/large diagonal cutters or any other common hand tool. Reasonably intelligent children and potential abductors will both figure this out.
The only REALLY secure tracker is an implantable chip, and I pity the poor cattle^H^H^H^H^H^Hchild at that point.
How sad is it when your own father (who should, of all people, know you best) buys the almost-perfect present - and you know it could've saved half a day at the returns counter if he'd tried just a little harder? My dad got me an inflatable PFD, but didn't know which safety features to look for. I would've been MORE thrilled to open an email from West Marine with a "gift suggestion", signifying that he tried but wasn't sure, than a package under the tree.
It's a point well-taken that machine translation is imperfect; it's no substitute for careful third-party translation, let alone an implicit understanding of both languages. However, for tourist/business usage, especially for Romance languages, it can't be THAT bad. I like the stackable-dictionary idea, but that's for another post. Many people have replied to the topic with MP's Hungarian Tourist in a Tobacconist's Shop skit. Still more have hypermutated text through 4 or 5 different languages on AV Babelfish. Hilarity ensues. But the above examples aren't that realistic; if in a Spanish hotel trying to translate your English for the receptionist, you are not, for example, going to run your speech through French and German first. She might look at you with that knowing smile specially reserved for turistas, but the Spanish will probably be intelligible, if not too grammatical, viz.: "I would like a double room, please" will probably parse through your belt-pack Babelfish as "Quiero un cuarto doble, por favor" although it SHOULD be "Por favor, quisiera un cuarto con doble ocupancia." However, the poor receptionist will certainly notice that you are asking for a room, pick up the word "doble", and derive that you're a monolingual American who wants a double-occupancy room and is at least TRYING to get the point across. English speakers can parse Yodaisms or Shakespeare - even broken English - without too much trouble. Instruction booklets of foreign-made electronics, for example, can use incredibly bad English, but one can follow it regardless. How are native speakers of other languages any different? If you're just trying to get by, a belt-borne Babelfish may not be THAT terrible of an option. That said, I'd still advocate learning a bit of the language itself. Would that all were so motivated.
Does he? I'm *learning* Spanish, through school, and I acknowledge as such... I'm not fluent or anything, but I can hold a pretty good conversation and read Barrapunto.com and so forth :) What astounds me is the number of people, in high school and older, who claim that for knowing a few phrasebook sentences ("Cómo están?" and "Creo que educación tiene la mejor importancia" I suppose would be Dubya's favorites), they KNOW Spanish. I wouldn't be surprised if, among his hypothetical collection of political-science and remedial English books, there lurks a tourist's Spanish phrasebook :)
I'm also an AP Comp Sci student. I had no programming experience whatsoever beyond scripting - HTML and JS, for crying out loud, although I'm rather good at that, and making forays into XML dev at the moment - anyway, and that's the ambient level of pre-OOP experience in the class. At BEST. A semester into the class, I'm pretty irritated with it. A fellow APeon wrote below that we're basically learning someone else's code, not any sort of developmental process, from using proprietary library files (such as the notorious AP*****.h breed) to adopting flatly ridiculous programming "terms." Classic example of College Board text writers on crack: in the first chapter on the syntax and application of functions, my particular text has the audacity to refer to the "main" function as a "driver." I thought the difference between a right and proper hardware driver, and a function that calls others, would be within the grasp of an adroit two-year-old. Pathetic, is it not?
I can't speak for all APCS texts here, but my text is very poorly organized and advocates Hello-Worldish "programming" over organized, logical development and education in all the key principles thereof. If you're using "Introduction to Computer Science with C++" by Kenneth Lambert, et al, caveat emptor! I picked up my boyfriend's ANSI C book, and in ten minutes, acquired a better idea of C/C++ structure and flow than in a semester of antiseptic labors.
Most of the class seems to think they'll emerge as l337 h4x0rs at the end of May. I am quite interested in a Java-based APCS; that's where I intend to go from here. But they could pick COBOL for all I care, if only the College Board would reevaluate the way the language and theory are taught.
Sure, it works to allocate space on file servers for individual students. This is the practice at the local university and certainly elsewhere; suitably enlightened students who live at home can also FTP into their directory. However, I'm still in high school, most of the school runs on Bondi iMacs and largely antiquarian HP Vectras (before all you post-high-schoolers bitch about poor cable/DSL choices at home, think of life on a T1 shared across a *district* with some goddamned N2H2 monitoring software on the proxy and FullControl on the individual boxen... pain and agony, indeed), and we have maybe three staff members who don't run away screaming when presented with some network error. Nope, and we can't FTP or telnet into the school servers anyway, even for those classes in which accounts are set up. To take any work home, you have one option: the floppy drive. 1.44 megs is sufficient for, say, a couple Word files or a single workspace in VC++. Nothing more. (Don't ask about emailing work home. We've tried.) However, floppies are dirt cheap. They go for a quarter at school, ten cents if they're used, free if you have your own. CDRWs are comparably cheap, and useful on iCracks, though much more of a pain to use at school, and 650 megs is certainly overkill on a medium I can't even write to at school. Another factor is cost. Floppy and CDRW are cheap, but limited in their respective ways. Zip is just about perfect in terms of size, as a small, portable medium. However, I consider it a relative failure as a format - I can't call a format portable and sharable that costs $10 a pop. I'll happily give a friend a floppy or CDRW, but I don't even trust myself with a ten-dollar disk. Notwithstanding the iCrack's shameless lack of an internal drive, I'm betting floppy will remain in use for a while. It's not great, but functional, and more durable in the grubby little paws of idiot students (something CDRW sorely lacks.) I WOULD like a 50-meg floppy medium that costs less than $2 a disk. Is this feasible with current drives? Backwards compatibility with existing 3.25" drives is the idea here, seeing how the support for compatibility in many public schools is indeed backward... eh. So. Cheap, high-capacity floppy disks would be nothing short of a blessing.
I'm just curious why Adobe is accosting Macromedia specifically. The tabbed window interface was used very extensively (and effectively) in Paint Shop Pro 6, but I can't recall an Adobe/Jasc lawsuit. Anyone shed some light on this? Presumably, if Adobe truly had a leg to stand on and wasn't just picking a fight like the neighborhood pixel bully, they could go after AltaVista... and any number of sites and applications that use a tabbed interface without any idea that the Adobe patent exists.
I agree that puzzle games need a logical progression when using tools. This annoyed me a bit in the King's Quest series... progression seemed to depend on stumbling upon the correct tools in a preset order, instead of being really plucky, observing something and then tackling it in a logical manner. I also don't think all three of those ingredients would be required for a truly dynamic game - someone commented below that Myst was neither changeable nor especially realistic, but so many people were profoundly addicted (and still are, in my case) to the Myst/Riven saga. I believe both games still accorded the player some flexibility of mind: you could tackle a lot of problems in your own thinking style, as long as it got the job done. But I WOULD love to see a puzzle game that borrows the Diablo-ish concept of generating a new map and/or sequence for each game. Myst got boring once you figured out you didn't have to leave the main island or keep returning pages to the brothers' books to beat it.