I understand your annoyance -- I have different family members who fall into either category (Type I or Type II). In the story case, the protagonist is told she's in danger of developing Type II diabetes, even though she's not yet an adult (due to a poor diet and lack of exercise). She initially responds with denial and rationalization as she struggles with her problems in the game world and the real world. The story's well worth the read, IMHO.
600,000 boxes sold does not equal 600,000 current subscription. I know for a fact that at least one of those boxes did not result in a subscription (my husband cancelled his account due to lack of free time). They have recorded 200,000 simultaneous players, but even that was during the period when many might have been playing on the free first month of release. So I don't know of a reliable number for paying subscriptions, as of yet.
Gee. I seem to remember a lot of downtime, patches to fix the patches to fix the patches to fix the one that broke the bards from the patch before the last one. And the DX9 graphics problem dragged on for some players for months!
I loved EQ, but even I didn't live in a fantasy world about it!
I don't think so. . . Blizzard's reps on the forums had already indicated that more games wouldn't be shipping days before the guys at P-A rescinded their award. See Caydiem's comment in this WoW Official Forum Thread dated to the 14th (and I've seen similar comments in earlier threads, just can't find them right now).
But who is to say that one parent or another in every family is necessarily a good teacher (or even merely adequate)?
And what of single-parent families -- do you propose a subsidy whereby the single parent can collect a public subsidy to homeschool until their youngest child is old enough for university or the workforce?
Walking into work one day from the parking lot, I was carrying my laptop in its padded case. The sidewalk was slippery and I was trying to avoid the worst of the ice by staying on the grassy verge but that disappeared at one spot where black rock butted right up beside the sidewalk.
You can guess what happened next: I slipped on the icy sidewalk, the laptop case went flying into the rock face and the LCD screen was history. $1000 and a month later (this happened two days before Christmas holidays), I had my computer back.
I've grown disenchanted with laptops and now will use a thumb drive and PDA to do my mobile computing. Those are much cheaper options for repair/replacement.
I use my PDA to keep copies of my course manuals (I'm a university professor), to access the library catalogue when I'm out of my office and around the campus, to add research notes when working in the library or at home and to remind me when I need to go teach my classes. I no longer need to lug a laptop around anywhere: my PDA does it all.
I'm one of those strange people who doesn't have a cell phone, though. Had one for a few years and it got pretty boring paying 40+ (Can.) per month for service. I've had a family situation crop up where I might need to get one, again: if I could find a phone that covers all my PDA functionality (especially the document handling), I might be convinced to put my PDA aside.
My experience with fanfiction predates the internet (not the DARPAnet, however). The one real advantage that some of these fanfiction sites such as Sugarquill have over other sites and just writing in your journal is the extensive editing process. Jenkins is correct to put a lot of emphasis on the editorial process: it's what can make fanfiction writing into a real learning experience!
The internet makes fanfiction reviewing and editing a quicker process. Think back to the days when we sent typescripts back and forth by mail! Nowadays internet writers can afford the luxury of several "beta-readers" all in the time it would take oldtime fans to get the first editorial review from one fanzine publisher.
True, many writers don't take advantage of beta-readers. They just dump their stories up at websites like Fanfiction.Net in all their first-draft horror. Then they often get savagely mocked by disappointed readers. Savvy fans learn to prefer the sites which practice some sort of review process.
Check out the story over at Access Copyright, a clearinghouse agency for writers and visual artists in Canada that compensates these creators in cases where "their work is copied, whether it's being photocopied, scanned or downloaded." This is done through licensing fees which, in turn, is often collected through levying on photocopying (such as an extra fee slipped into the charges on a university's photocopy machine).
It's not the individual users who log in and pay up each time they photocopy from a library book (though they could). It's the providers that have to do the work. I think, unfortunately, that this precedent will be important when trying to put responsibility on the ISPs.
simply not sufficient to reach Boilermaker fans far away, say, in California, etc. Sounds like an alum at Cisco might have had a hand in this donation.
I'd write my own textbook before I went to wikipedia -- from all I've seen in many visits, it's informative but often disconnected and occasionally superficial. It's an encyclopedia -- a reference to look up background information on topics of your choice, so don't expect more than that.
Texts that I use for intro courses in my field are written by teams of experts (to cover all the different specialties) and peer-reviewed by dozens of other professors. I agree they are too expensive, but at least they have completeness, continuity and usability in their field as a first principle.
As a professor, I can tell you that we feel captive to the publishers. For first-year surveys they have a deliberate policy of issuing new editions of textbooks every two years or less! With new paginations, new chapters and no availability of the older editions from warehouses, you pretty much have to bite the bullet and go with the new to ensure there are enough texts on hand for your freshman class.
And the reason that upper year course books change often can be two-fold. One is that the professor is just as disappointed as you (often having adopted the text sight unseen six months before the start of classes). The other common problem with text carryover is different professor teach much different courses under the same title. Some department get around this by adopting a standard text for shared classes, but that usually only applies to the more general, lower-level courses.
There are some cost-effective options -- custom readers from publishers like Pearson in my field are amazingly cheap. With their material, I've put together a tutorial reader covering an entire term for 21.95 US. That's less than half the cost of a lousy course package photocopy set put together by our monopolistic bookstore.
All I can say to her is "Serves you right, ignorant casual user!".
Still trotting out that tired old canard, eh? Buyer beware and all that? Geez, since she was using a Windows machine and IE she should just blow off the bad service because she wasn't using ubergeek technology? Your arrogance is astonishing (the more for being completely unwarranted). Do you know who you're talking about? Scriptygoddess is a very well-respected site and fulfills an important, cutting-edge role in one niche of the tech community.
As for the review: It isn't like she purchased an entire music library -- just a small selection which was enough to thoroughly test the problems of Buymusic (i.e. no album-level permissions, WMP plug-in problems, useless CS). Then after the company failed to provide adequate support or redress, she let people know in her widely-read blog. What would people have said if her complaint was about one song? "Too small a sample to count," would be my guess. I think that review did more for the tech community than a dozen/. raves about DRM and tech-savviness could ever accomplish.
Speaking as a longtime prof, one way to spark lively discussion in a computer classroom is to set up an anonymous quiz/voting booth. Technically it's a simple operation: set up a javascript on your class webpage, use a bit of perl or whatever suits your educational software.
Let's say you're teaching a rhetoric course: use a voting booth to let the students vote which of two takes on a topic was the more persuasive. Then the class discussion can roll on into the why.
Many students feel inhibited from raising the hands or expressing their views verbally in class. But when they see that 33% of their classmates voted the same way they did, they might be more inclined to speak to the point.
In December, 2002, the Arcaeological Institute of America reaffirmed its standing resolution calling upon all governments to "protect ancient sites, monuments, antiquities, and cultural institutions in the case of war." Unfortunately, the U.S. is not a signatory to the Hague Convention which explicitly provides for such protection.
A few years ago, Archaeology Magazine also ran an excellent story on the problem of looting since the Gulf War -- Stolen Stones: The Modern Sack of Nineveh. It's worthwhile reading about how the chaos of war led to widespread sacking of these archaeological sites.
As a Prof on a Wi-Fi campus
on
Professors vs. WiFi
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I have to say that rumours of our rage and angst are greatly exaggerated. I'd like to see more of my students with Wi-Fi equipped computers attending classes and using their equipment. I wish that more of our classrooms were equipped with computers and projectors for the professors, since I've integrated technology into my courses. It's wonderful when students can download files as you refer to them, bookmark websites you recommend during class or check out additional resources to bring more fuel to their comments in discussion.
My rules are few: Sound alerts must be turned off during class (especially those annoying IM moo noises) and Wi-Fi network access must be disabled during tests and examinations (I don't want my students surfing the net for answers when they should be writing). If you can abide by those rules (and the general campus rules for Wi-Fi access) you're welcome to compute during my class!
Important for Multiplayer/LAN gamers
on
DirectX 9 Finally Out
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Due to enhancements in the way DirectPlay functions, it is strongly recommended that all users who want to join or host multiplayer games upgrade to DirectX 9.0. A user with earlier versions of DirectX may have trouble joining or hosting games, or my see a significant performance reduction when playing with users who have 9.0 installed.
It's standard (though often unwritten) practice for many journals to require that any article they accept for publication have a minimum number of citations from previous articles in the same journal. These citations are counted in academic listings such as the ISI reports. Quoting from their website: "It presents quantifiable statistical data that provides a systematic, objective way to determine the relative importance of journals within their subject categories."
Not if researchers are adding extraneous notes to their article at the publisher's command!
As a union member these past fifteen years (two different unions at two different workplaces), I have to ask: How many of you have even belonged to a union? How many of you have firsthand experience being on a union negotiating committee, walked a picket line or have seen a horrible injustice averted by a grievance? I have, and that has helped me see how I get value from my union. (And, no, I don't hate my employers or have a bad relationship with them -- we're all professionals.)
Yes, unions can have their bad sides, but so do some employers who take advantage of employees unwilling to rock the boat when their employment rights are violated.
Slashdot Mirror
And notice how IGE is already targetting many of their fansites for buyout. Amusing write up at n3rfed.
I understand your annoyance -- I have different family members who fall into either category (Type I or Type II). In the story case, the protagonist is told she's in danger of developing Type II diabetes, even though she's not yet an adult (due to a poor diet and lack of exercise). She initially responds with denial and rationalization as she struggles with her problems in the game world and the real world. The story's well worth the read, IMHO.
Verant is owned by Sony Online Entertainment.
Blizzard is with Vivendi. EA also now owns a stake in all of this, just to make things even murkier.
600,000 boxes sold does not equal 600,000 current subscription. I know for a fact that at least one of those boxes did not result in a subscription (my husband cancelled his account due to lack of free time). They have recorded 200,000 simultaneous players, but even that was during the period when many might have been playing on the free first month of release. So I don't know of a reliable number for paying subscriptions, as of yet.
Gee. I seem to remember a lot of downtime, patches to fix the patches to fix the patches to fix the one that broke the bards from the patch before the last one. And the DX9 graphics problem dragged on for some players for months!
I loved EQ, but even I didn't live in a fantasy world about it!
Well, maybe they meant EA. EA is on the road to owning everything, after all. . . .
I don't think so. . . Blizzard's reps on the forums had already indicated that more games wouldn't be shipping days before the guys at P-A rescinded their award. See Caydiem's comment in this WoW Official Forum Thread dated to the 14th (and I've seen similar comments in earlier threads, just can't find them right now).
Demand was much higher than expectations, according to Blizzard with 600,000 copies sold and 200,000 simultaneous players (self-congratulatory press release). That's a lot more than predicted.
But who is to say that one parent or another in every family is necessarily a good teacher (or even merely adequate)?
And what of single-parent families -- do you propose a subsidy whereby the single parent can collect a public subsidy to homeschool until their youngest child is old enough for university or the workforce?
One-size-fits-all solutions rarely work.
Walking into work one day from the parking lot, I was carrying my laptop in its padded case. The sidewalk was slippery and I was trying to avoid the worst of the ice by staying on the grassy verge but that disappeared at one spot where black rock butted right up beside the sidewalk.
You can guess what happened next: I slipped on the icy sidewalk, the laptop case went flying into the rock face and the LCD screen was history. $1000 and a month later (this happened two days before Christmas holidays), I had my computer back.
I've grown disenchanted with laptops and now will use a thumb drive and PDA to do my mobile computing. Those are much cheaper options for repair/replacement.
I use my PDA to keep copies of my course manuals (I'm a university professor), to access the library catalogue when I'm out of my office and around the campus, to add research notes when working in the library or at home and to remind me when I need to go teach my classes. I no longer need to lug a laptop around anywhere: my PDA does it all.
I'm one of those strange people who doesn't have a cell phone, though. Had one for a few years and it got pretty boring paying 40+ (Can.) per month for service. I've had a family situation crop up where I might need to get one, again: if I could find a phone that covers all my PDA functionality (especially the document handling), I might be convinced to put my PDA aside.
And did you read the list of moderators on the alternative site you recommended? First on the list: Castronova, Edward
My experience with fanfiction predates the internet (not the DARPAnet, however). The one real advantage that some of these fanfiction sites such as Sugarquill have over other sites and just writing in your journal is the extensive editing process. Jenkins is correct to put a lot of emphasis on the editorial process: it's what can make fanfiction writing into a real learning experience!
The internet makes fanfiction reviewing and editing a quicker process. Think back to the days when we sent typescripts back and forth by mail! Nowadays internet writers can afford the luxury of several "beta-readers" all in the time it would take oldtime fans to get the first editorial review from one fanzine publisher.
True, many writers don't take advantage of beta-readers. They just dump their stories up at websites like Fanfiction.Net in all their first-draft horror. Then they often get savagely mocked by disappointed readers. Savvy fans learn to prefer the sites which practice some sort of review process.
Check out the story over at Access Copyright, a clearinghouse agency for writers and visual artists in Canada that compensates these creators in cases where "their work is copied, whether it's being photocopied, scanned or downloaded." This is done through licensing fees which, in turn, is often collected through levying on photocopying (such as an extra fee slipped into the charges on a university's photocopy machine).
It's not the individual users who log in and pay up each time they photocopy from a library book (though they could). It's the providers that have to do the work. I think, unfortunately, that this precedent will be important when trying to put responsibility on the ISPs.
simply not sufficient to reach Boilermaker fans far away, say, in California, etc. Sounds like an alum at Cisco might have had a hand in this donation.
I thought the correct technical term was "scumware" -- guess I fell behind the times.
I'd write my own textbook before I went to wikipedia -- from all I've seen in many visits, it's informative but often disconnected and occasionally superficial. It's an encyclopedia -- a reference to look up background information on topics of your choice, so don't expect more than that.
Texts that I use for intro courses in my field are written by teams of experts (to cover all the different specialties) and peer-reviewed by dozens of other professors. I agree they are too expensive, but at least they have completeness, continuity and usability in their field as a first principle.
As a professor, I can tell you that we feel captive to the publishers. For first-year surveys they have a deliberate policy of issuing new editions of textbooks every two years or less! With new paginations, new chapters and no availability of the older editions from warehouses, you pretty much have to bite the bullet and go with the new to ensure there are enough texts on hand for your freshman class.
And the reason that upper year course books change often can be two-fold. One is that the professor is just as disappointed as you (often having adopted the text sight unseen six months before the start of classes). The other common problem with text carryover is different professor teach much different courses under the same title. Some department get around this by adopting a standard text for shared classes, but that usually only applies to the more general, lower-level courses.
There are some cost-effective options -- custom readers from publishers like Pearson in my field are amazingly cheap. With their material, I've put together a tutorial reader covering an entire term for 21.95 US. That's less than half the cost of a lousy course package photocopy set put together by our monopolistic bookstore.
As for the review: It isn't like she purchased an entire music library -- just a small selection which was enough to thoroughly test the problems of Buymusic (i.e. no album-level permissions, WMP plug-in problems, useless CS). Then after the company failed to provide adequate support or redress, she let people know in her widely-read blog. What would people have said if her complaint was about one song? "Too small a sample to count," would be my guess. I think that review did more for the tech community than a dozen
Speaking as a longtime prof, one way to spark lively discussion in a computer classroom is to set up an anonymous quiz/voting booth. Technically it's a simple operation: set up a javascript on your class webpage, use a bit of perl or whatever suits your educational software.
Let's say you're teaching a rhetoric course: use a voting booth to let the students vote which of two takes on a topic was the more persuasive. Then the class discussion can roll on into the why.
Many students feel inhibited from raising the hands or expressing their views verbally in class. But when they see that 33% of their classmates voted the same way they did, they might be more inclined to speak to the point.
In December, 2002, the Arcaeological Institute of America reaffirmed its standing resolution calling upon all governments to "protect ancient sites, monuments, antiquities, and cultural institutions in the case of war." Unfortunately, the U.S. is not a signatory to the Hague Convention which explicitly provides for such protection.
A few years ago, Archaeology Magazine also ran an excellent story on the problem of looting since the Gulf War -- Stolen Stones: The Modern Sack of Nineveh. It's worthwhile reading about how the chaos of war led to widespread sacking of these archaeological sites.
I have to say that rumours of our rage and angst are greatly exaggerated. I'd like to see more of my students with Wi-Fi equipped computers attending classes and using their equipment. I wish that more of our classrooms were equipped with computers and projectors for the professors, since I've integrated technology into my courses. It's wonderful when students can download files as you refer to them, bookmark websites you recommend during class or check out additional resources to bring more fuel to their comments in discussion.
My rules are few: Sound alerts must be turned off during class (especially those annoying IM moo noises) and Wi-Fi network access must be disabled during tests and examinations (I don't want my students surfing the net for answers when they should be writing). If you can abide by those rules (and the general campus rules for Wi-Fi access) you're welcome to compute during my class!
From the DirectX 9.0 FAQ:
Due to enhancements in the way DirectPlay functions, it is strongly recommended that all users who want to join or host multiplayer games upgrade to DirectX 9.0. A user with earlier versions of DirectX may have trouble joining or hosting games, or my see a significant performance reduction when playing with users who have 9.0 installed.
It's standard (though often unwritten) practice for many journals to require that any article they accept for publication have a minimum number of citations from previous articles in the same journal. These citations are counted in academic listings such as the ISI reports. Quoting from their website: "It presents quantifiable statistical data that provides a systematic, objective way to determine the relative importance of journals within their subject categories."
Not if researchers are adding extraneous notes to their article at the publisher's command!
As a union member these past fifteen years (two different unions at two different workplaces), I have to ask: How many of you have even belonged to a union? How many of you have firsthand experience being on a union negotiating committee, walked a picket line or have seen a horrible injustice averted by a grievance? I have, and that has helped me see how I get value from my union. (And, no, I don't hate my employers or have a bad relationship with them -- we're all professionals.)
Yes, unions can have their bad sides, but so do some employers who take advantage of employees unwilling to rock the boat when their employment rights are violated.
So don't dismiss unions out of hand. At least learn a bit more about them first.