How do you write formulas or draw pictures on the thing?
I don't think a pda would work so well for things like, oh I dunno, describing the equations of motion for a fluid using navier-stokes (or drawing a quick sketch to illustrate what the equations should model)
I'd rather my tax dollars go to paying better salaries to good teachers.
Other than a lab for writing/printing papers, what, exactly, is the benefit of having computers in school? Maybe a compsci lab, but any kid interested in that type of thing will learn more at home on his own (I certainly did).
If you want to give them computers, give them old TRS-80's and have them learn how to write stuff on them. Or better yet, an introductory analog, followed by digital electronics course.
Using computers for simulations doesn't do much good if the kids don't know how the computer performs its magic in the first place. Hell, even in college we would have to do numerical methods by hand with a calculator, even though in the real world, that stuff is done by computers. We had to know what the computer was doing (this was an engineering course, btw, not a compsci course).
heh. One night, I went there to look at memory sticks. I got pested by one, fair enough, told them it is ok, I'm just browsing to see what's out there.
2 minutes later, got hit by another one. Annoying, but still put them away politely.
1 minute later ANOTHER one. Now I start to get upset.
3 minutes later YET ANOTHER. needless to say, this one got the terse 'NO!' along with the full glare.
I didn't get bothered again from then on.
The funny thing is, when I actually DO go there READY TO BUY, I cannot get a salesperson to come over even if I jump around on one leg and wave my arms around like a chicken.
Would be if h.s. was like college, where you could choose a focus class in things like scuba, karate, swimming, running, sailing, canoeing, diving, judo, etc.
This video game thing is pathetic. This country goes more downhill every year.
I hated gym class too. Golf, softball, dodgeball and all the other crap they had you do was a joke. I was the captain of my XC team, and gym class destroyed my season junior year b/c of an @$$hole in gym class blindsiding me playing basketball and fracturing my foot.
Sports are great. H.S. gym has always been lame. Video games just add to the lameness. My opinion is if you participate in a sport, you should't be required to take gym class at all. Oh well.
If I build my own device, and I am harmed, or give it to somebody with a warning and they are harmed it is my fault and that other person's fault for trusting my non-certified device.
If, however, I am the head engineer for a project, and it fails, my head should roll. This goes for things I would manufacture and sell.
If I putz around with some code, and share it, no big deal. As soon as I am in the software BUSINESS, and sell that code, however, I have a responsibility to the folks who use that code.
Most folks who write stuff in their spare time, write it first and foremost for their own use. Since they made the effort, many folks decide to share it with the world. Of course it won't be polished, but at least they try not to hurt themselves with it, so it follows they wouldn't be hurting others with it either.
Software vendors make software for a profit. And do a shitty job of it. They SHOULD be held accountable for their inferior shit that hurts individuals and businesses with lost productivity and data.
I know this isn't sniper rifles, but our tanks use radar/imaging like this, and automatically correct for trajectory on the fly. All the tank gunner has to do is line up the sites on the target. The round WILL hit the enemy. Very cool stuff.
...it is entertainment afterall, and movies are for escapism. We don't WANT perfect physics...BUT
The one that really annoyed me was spidey's web being able to 'stick' to a steel bridge even with a friggin' car full of people hanging from it (and him). Please. Flinging the web around the girder would have been at least a 'little' believable.
Maybe it is just time for radio stations / radios to adapt to instead of using a set frequency, to use spread spectrum to broadcast/receive signals. This would get away from the fights over who 'owns' a frequency.
I prefer using embedded perl to PHP, plus you get all the goodness of mod_perl speed. You can also use any standard perl module in your web pages then.
Check it out:
You set up a fileserver or three with a fast scsi RAID array, and plenty of storage. Your policy is that data on that machine is backed up. If they lose it on their PC, floppy, keydisk, etc. TOUGH.
Hell, save some money and administration headache. Run it on linux with samba.
Maybe I'm stupid, but for anything that a tablet would be useful for...what do you need all of that power for?
A little offtopic, but I'd be really happy if someone would come out with a cheap, lcd, even if text only, telnet 'terminal' that could plug right into the network, not even wireless, for $50 DHCP or static addressing, DNS, telnet, nothing else. I'd buy a few of those. Fast power-on would be the key. Many times I want to just check the mail on my main server at home without having to power up the main box. I can use the palm pilot, sure, but the limited display and lack of keyboard are a PITA.
You miss the point. If the Internet gets congested with traffic, you will suffer too. Take, for example, the latency spike that occurred last monday around 2:00pm EST as the worm that attacked M$ SQL servers started doing its thing.
I forgot to add..you can still launch several 'full sized' browser windows as well, allowing you to combine tabbed browsing with separate application windows. This is a wonderful way to browse. For example, I'll often read slashdot with stories and replies in separate tabs within a single browser, but have the link to the story itself pop up in a different window entirely. Major flexibility in tailoring the windows to whatever you happen to be looking at at the time. (this reply, for example, is in a tab launched from the reply link)
I'm a dumbass today (so I am posting AC). What the hell is a "tab-based MDI"? Thanks I will take your answer, offline. Thanks!>
MDI is that absolutely horrid UI that first became popular in windoze 3.1 where you have a single application window with several child windows inside it, each with its own size and position containing a single document.
Tabbed-browsing is 'mdi' done right. You have a single main window, easily controlled, but can have several documents open within it at once, using a slim tab bar at the top.
It may have supported more, but it seemed to do so poorly.
It's all about the user experience - I'm just pointing out that, no matter how good it's specifications are one paper, no matter how useful it's email client and no matter how idealogically worthy it's production, AOL won't be able to slip it to 34 million user unless it's good enough at simple rendering for them not to notice the difference.
IE is terrible with CSS. You are FORCED to use DIV tags everywhere. You cannot apply width to the document body, for example. Mozilla does it all, and does it RIGHT.
Slashdot Mirror
So why do we need a law at all? This can be done now, right?
How do you write formulas or draw pictures on the thing?
I don't think a pda would work so well for things like, oh I dunno, describing the equations of motion for a fluid using navier-stokes (or drawing a quick sketch to illustrate what the equations should model)
Other than a lab for writing/printing papers, what, exactly, is the benefit of having computers in school? Maybe a compsci lab, but any kid interested in that type of thing will learn more at home on his own (I certainly did).
If you want to give them computers, give them old TRS-80's and have them learn how to write stuff on them. Or better yet, an introductory analog, followed by digital electronics course.
Using computers for simulations doesn't do much good if the kids don't know how the computer performs its magic in the first place. Hell, even in college we would have to do numerical methods by hand with a calculator, even though in the real world, that stuff is done by computers. We had to know what the computer was doing (this was an engineering course, btw, not a compsci course).
Above/Below speakers in addition to front, back, left, right.
Then stuff like quake, rtcw, half-life, etc would be a bit more submersive. It would be nice to know if an enemy is above or below you by sound.
2 minutes later, got hit by another one. Annoying, but still put them away politely.
1 minute later ANOTHER one. Now I start to get upset.
3 minutes later YET ANOTHER. needless to say, this one got the terse 'NO!' along with the full glare.
I didn't get bothered again from then on.
The funny thing is, when I actually DO go there READY TO BUY, I cannot get a salesperson to come over even if I jump around on one leg and wave my arms around like a chicken.
This video game thing is pathetic. This country goes more downhill every year.
I hated gym class too. Golf, softball, dodgeball and all the other crap they had you do was a joke. I was the captain of my XC team, and gym class destroyed my season junior year b/c of an @$$hole in gym class blindsiding me playing basketball and fracturing my foot.
Sports are great. H.S. gym has always been lame. Video games just add to the lameness. My opinion is if you participate in a sport, you should't be required to take gym class at all. Oh well.
If, however, I am the head engineer for a project, and it fails, my head should roll. This goes for things I would manufacture and sell.
If I putz around with some code, and share it, no big deal. As soon as I am in the software BUSINESS, and sell that code, however, I have a responsibility to the folks who use that code.
Most folks who write stuff in their spare time, write it first and foremost for their own use. Since they made the effort, many folks decide to share it with the world. Of course it won't be polished, but at least they try not to hurt themselves with it, so it follows they wouldn't be hurting others with it either.
Software vendors make software for a profit. And do a shitty job of it. They SHOULD be held accountable for their inferior shit that hurts individuals and businesses with lost productivity and data.
I know this isn't sniper rifles, but our tanks use radar/imaging like this, and automatically correct for trajectory on the fly. All the tank gunner has to do is line up the sites on the target. The round WILL hit the enemy. Very cool stuff.
The one that really annoyed me was spidey's web being able to 'stick' to a steel bridge even with a friggin' car full of people hanging from it (and him). Please. Flinging the web around the girder would have been at least a 'little' believable.
Maybe it is just time for radio stations / radios to adapt to instead of using a set frequency, to use spread spectrum to broadcast/receive signals. This would get away from the fights over who 'owns' a frequency.
but judging from current day, they probably don't have anything to worry about after all.
http://perl.apache.org/embperl/
Or buy a decent monitor with some resolution. Sheesh. AA fonts are worthless if you have good Adobe fonts and a decent monitor.
Hell, save some money and administration headache. Run it on linux with samba.
Why do they still have the build ID in the title bar? Is there a way to remove that, short of recompiling myself?
http://mozilla.org/start/1.0/demos.html
That's what I had to do, even though I *don't* watch tv, and didn't want cable, before switching to DSL.
A little offtopic, but I'd be really happy if someone would come out with a cheap, lcd, even if text only, telnet 'terminal' that could plug right into the network, not even wireless, for $50 DHCP or static addressing, DNS, telnet, nothing else. I'd buy a few of those. Fast power-on would be the key. Many times I want to just check the mail on my main server at home without having to power up the main box. I can use the palm pilot, sure, but the limited display and lack of keyboard are a PITA.
You miss the point. If the Internet gets congested with traffic, you will suffer too. Take, for example, the latency spike that occurred last monday around 2:00pm EST as the worm that attacked M$ SQL servers started doing its thing.
Just configure your internet search to use google, type stuff in your URL bar, and tab to the 'search google for ...' in the drop down list.
have you tried view->apply theme->get new themes recently?
I forgot to add..you can still launch several 'full sized' browser windows as well, allowing you to combine tabbed browsing with separate application windows. This is a wonderful way to browse. For example, I'll often read slashdot with stories and replies in separate tabs within a single browser, but have the link to the story itself pop up in a different window entirely. Major flexibility in tailoring the windows to whatever you happen to be looking at at the time. (this reply, for example, is in a tab launched from the reply link)
MDI is that absolutely horrid UI that first became popular in windoze 3.1 where you have a single application window with several child windows inside it, each with its own size and position containing a single document.
Tabbed-browsing is 'mdi' done right. You have a single main window, easily controlled, but can have several documents open within it at once, using a slim tab bar at the top.
IE is terrible with CSS. You are FORCED to use DIV tags everywhere. You cannot apply width to the document body, for example. Mozilla does it all, and does it RIGHT.