"On the Mac side things are even more confusing because there is no free download unless you write/call to cancel your 'subscription' within 14 days."
This isn't true. Go to real.com from a Mac, and scroll down -- the link is there. (Yes, it should be more obvious than it is.) The link will take you to this page, where it says very clearly "Thank you for trying our new RealOne Player for OS X. You will not be charged for downloading this software." I have done this and have not been charged or asked to enter credit card info. I gave 'em a fake address, too... out of longstanding habit.;)
Yup, it's still around and even in an OS X version. I've been messing with the demo, and it's amazing how the old HyperTalk skills come back. If you have that background, you'll probably find it enjoyable to use.
(However, the stack I am trying to update needs to print a portion of a card, not the entire card, and I can't figure out how to do this in SuperCard. All I can convince SC to do is print the entire card. If anyone knows how to get it to print a part of a card, defined by xy coordinates like HyperCard did, please let me know.)
Consider many of the folks in my program were not programmers or techies, but teachers trying to boost their own tech skills
And that's the very strength of HyperCard, right there. It made non-programmers think they could do a lot of cool things. I am a non-programmer myself, essentially, but I sat down with HyperCard one day in the late '80s and said "I want a program that does x. There is no program that does what I want the way I want. Maybe this HyperCard thing will help." And I messed with it and messed with it some more, and found out that yes, I could create a stack with the functionality I needed, without any actual training or prior experience. If I didn't know the syntax for something, I could just guess and half the time it would work! It made me feel like I could accomplish anything. And I have a box of postcards from users of the stack I later released as postcardware, to prove that I really could.
SuperCard is great, but like many, I think Apple really dropped the ball the minute they stopped making a scriptable version of HyperCard free with every Mac. An OS X HyperCard, from Apple, with all the features a modern HyperCard would have... well, that would be fantastic. I can dream...
You might want to try SuperCard; you can even import your old HyperCard stacks in and they will probably work. (Mine mostly worked when I tried it; I did have to make some small changes but not too much.) SuperTalk is pretty much HyperTalk with some additions (and a couple of things removed), and color works much better in SuperCard than the hack they did to include color in HyperCard.
We don't contribute to local economies? Funny, I thought I was doing that when I take the money my internet business brings in and spend it at local stores and other local businesses.
Where did you get the idea that Net companies have zero overhead? We have overhead, it's just not exactly the same overhead. Like B&M businesses, we pay rent, we pay for our inventory, we have to buy supplies, we pay accountants and lawyers. Like you, I collect local sales tax (when I sell to residents of my state). I don't pay the other stuff because I don't yet have an employee, so it's not yet relevant. (Soon, maybe. We are growing.) But that would be the case whether I was operating a Net company or not.
As someone pointed out above, there is absolutely no way in hell this can work unless there is some uniform nationwide GST. As a one-person operation here, there is no way I can manage keeping track of hundreds of different tax jurisdictions and their payment requirements. It cannot be done. I am skeptical of your "$50 software" suggestion for a variety of reasons. (I prefer to use the OS and software of my choice, for one thing. Another thing is that integrating this into my shopping cart/accounting software system would be difficult and expensive.)
I don't actually object to the tax if it is fairly applied (and that means a uniform national tax, that can be paid with our income tax, and that is applied to all retail businesses, not just penalizing Net businesses). But I really doubt they will do that.
Please be aware that not everyone is in your situation. Some people will have an easier time spam-filtering than others, specifically because of the nature of their online presence.
I operate an online business, so I have had e-mail addresses for that business on the Web for years now, and it would not be a good idea to change them. So I get more spam than most people. But no matter how heavily I customize my Bayesian filters, I still get false positives from customers (and lots of customers tend to format their mail in ways that make it look suspicious, for some reason). "Certain phrases that every piece of spam seems to contain" -- well, you are lucky. Lots of legit mail I get contains some of the common spam phrases as well. (At least I can assume that anything mentioning "Viagra" or "penis" is spam... I suppose if my business was a pharmacy or doctor's office that would be tougher.) At least I'm only getting a few false negatives daily. But I am getting more than you are. There's a certain level that I can't seem to drop below without generating too many false positives.
I cannot just blindly rely on filtering, or I will anger my customers and lose money. I can't change my address or customers with the old address may be unable to reach me and I will lose money. I can't remove my address from the Web; same problem. So instead I have to spend time every day going through the filtered mail to find the false positives. At least it's quicker than it was digging through the spam when it all went into the same mailbox, but I spend time and money I shouldn't have to, to deal with this.
Not to mention that well over 50% of our mail is spam now, and there are associated costs with having our mail volume here be double what it should be.
I honestly don't know how they will enforce this law, but I entreat anyone who thinks "spam is easy to deal with" just because it is easy for you, to try to walk in the shoes of those of us who have been completely overwhelmed by the volume of spam lately. I am glad that you aren't having a problem, but we are dealing with it the best we can. I cannot risk losing customer mail, so dealing with it any more aggressively is not an option.
Yes, Sony just turned around and sued Connectix again, this time on grounds that Virtual GameStation infringes on eleven Sony patents. MacNN has the story at http://www.macnn.com/features/ sony-patent-suit.shtml. (I submitted it last night, but it got rejected. Who's editing this stuff, anyway?)
Connectix won in the 9th Circuit court last week, but that was a copyright infringement case. Sony is trying a new tactic now.
Although this is the exact opposite (online stamps which, unfortunately, require Word to be used, for snailmail)
This isn't true -- stamps.com provides their own software to print from. (I think you can print from Word as well, though. I don't use Word so I haven't tried.) Word is not required, but the stamps.com software is, and AFAIK it runs only on Windows (not my preferred platform, to say the least, though I did have a Win95 box available and use that for it).
Also, there was no start up charge whatsoever when I signed up, and they also gave me a $25 postage credit, which is nothing to sneeze at.
I have a small business, but we don't use enough postage to make a postage meter worth the $$. Stamps.com is a nice solution to having to run to the post office several times a week to buy odd amounts of postage for sending packages.
The system does have its flaws, though. It's Windows only, and you can't just print postage on plain paper and slap that on the front of an envelope -- to use stamps.com with normal business-size envelopes, you have to buy special approved stickers with a fluorescent border, or print directly on the envelope itself. The special stickers aren't yet available at office supply stores, so you have to order them from stamps.com.
On packages you don't have to use the fluorescent stickers, but you still have to use an approved brand and type. At least the package stickers are carried at office supply stores.
When you misprint postage (which happens relatively often, since my printer is a little touchy and doesn't much like the sticker paper), the process for getting a (partial) refund is a pain in the butt, but I can sort of see why.
Lastly, you still have to keep some of the regular postage around for international mail (e-postage is currently domestic only), and for spur-of-the-moment mail. You can't just print out some stamps and carry them around with you. Each stamp is encoded to work only with one particular piece of mail on a particular date.
All in all, though, I really kind of like the product, and if they'd come out with a version on a platform I like better, and if I could print the postage on any white paper instead of the special stickers, I'd have no complaints.
Just in case anyone really wants to know (and since some of the replies to this question have been incorrect):
Brian Boitano is the 1988 Olympic gold medalist in men's figure skating. He competed for the USA. (The Canadian Brian that someone mentioned was a different Brian, Brian Orser.) The "Battle of the Brians" was very close -- really, either one could have won. To this day "Brian vs. Brian" battles are the stuff of much flamage on figure skating newsgroups and BBSes.
Since then, Boitano has skated as a professional, reinstated as an "amateur" (they aren't very amateur anymore) for the 1994 Lillehammer Olympic Games, then gone back to the pro world, where he produces skating specials and continues to skate professionally.
I don't think the Brian Boitano jokes on South Park would be nearly as funny if I wasn't familiar with BB's career and persona. I'm not exactly sure *why* it's so funny, though.
(I hate to comment in this off-topic thread, but it's clearly developed a life of its own.)
My concern with the "karma fading" idea is that some of us are less prolific posters than others. I don't post much, but many of the posts I have made *have* been moderated up, so I have a positive (but rather low) karma rating. When I get moderator points, I try to use them as responsibly as possible, and I take it very seriously.
If my karma were to fade away, it would be very difficult for me to build it back up with my lower frequency of posting. But I do read and participate, and I think there's a place for those of us who are less verbose.
I understand your concerns; I just don't agree with your solution.
It may be available for the Mac, but when I try to run it it freezes every time. Hmph. I suppose some people are having good luck with it, though, and the idea is good -- but when they call it beta software, they aren't kidding. According to their forums, a lot of people are having the freeze problem.
That's only an issue if you *want* your browser to do everything. I don't know if I'm the typical Mac user at all, but I certainly don't want to use mail and news within my browser. I have separate mail and news programs that I really like, and that run *faster* than the ones built-in to my browser, so I don't need those capabilities in the browser at all and certainly wouldn't miss them.
Once JavaScript and CSS support are complete in iCab, and it's out of beta, I just might switch over to iCab as my primary browser. I really like the browser so far (speedy, non-bloated), but I need more stability than the betas have shown.
Of course, Mozilla might be so amazingly cool that I won't need to switch. We'll see. So far the milestone builds crash way too fast and it takes up too much HD space for me to do any extensive testing, though I'd like to test it more.
See http://www.icab.de/info.html for iCab's features -- it really is quite a bit beyond Netscape 2.0. (And you can see java applets with it, though I don't bother -- I haven't yet found a site that was worth turning java on.)
Re:Taste is culturally defined...
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Focus Group Art
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I just looked at the "Most Wanted" painting for the Netherlands, and it's clear to me that I should be marketing my paintings there and not here in the US.:) (See http://www.slumberland.org/gallery.html for the proof. Be warned, the page uses weird table tricks so it might look funny to some of you.)
The cultural differences are interesting, though not surprising. I guess I would expect most people to choose money over art, and that most Americans really really like Norman Rockwell and have never heard of Salvador Dali. Still, it makes me a bit sad. I guess I like to delude myself that average Americans are more culturally literate, and interested in art, than that.
(Not to say anything against Norman Rockwell -- to each his own. It's the number of people who hadn't heard of many of the listed artists that appalled me.)
Here's what I get for not using Preview. The line of the guy's letter that said "In 1995 I posted a message that you replied to on." actually said "In 1995 I posted a message that you replied to on (some newsgroup name here)." Sorry about the munged post.
I recently got a couple of "Deja News Nuke Article Requests" -- e-mails trying to confirm that I really wanted some of my articles deleted from Deja News. I hadn't asked for any of my articles to be deleted, so I was a bit surprised, to say the least.
A couple of minutes later, I got an e-mail that said:
"In 1995 I posted a message that you replied to on . In the reply you quote my message. I am now trying to go back and remove all instances of my name from Usenet. If you would kindly send back the DejaNews Nuke form, all you have to do is send the entire thing back to the address which it came from, I'd really appreciate it. If you have any questions please e-mail me."
I went and checked the messages in question, and nothing he said was particularly controversial or anything like that. My responses were quite long and actually pretty good, in retrospect.:) The topic was nothing that anyone would be ashamed of having posted to. So it appears that the guy really is just trying to remove all traces of his existence from Deja.
I decided not to return the nuke forms, because while he may want to eliminate all of his own words on Deja, he has no right to force me to eliminate *mine.* He posted publicly, and I responded publicly, and he has to deal with that. What's done is done. (The funny thing is that, back when I first heard about Deja, I had all my postings set to no-archive. But apparently some slipped through back then, and now I don't even bother preventing archiving anymore.)
Am I wrong here? I'd love to hear some feedback from the rest of you on this.
I have the domain slumberland.seattle.wa.us, registered after NSI shut off my old domain, slumberland.com, in a domain name dispute with Slumberland Furniture. (I wasn't "domain-squatting" -- the domain was the name of my BBS, and at the time I got the domain name, Slumberland wasn't trademarked in the US -- not only that, they don't do business in my part of the US, so I didn't know they existed.) Anyway, the dispute has been satisfactorily settled, and I now have slumberland.org -- but I still use slumberland.seattle.wa.us most of the time when I am filling out forms on the web.
Why would I use the longer, harder to type, more confusing domain name?
Easy. In 2 years of having slumberland.seattle.wa.us, I've only gotten 2 or 3 spams to that address. (The first one was in June. The address was spam free for more than a year!) This is even though I have my address on my web page.
My other addresses such as my business addresses, started getting spammed almost immediately after being set up, and now they get a deluge -- but my slumberland.seattle.wa.us address is immune. (Email to my old slumberland.com address gets forwarded to me, and it's 98% spam now as well.)
Recently I was looking at one of the spams that my other addresses get -- a spam to sell bulk email addresses. I noticed that the spam said something to the effect of "Our addresses are high quality -- we've weeded out all.gov,.mil, and.us addresses so you get 100%.com and.net addresses!"
A-HA!:) I think I'll keep using the.us address for a while. Free and nearly spamproof? Sounds good to me.
You said, "...also vying for the customers that DO like machines with colors and curves. They don't understand computers as well. They want to send email and use Quicken or something. The machine will look good in their den."
I don't think good-looking and technologically powerful are mutually-exclusive.
I'm a visually-oriented person -- I like design and to have well-designed things around me -- so I want my computer to look good. But I also want it to be powerful and flexible enough to let me do anything I could possibly want it to do. Why should I have to settle for a god-awful ugly beige box that looks like crap no matter *what* room I put it in?
Why *not* have computers in different styles? iMacs are great-looking, but some people might prefer a machine with a retro style (something that looks more like a 1920s typewriter than a 1990s PC), or a classic style in a wooden case. Surely it could be possible to make PCs that appeal to the tech side as well as the visual side. There is absolutely no reason other than inflexibility and lack of vision for good-looking machines to be "beginners' computers" only.
You said, "And yes, nearly fifteen years after my walk through high school hell I am still angry over how I was treated and how the school administration prevented me from living in a reasonable non-violent and non-abusive environment."
As am I, and it's been 22 years since I left Hell Elementary School. (I shudder to think what would have happened to me if junior high and high school had been anywhere near as terrifying.)
I don't have children, but if I ever do, this will be the number one reason why I would strongly consider home schooling. Private schools are good for an education, but I don't believe that they are much better at the social aspect.
You said: "Once my parents found out, they tested my IQ (it was high) and put me back in the regular class, but the teacher resented it - she took every opportunity to tell me, in front of other students, that I was retarded and that I didn't belong in the class."
There are some teachers who are just as much bullies as the worst bullies in the student population. Unfortunately the teaching profession doesn't seem to have a way to screen them out.
I went through some of the same stuff; my second grade teacher seemed to resent me greatly though I'm not sure why. I was already reading at a 9th grade level, but she put me in the lowest reading group, and wouldn't allow me to work ahead. I was punished for reading independently.
In fourth grade, when I was nine, it was even worse -- we had a teacher who, two weeks into the quarter, split the classroom into a "good side" and a "bad side" and assigned us to the sides based on his perceptions of our behavior in the first couple of weeks.
One of the kids on the bad side wasn't bad at all; just quiet and artistic. He got in trouble because his handwriting (which was beautiful) was faint and light, and a bit hard to read because of it. That alone got him assigned to the bad side, and the teacher constantly kept after school, yelling at him to press harder when writing.
Other things this teacher did were just as twisted. He threw chalk at a student who couldn't get the right answer to a question, and hit him directly in the eye. He told us we couldn't have art class (he was the art teacher for all the fourth graders in the school) because we were bad kids who didn't deserve it. In December, he put me out on the porch (our class was in a portable building) for some transgression, and locked the door from the inside. I wasn't allowed to take my coat. It didn't take long before I was freezing and knocking on the door, but he wouldn't let me back in the room. I was scared to go in the main school building because I knew I would get in trouble. But finally I went to the principal's office and told them what happened, and they called my mom because I wouldn't go back to class. I think that may have been the day that my mom pulled me out of school. I stayed out of school for about three weeks until I could start at another school.
During that fall semester I was having horrible stomach pains every school day. I dreaded going to school. I would cry and scream, begging my mom not to make me go. She took me to a doctor who said "If you don't get her out of that school she will get an ulcer." I couldn't just change teachers, because all fourth-grade classes spent at least a little bit of time every day with the bad teacher.
We ended up requesting a transfer to another school. In the pre-busing days, this meant we had to have a doctor's statement, and a sponsor on the School Board. Four of us ended up transferring to various schools around town, and the teacher -- who should have at least been put on leave for the rest of the year -- continued teaching. His defense? He said he was having family problems that made him a little crazy. And he was the vice-principal, and had tons of seniority.
Anyway, when I went to the next school, the teachers were a little better but the students were far worse -- that was the school where I was beat up and otherwise abused on a regular basis. Out of the frying pan, right into the yawning pit of hellfire, as it were. But I posted about that in "Kids That Kill" the other day, and I won't go into it here.
I think that bullying teachers can be even more damaging than bullying kids -- they are the authority figures, after all. If you can't go to the teacher for help, especially at an age like 7 or 9... well... that's a really frightening place for a child.
I'd honestly like to see a no tolerance policy for school bullying. I don't know if it's possible or how it would work, but whether the bullying are students or teachers, it must be made clear that we don't accept that behavior in schools. There are far too many teachers, parents, and administrators who are willing to call the bullying a normal part of growing up and just pat the bullies on the head with a minor punishment, if any. We cannot and should not tolerate this.
This is something I sent to some friends last night, but it applies here as well:
I was in the scapegoat role for 2 1/2 years at a certain Seattle elementary school (before that I went to a school where I was reasonably average in the popularity standings, and after that in junior high things were ok -- it was just those 2 1/2 years that were hell).
I was kicked, punched, and verbally abused on a daily basis during my years at that school, for no particular crime other than being the new poor kid who showed up in mid-semester (and the reason I transferred in midyear was because of an abuse situation at my previous school -- a fourth grade teacher who basically went off the deep end but couldn't be fired for his abusive behavior because of his seniority (!). 4 of us ended up being transferred to other schools because the situation was so serious. Let's just say I was a little traumatized by the whole thing). All the neighborhood kids at my new school (this was pre-busing) were either blond and went to the Lutheran church or they were Irish and went to Our Lady of The Lake. I was all and none of the above and I didn't live in the neighborhood. Maybe that was all it took to become the punching bag.
When I ended up in the principal's office after being beat up, I was told "You must be doing something to egg them on." Apparently walking down the hall trying not to make eye contact makes you deserve to get kicked and hit and have your schoolwork strewn about the rainy playground. I learned pretty damn quickly that I would not be getting any support from the school: not from the principal, not from the teachers, not from the counselors. All I could do was wait for it to end.
Sometimes I think that the school administration *encouraged* the cliques in the school; perhaps they thought the clearly-defined hierarchy of students made their jobs easier. I don't know. I certainly didn't see much sympathy from them and I was going through a lot of pain. They seemed to buy into the whole hierarchy as if it was *right.* This includes most of the teachers, too.
I wish that people would maybe try to emphasize that so-called typical childhood cruelty is something that shouldn't be tolerated. So what if "kids are just that way"? Why not try to teach them a little empathy?
Some of the reactions I've seen to the Littleton thing seem to imply that being different is wrong and that perhaps these kids should have tried harder not to be outsiders. Why don't people look at it the other way -- maybe the insiders should try harder not to *create* outsiders?
For a while when I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be a tester for Consumer Reports. It just seemed like such a cool job -- playing with stuff in weird ways and trying to figure out ways to break it. Now I look at the technician picking food off of frozen pizzas and realize that at least some aspects of the job might have been pretty darned tedious.
It's an awful lot like software testing, though, isn't it?
Some of these products were interesting ideas, if flawed. Those paper dresses -- how flammable were they? And the car record player (by Norelco!) -- what a neat idea! If 45s were longer the players might have caught on, but changing the disc every 2.5 minutes (remember, hit records were shorter then) had to be annoying.
That Pocket Totalizer was a blast from the past. I remember seeing my mom use a similar product when I was a kid in the early '70s, pre-pocket calculators. It's also kind of like the things baseball umpires use to keep track of the count.
Another thing that strikes me are some of the Rube Goldbergesque contraptions that CR built to test products -- like the soap tester which sprayed soap bars with streams of water while rubbing them with identical pressure.
Wouldn't you just love to be allowed to dig through their archives for a while?
You might be right about the late posts withering and dying from neglect. While I haven't posted here much, I've noticed this in posts that I've read.
Even reading in the afternoon as I often do (I'm a night owl so I don't do much of anything in the morning except sleep), I find that a lot of morning-posted topics are pretty much played-out before I even get to them, and it seems that the latest posts don't get moderated up as much as the early ones.
Then again, I'm not keeping actual stats, so my impressions on this could be wrong. But this does seem to be a bit of a problem for posters who want to build up a good "reputation" but don't get up early by US standards.
I must say that I'm finding this whole process of working out the moderation system really interesting. Lots of good ideas here and even the ones that I'm not sure about show a great deal of creativity and thought.
Anyway, you got a reply.:) I'm in Seattle, WA, USA.
This is true enough. It's not so much the case in my situation, since I teach the intro to web development course and 90% of my students are in the Web Admin or Multimedia programs, so in theory this is a class they *should* be interested in. (g)
Admittedly if someone's just taking the class to fulfill a distribution requirement they might not want to be there, but my feeling is "Hey -- don't waste my time and yours. Find a way to make this class mean something to you, otherwise you are wasting 11 weeks (or however long) of your life -- and mine."
I had to take CSC101, Computer Applications, as a dist. requirement since it was the only class that fit my schedule and met the requirement. On the first day of class, the teacher stood up, holding a floppy disk, and said "This is a floppy disk. We STORE things on it." Groan. Obviously, I didn't need to be there, but I went up and spoke to the teacher (saying "Hey, I work in tech support, I really don't need what you're teaching here") and made arrangements to do some more interesting stuff for the assignments, and I got permission to play Solitaire, read books, or write papers for other classes during the lectures, so I was able to do something I enjoyed with my time there.
If it's a subject you don't already know, weren't interested in, and you need it for a requirement, then I guess you just have to think of it as something that will broaden your mind, which is at least worth something. And you might get to enjoy it after all (as I did with the dreaded Logic class I took).
At any rate, the adult way to deal with it is to do the best you possibly can in the class, even if it's not something you are much interested in. Screwing around and expecting to get a good grade anyway is the immature way of getting through life.
(Having said that, I admit that I do not always deal with things in the most mature way... grin.)
My experience has been the opposite; my adult students tend to be the most serious and work the hardest, because they *know* the value of the money they are spending for the class and they know what happens to them if they don't learn the material and can't get a job.
It's the students fresh out of high school that tend to screw around and not do the work. The cost of the course is not "real" to many of them because their parents or financial aid are paying the bills, and if they fail they can go live with Mon and Dad for a while. So they goof off.
There are a few things that the article doesn't give enough detail about, and without that detail you really can't make an informed decision on whether the students, the teacher, or the school are the villains of this story.
1. What percentage of the students in the class failed?
2. How *exactly* was the class presented to these students before they enrolled? Did someone just tell them "point-and-click" in a passing comment or did a catalog actually say that?
3. What did the syllabus say? Did the syllabus actually describe the class correctly?
4. Why did these students fail? Did they just not do the work? Or did they do the work incorrectly?
5. Has this instructor taught this class before or since, and were the results similar?
Slashdot Mirror
"On the Mac side things are even more confusing because there is no free download unless you write/call to cancel your 'subscription' within 14 days."
;)
This isn't true. Go to real.com from a Mac, and scroll down -- the link is there. (Yes, it should be more obvious than it is.) The link will take you to this page, where it says very clearly "Thank you for trying our new RealOne Player for OS X. You will not be charged for downloading this software." I have done this and have not been charged or asked to enter credit card info. I gave 'em a fake address, too... out of longstanding habit.
(However, the stack I am trying to update needs to print a portion of a card, not the entire card, and I can't figure out how to do this in SuperCard. All I can convince SC to do is print the entire card. If anyone knows how to get it to print a part of a card, defined by xy coordinates like HyperCard did, please let me know.)
And that's the very strength of HyperCard, right there. It made non-programmers think they could do a lot of cool things. I am a non-programmer myself, essentially, but I sat down with HyperCard one day in the late '80s and said "I want a program that does x. There is no program that does what I want the way I want. Maybe this HyperCard thing will help." And I messed with it and messed with it some more, and found out that yes, I could create a stack with the functionality I needed, without any actual training or prior experience. If I didn't know the syntax for something, I could just guess and half the time it would work! It made me feel like I could accomplish anything. And I have a box of postcards from users of the stack I later released as postcardware, to prove that I really could.
SuperCard is great, but like many, I think Apple really dropped the ball the minute they stopped making a scriptable version of HyperCard free with every Mac. An OS X HyperCard, from Apple, with all the features a modern HyperCard would have... well, that would be fantastic. I can dream...
You might want to try SuperCard; you can even import your old HyperCard stacks in and they will probably work. (Mine mostly worked when I tried it; I did have to make some small changes but not too much.) SuperTalk is pretty much HyperTalk with some additions (and a couple of things removed), and color works much better in SuperCard than the hack they did to include color in HyperCard.
We don't contribute to local economies? Funny, I thought I was doing that when I take the money my internet business brings in and spend it at local stores and other local businesses.
Where did you get the idea that Net companies have zero overhead? We have overhead, it's just not exactly the same overhead. Like B&M businesses, we pay rent, we pay for our inventory, we have to buy supplies, we pay accountants and lawyers. Like you, I collect local sales tax (when I sell to residents of my state). I don't pay the other stuff because I don't yet have an employee, so it's not yet relevant. (Soon, maybe. We are growing.) But that would be the case whether I was operating a Net company or not.
As someone pointed out above, there is absolutely no way in hell this can work unless there is some uniform nationwide GST. As a one-person operation here, there is no way I can manage keeping track of hundreds of different tax jurisdictions and their payment requirements. It cannot be done. I am skeptical of your "$50 software" suggestion for a variety of reasons. (I prefer to use the OS and software of my choice, for one thing. Another thing is that integrating this into my shopping cart/accounting software system would be difficult and expensive.)
I don't actually object to the tax if it is fairly applied (and that means a uniform national tax, that can be paid with our income tax, and that is applied to all retail businesses, not just penalizing Net businesses). But I really doubt they will do that.
Please be aware that not everyone is in your situation. Some people will have an easier time spam-filtering than others, specifically because of the nature of their online presence.
I operate an online business, so I have had e-mail addresses for that business on the Web for years now, and it would not be a good idea to change them. So I get more spam than most people. But no matter how heavily I customize my Bayesian filters, I still get false positives from customers (and lots of customers tend to format their mail in ways that make it look suspicious, for some reason). "Certain phrases that every piece of spam seems to contain" -- well, you are lucky. Lots of legit mail I get contains some of the common spam phrases as well. (At least I can assume that anything mentioning "Viagra" or "penis" is spam... I suppose if my business was a pharmacy or doctor's office that would be tougher.) At least I'm only getting a few false negatives daily. But I am getting more than you are. There's a certain level that I can't seem to drop below without generating too many false positives.
I cannot just blindly rely on filtering, or I will anger my customers and lose money. I can't change my address or customers with the old address may be unable to reach me and I will lose money. I can't remove my address from the Web; same problem. So instead I have to spend time every day going through the filtered mail to find the false positives. At least it's quicker than it was digging through the spam when it all went into the same mailbox, but I spend time and money I shouldn't have to, to deal with this.
Not to mention that well over 50% of our mail is spam now, and there are associated costs with having our mail volume here be double what it should be.
I honestly don't know how they will enforce this law, but I entreat anyone who thinks "spam is easy to deal with" just because it is easy for you, to try to walk in the shoes of those of us who have been completely overwhelmed by the volume of spam lately. I am glad that you aren't having a problem, but we are dealing with it the best we can. I cannot risk losing customer mail, so dealing with it any more aggressively is not an option.
There is a very convenient loophole to exclude Aldus, for sure. That loophole being: they no longer exist. ;)
You probably mean Adobe, current guardians of the PageMaker legacy, also with Seattle offices.
Carry on...
Yes, Sony just turned around and sued Connectix again, this time on grounds that Virtual GameStation infringes on eleven Sony patents. MacNN has the story at http://www.macnn.com/features/ sony-patent-suit.shtml. (I submitted it last night, but it got rejected. Who's editing this stuff, anyway?)
Connectix won in the 9th Circuit court last week, but that was a copyright infringement case. Sony is trying a new tactic now.
Although this is the exact opposite (online stamps which, unfortunately, require Word to be used, for snailmail)
This isn't true -- stamps.com provides their own software to print from. (I think you can print from Word as well, though. I don't use Word so I haven't tried.) Word is not required, but the stamps.com software is, and AFAIK it runs only on Windows (not my preferred platform, to say the least, though I did have a Win95 box available and use that for it).
Also, there was no start up charge whatsoever when I signed up, and they also gave me a $25 postage credit, which is nothing to sneeze at.
I have a small business, but we don't use enough postage to make a postage meter worth the $$. Stamps.com is a nice solution to having to run to the post office several times a week to buy odd amounts of postage for sending packages.
The system does have its flaws, though. It's Windows only, and you can't just print postage on plain paper and slap that on the front of an envelope -- to use stamps.com with normal business-size envelopes, you have to buy special approved stickers with a fluorescent border, or print directly on the envelope itself. The special stickers aren't yet available at office supply stores, so you have to order them from stamps.com.
On packages you don't have to use the fluorescent stickers, but you still have to use an approved brand and type. At least the package stickers are carried at office supply stores.
When you misprint postage (which happens relatively often, since my printer is a little touchy and doesn't much like the sticker paper), the process for getting a (partial) refund is a pain in the butt, but I can sort of see why.
Lastly, you still have to keep some of the regular postage around for international mail (e-postage is currently domestic only), and for spur-of-the-moment mail. You can't just print out some stamps and carry them around with you. Each stamp is encoded to work only with one particular piece of mail on a particular date.
All in all, though, I really kind of like the product, and if they'd come out with a version on a platform I like better, and if I could print the postage on any white paper instead of the special stickers, I'd have no complaints.
Just in case anyone really wants to know (and since some of the replies to this question have been incorrect):
Brian Boitano is the 1988 Olympic gold medalist in men's figure skating. He competed for the USA. (The Canadian Brian that someone mentioned was a different Brian, Brian Orser.) The "Battle of the Brians" was very close -- really, either one could have won. To this day "Brian vs. Brian" battles are the stuff of much flamage on figure skating newsgroups and BBSes.
Since then, Boitano has skated as a professional, reinstated as an "amateur" (they aren't very amateur anymore) for the 1994 Lillehammer Olympic Games, then gone back to the pro world, where he produces skating specials and continues to skate professionally.
I don't think the Brian Boitano jokes on South Park would be nearly as funny if I wasn't familiar with BB's career and persona. I'm not exactly sure *why* it's so funny, though.
(I hate to comment in this off-topic thread, but it's clearly developed a life of its own.)
My concern with the "karma fading" idea is that some of us are less prolific posters than others. I don't post much, but many of the posts I have made *have* been moderated up, so I have a positive (but rather low) karma rating. When I get moderator points, I try to use them as responsibly as possible, and I take it very seriously.
If my karma were to fade away, it would be very difficult for me to build it back up with my lower frequency of posting. But I do read and participate, and I think there's a place for those of us who are less verbose.
I understand your concerns; I just don't agree with your solution.
It may be available for the Mac, but when I try to run it it freezes every time. Hmph. I suppose some people are having good luck with it, though, and the idea is good -- but when they call it beta software, they aren't kidding. According to their forums, a lot of people are having the freeze problem.
That's only an issue if you *want* your browser to do everything. I don't know if I'm the typical Mac user at all, but I certainly don't want to use mail and news within my browser. I have separate mail and news programs that I really like, and that run *faster* than the ones built-in to my browser, so I don't need those capabilities in the browser at all and certainly wouldn't miss them.
Once JavaScript and CSS support are complete in iCab, and it's out of beta, I just might switch over to iCab as my primary browser. I really like the browser so far (speedy, non-bloated), but I need more stability than the betas have shown.
Of course, Mozilla might be so amazingly cool that I won't need to switch. We'll see. So far the milestone builds crash way too fast and it takes up too much HD space for me to do any extensive testing, though I'd like to test it more.
See http://www.icab.de/info.html for iCab's features -- it really is quite a bit beyond Netscape 2.0. (And you can see java applets with it, though I don't bother -- I haven't yet found a site that was worth turning java on.)
I just looked at the "Most Wanted" painting for the Netherlands, and it's clear to me that I should be marketing my paintings there and not here in the US. :) (See http://www.slumberland.org/gallery.html for the proof. Be warned, the page uses weird table tricks so it might look funny to some of you.)
The cultural differences are interesting, though not surprising. I guess I would expect most people to choose money over art, and that most Americans really really like Norman Rockwell and have never heard of Salvador Dali. Still, it makes me a bit sad. I guess I like to delude myself that average Americans are more culturally literate, and interested in art, than that.
(Not to say anything against Norman Rockwell -- to each his own. It's the number of people who hadn't heard of many of the listed artists that appalled me.)
Here's what I get for not using Preview. The line of the guy's letter that said "In 1995 I posted a message that you replied to on ." actually said "In 1995 I posted a message that you replied to on (some newsgroup name here)." Sorry about the munged post.
I recently got a couple of "Deja News Nuke Article Requests" -- e-mails trying to confirm that I really wanted some of my articles deleted from Deja News. I hadn't asked for any of my articles to be deleted, so I was a bit surprised, to say the least.
:) The topic was nothing that anyone would be ashamed of having posted to. So it appears that the guy really is just trying to remove all traces of his existence from Deja.
A couple of minutes later, I got an e-mail that said:
"In 1995 I posted a message that you replied to on . In the reply you quote my message. I am now trying to go back and remove all instances of my name from Usenet. If you would kindly send back the DejaNews Nuke form, all you have to do is send the entire thing back to the address which it came from, I'd really appreciate it. If you have any questions please e-mail me."
I went and checked the messages in question, and nothing he said was particularly controversial or anything like that. My responses were quite long and actually pretty good, in retrospect.
I decided not to return the nuke forms, because while he may want to eliminate all of his own words on Deja, he has no right to force me to eliminate *mine.* He posted publicly, and I responded publicly, and he has to deal with that. What's done is done. (The funny thing is that, back when I first heard about Deja, I had all my postings set to no-archive. But apparently some slipped through back then, and now I don't even bother preventing archiving anymore.)
Am I wrong here? I'd love to hear some feedback from the rest of you on this.
I have the domain slumberland.seattle.wa.us, registered after NSI shut off my old domain, slumberland.com, in a domain name dispute with Slumberland Furniture. (I wasn't "domain-squatting" -- the domain was the name of my BBS, and at the time I got the domain name, Slumberland wasn't trademarked in the US -- not only that, they don't do business in my part of the US, so I didn't know they existed.) Anyway, the dispute has been satisfactorily settled, and I now have slumberland.org -- but I still use slumberland.seattle.wa.us most of the time when I am filling out forms on the web.
.gov, .mil, and .us addresses so you get 100% .com and .net addresses!"
:) I think I'll keep using the .us address for a while. Free and nearly spamproof? Sounds good to me.
Why would I use the longer, harder to type, more confusing domain name?
Easy. In 2 years of having slumberland.seattle.wa.us, I've only gotten 2 or 3 spams to that address. (The first one was in June. The address was spam free for more than a year!) This is even though I have my address on my web page.
My other addresses such as my business addresses, started getting spammed almost immediately after being set up, and now they get a deluge -- but my slumberland.seattle.wa.us address is immune. (Email to my old slumberland.com address gets forwarded to me, and it's 98% spam now as well.)
Recently I was looking at one of the spams that my other addresses get -- a spam to sell bulk email addresses. I noticed that the spam said something to the effect of "Our addresses are high quality -- we've weeded out all
A-HA!
You said, "...also vying for the customers that DO like machines with colors and curves. They don't understand computers as well. They want to send email and use Quicken or something. The machine will look good in their den."
I don't think good-looking and technologically powerful are mutually-exclusive.
I'm a visually-oriented person -- I like design and to have well-designed things around me -- so I want my computer to look good. But I also want it to be powerful and flexible enough to let me do anything I could possibly want it to do. Why should I have to settle for a god-awful ugly beige box that looks like crap no matter *what* room I put it in?
Why *not* have computers in different styles? iMacs are great-looking, but some people might prefer a machine with a retro style (something that looks more like a 1920s typewriter than a 1990s PC), or a classic style in a wooden case. Surely it could be possible to make PCs that appeal to the tech side as well as the visual side. There is absolutely no reason other than inflexibility and lack of vision for good-looking machines to be "beginners' computers" only.
You said, "And yes, nearly fifteen years after my walk through high school hell I am still angry over how I was treated and how the school administration prevented me from living in a reasonable non-violent and non-abusive environment."
As am I, and it's been 22 years since I left Hell Elementary School. (I shudder to think what would have happened to me if junior high and high school had been anywhere near as terrifying.)
I don't have children, but if I ever do, this will be the number one reason why I would strongly consider home schooling. Private schools are good for an education, but I don't believe that they are much better at the social aspect.
You said: "Once my parents found out, they tested my IQ (it was high) and put me back in the regular class, but the teacher resented it - she took every opportunity to tell me, in front of other students, that I was retarded and that I didn't belong in the class."
There are some teachers who are just as much bullies as the worst bullies in the student population. Unfortunately the teaching profession doesn't seem to have a way to screen them out.
I went through some of the same stuff; my second grade teacher seemed to resent me greatly though I'm not sure why. I was already reading at a 9th grade level, but she put me in the lowest reading group, and wouldn't allow me to work ahead. I was punished for reading independently.
In fourth grade, when I was nine, it was even worse -- we had a teacher who, two weeks into the quarter, split the classroom into a "good side" and a "bad side" and assigned us to the sides based on his perceptions of our behavior in the first couple of weeks.
One of the kids on the bad side wasn't bad at all; just quiet and artistic. He got in trouble because his handwriting (which was beautiful) was faint and light, and a bit hard to read because of it. That alone got him assigned to the bad side, and the teacher constantly kept after school, yelling at him to press harder when writing.
Other things this teacher did were just as twisted. He threw chalk at a student who couldn't get the right answer to a question, and hit him directly in the eye. He told us we couldn't have art class (he was the art teacher for all the fourth graders in the school) because we were bad kids who didn't deserve it. In December, he put me out on the porch (our class was in a portable building) for some transgression, and locked the door from the inside. I wasn't allowed to take my coat. It didn't take long before I was freezing and knocking on the door, but he wouldn't let me back in the room. I was scared to go in the main school building because I knew I would get in trouble. But finally I went to the principal's office and told them what happened, and they called my mom because I wouldn't go back to class. I think that may have been the day that my mom pulled me out of school. I stayed out of school for about three weeks until I could start at another school.
During that fall semester I was having horrible stomach pains every school day. I dreaded going to school. I would cry and scream, begging my mom not to make me go. She took me to a doctor who said "If you don't get her out of that school she will get an ulcer." I couldn't just change teachers, because all fourth-grade classes spent at least a little bit of time every day with the bad teacher.
We ended up requesting a transfer to another school. In the pre-busing days, this meant we had to have a doctor's statement, and a sponsor on the School Board. Four of us ended up transferring to various schools around town, and the teacher -- who should have at least been put on leave for the rest of the year -- continued teaching. His defense? He said he was having family problems that made him a little crazy. And he was the vice-principal, and had tons of seniority.
Anyway, when I went to the next school, the teachers were a little better but the students were far worse -- that was the school where I was beat up and otherwise abused on a regular basis. Out of the frying pan, right into the yawning pit of hellfire, as it were. But I posted about that in "Kids That Kill" the other day, and I won't go into it here.
I think that bullying teachers can be even more damaging than bullying kids -- they are the authority figures, after all. If you can't go to the teacher for help, especially at an age like 7 or 9... well... that's a really frightening place for a child.
I'd honestly like to see a no tolerance policy for school bullying. I don't know if it's possible or how it would work, but whether the bullying are students or teachers, it must be made clear that we don't accept that behavior in schools. There are far too many teachers, parents, and administrators who are willing to call the bullying a normal part of growing up and just pat the bullies on the head with a minor punishment, if any. We cannot and should not tolerate this.
What can we do about it?
This is something I sent to some friends last night, but it applies here as well:
I was in the scapegoat role for 2 1/2 years at a certain Seattle elementary school (before that I went to a school where I was reasonably average in the popularity standings, and after that in junior high things were ok -- it was just those 2 1/2 years that were hell).
I was kicked, punched, and verbally abused on a daily basis during my years at that school, for no particular crime other than being the new poor kid who showed up in mid-semester (and the reason I transferred in midyear was because of an abuse situation at my previous school -- a fourth grade
teacher who basically went off the deep end but couldn't be fired for his abusive behavior because of his seniority (!). 4 of us ended up being
transferred to other schools because the situation was so serious. Let's just say I was a little traumatized by the whole thing). All the
neighborhood kids at my new school (this was pre-busing) were either blond and went to the Lutheran church or they were Irish and went to Our Lady of The Lake. I was all and none of the above and I didn't live in the neighborhood. Maybe that was all it took to become the punching bag.
When I ended up in the principal's office after being beat up, I was told "You must be doing something to egg them on." Apparently walking down the hall trying not to make eye contact makes you deserve to get kicked and hit and have your schoolwork strewn about the rainy playground. I learned pretty damn quickly that I would not be getting any support from the school: not from the principal, not from the teachers, not from the
counselors. All I could do was wait for it to end.
Sometimes I think that the school administration *encouraged* the cliques in the school; perhaps they thought the clearly-defined hierarchy of students made their jobs easier. I don't know. I certainly didn't see much sympathy from them and I was going through a lot of pain. They seemed to buy into the whole hierarchy as if it was *right.* This includes most of the teachers, too.
I wish that people would maybe try to emphasize that so-called typical childhood cruelty is something that shouldn't be tolerated. So what if
"kids are just that way"? Why not try to teach them a little empathy?
Some of the reactions I've seen to the Littleton thing seem to imply that being different is wrong and that perhaps these kids should have tried harder not to be outsiders. Why don't people look at it the other way -- maybe the insiders should try harder not to *create* outsiders?
For a while when I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be a tester for Consumer Reports. It just seemed like such a cool job -- playing with stuff in weird ways and trying to figure out ways to break it. Now I look at the technician picking food off of frozen pizzas and realize that at least some aspects of the job might have been pretty darned tedious.
It's an awful lot like software testing, though, isn't it?
Some of these products were interesting ideas, if flawed. Those paper dresses -- how flammable were they? And the car record player (by Norelco!) -- what a neat idea! If 45s were longer the players might have caught on, but changing the disc every 2.5 minutes (remember, hit records were shorter then) had to be annoying.
That Pocket Totalizer was a blast from the past. I remember seeing my mom use a similar product when I was a kid in the early '70s, pre-pocket calculators. It's also kind of like the things baseball umpires use to keep track of the count.
Another thing that strikes me are some of the Rube Goldbergesque contraptions that CR built to test products -- like the soap tester which sprayed soap bars with streams of water while rubbing them with identical pressure.
Wouldn't you just love to be allowed to dig through their archives for a while?
You might be right about the late posts withering and dying from neglect. While I haven't posted here much, I've noticed this in posts that I've read.
:) I'm in Seattle, WA, USA.
Even reading in the afternoon as I often do (I'm a night owl so I don't do much of anything in the morning except sleep), I find that a lot of morning-posted topics are pretty much played-out before I even get to them, and it seems that the latest posts don't get moderated up as much as the early ones.
Then again, I'm not keeping actual stats, so my impressions on this could be wrong. But this does seem to be a bit of a problem for posters who want to build up a good "reputation" but don't get up early by US standards.
I must say that I'm finding this whole process of working out the moderation system really interesting. Lots of good ideas here and even the ones that I'm not sure about show a great deal of creativity and thought.
Anyway, you got a reply.
This is true enough. It's not so much the case in my situation, since I teach the intro to web development course and 90% of my students are in the Web Admin or Multimedia programs, so in theory this is a class they *should* be interested in. (g)
Admittedly if someone's just taking the class to fulfill a distribution requirement they might not want to be there, but my feeling is "Hey -- don't waste my time and yours. Find a way to make this class mean something to you, otherwise you are wasting 11 weeks (or however long) of your life -- and mine."
I had to take CSC101, Computer Applications, as a dist. requirement since it was the only class that fit my schedule and met the requirement. On the first day of class, the teacher stood up, holding a floppy disk, and said "This is a floppy disk. We STORE things on it." Groan. Obviously, I didn't need to be there, but I went up and spoke to the teacher (saying "Hey, I work in tech support, I really don't need what you're teaching here") and made arrangements to do some more interesting stuff for the assignments, and I got permission to play Solitaire, read books, or write papers for other classes during the lectures, so I was able to do something I enjoyed with my time there.
If it's a subject you don't already know, weren't interested in, and you need it for a requirement, then I guess you just have to think of it as something that will broaden your mind, which is at least worth something. And you might get to enjoy it after all (as I did with the dreaded Logic class I took).
At any rate, the adult way to deal with it is to do the best you possibly can in the class, even if it's not something you are much interested in. Screwing around and expecting to get a good grade anyway is the immature way of getting through life.
(Having said that, I admit that I do not always deal with things in the most mature way... grin.)
My experience has been the opposite; my adult students tend to be the most serious and work the hardest, because they *know* the value of the money they are spending for the class and they know what happens to them if they don't learn the material and can't get a job.
It's the students fresh out of high school that tend to screw around and not do the work. The cost of the course is not "real" to many of them because their parents or financial aid are paying the bills, and if they fail they can go live with Mon and Dad for a while. So they goof off.
There are a few things that the article doesn't give enough detail about, and without that detail you really can't make an informed decision on whether the students, the teacher, or the school are the villains of this story.
1. What percentage of the students in the class failed?
2. How *exactly* was the class presented to these students before they enrolled? Did someone just tell them "point-and-click" in a passing comment or did a catalog actually say that?
3. What did the syllabus say? Did the syllabus actually describe the class correctly?
4. Why did these students fail? Did they just not do the work? Or did they do the work incorrectly?
5. Has this instructor taught this class before or since, and were the results similar?
These are only a few questions that come to mind.