I was actually wrong, it's not published by the KLF, just a rabid fan, it appears. It was years ago, my memory is failing me. The link is in my journal for those who are interested. (way off-topic now, I know.)
(Slightly off-topic, but not that much...) Actually, the KLF have all their songs online in mp3 format. Tons of rare remixes and songs from albums that no longer exist. In the interest of not knocking them off the net from bandwidth costs, I'm not going to post the address, but it's out there. Spend some time with Google.
I would like to buy the cds of these songs, as a side note, but having the mp3s is better than nothing.
"The single menu bar is a pain on large screens. Worse, it is confusing to many users: when they start an application, they expect an application to appear, not just some subtle change in the appearance of the menubar."
The benefit of a single, at-the-top-of-the screen menubar is that it provides a target for the user of infinite height. In windows, when I want to hit an item on the menu bar, I have to aim for a very small target (depending on my resolution). On any mac, when I aim for a menu bar I only have to aim in one direction, horizontally. It increases speed. See Fitt's Law, http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs5724/g1/
Once you're used to there being one menubar as opposed to many (which is just a matter of what you've been trained on), it's much quicker to use menus.
Think of it this way, a user opens an application, and then says 'where's the menu bar'... what's the answer? 'the top of the screen'. It's a pretty quick lesson to learn, because the answer is always the same.
I don't disagree with your assessment, but I do take issue at the implication that a decent education implies some familiarity/affinity with Linux or the GPL. I know plenty of people who can write hashtables and linked lists and don't particularly care about Linux or the GPL. Free software is a philosophy, not a standard of education.
Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast had an in-game keyboard that you could use with your controller. You could also use pre-made phrases (automatically translated) or customizable thought-balloon pictures. So there is a lower cost option at least keyboard-wise. (dunno if the mech game will work with a regular controller.) But a lot of the fun of games like this is the human interaction, and it's hard to communicate via a clunky letter-at-a-time onscreen keyboard while trying to kill monsters.
Because Tivo wants to make a profit and not be sued out of existence by TV companies. The description in the article sounds like a non-disruptive way of letting TV folks promote their shows.
Anyways, you paid for 40 hours of recording time. You have 40 hours of recording time. Tivo doesn't owe you every inch of recording media in the box.
It sounds like a better plan than death by legislation.
(side thought: Maybe in the future shows won't battle for a good time slot, they'll battle for Tivo priority. 200k for a two-day guaranteed time span on everyone's tivo, 25k for a 4 hour span, etc.)
Not Windows SEX-P ?:) Kind of like apple's old problem. They used 'X' to denote a certain processor in a computer. So: The Mac II, the Mac IIx, the Mac IIci, Mac IIcx, etc. Didn't work so well with the Mac SE. Mac SE, Mac SEx... hmm. So they called it the SE/030. (seriously, I used to own an SE/030)
It's true that authors only get paid when a new version of a book is sold. But consider it this way. When I buy a new book, and then sell it, I've read the book for a smaller amount of money than if I had bought it and kept it. With that extra money, I can go _buy more books_. More new books sold, more money for authors.
Additionally, books do degrade in quality as they're used. Especially the cheap-o paperback ones. So a book that I purchase new and resell only has a lifespan of only a few more users (depending on how nice people are to them, and whether or not any of them stop and keep it because they like it so much.)
I've run similar programs (at UC Berkeley) that check for structure of student's programs. I don't have numerical analysis of the results, but from my personal observations, anything that hit above 30% on the similarity level was almost always valid in one way or another. (maybe not blatant cheating, but too much collaboration, etc.)
Of course, we only used this on projects, which tended to be much larger than homeworks. (i.e., we would never ask them to just calculate the fibonacci series, more like pseudo-Life simulations, games, etc.)
I think that just saying 'if we pay teachers a lot of money and give them respect, then we'll have more teachers' isn't completely accurate.
While I'm sure it would increase the number of teachers, there's also the small point of teachers having to deal with kids. To be a good teacher (I believe that) you have to really care about what you're doing, and want to teach children/high school students.
On the other hand, you could say that a certain segment of the population would enjoy teaching, and we should make it easy/profitable for them to do that. Which I agree with, certainly. But are there enough 'teaching-prone' people? Does giving people who'd rather not teach lots of money to do it really make things better?
(not that I believe in cutting education funding, but money might not be the _only_ answer.)
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I was actually wrong, it's not published by the KLF, just a rabid fan, it appears. It was years ago, my memory is failing me. The link is in my journal for those who are interested. (way off-topic now, I know.)
(Slightly off-topic, but not that much ...) Actually, the KLF have all their songs online in mp3 format. Tons of rare remixes and songs from albums that no longer exist. In the interest of not knocking them off the net from bandwidth costs, I'm not going to post the address, but it's out there. Spend some time with Google.
I would like to buy the cds of these songs, as a side note, but having the mp3s is better than nothing.
"The single menu bar is a pain on large screens. Worse, it is confusing to many users: when they start an application, they expect an application to appear, not just some subtle change in the appearance of the menubar."
The benefit of a single, at-the-top-of-the screen menubar is that it provides a target for the user of infinite height. In windows, when I want to hit an item on the menu bar, I have to aim for a very small target (depending on my resolution). On any mac, when I aim for a menu bar I only have to aim in one direction, horizontally. It increases speed. See Fitt's Law, http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs5724/g1/
Once you're used to there being one menubar as opposed to many (which is just a matter of what you've been trained on), it's much quicker to use menus.
Think of it this way, a user opens an application, and then says 'where's the menu bar'... what's the answer? 'the top of the screen'. It's a pretty quick lesson to learn, because the answer is always the same.
I don't disagree with your assessment, but I do take issue at the implication that a decent education implies some familiarity/affinity with Linux or the GPL. I know plenty of people who can write hashtables and linked lists and don't particularly care about Linux or the GPL. Free software is a philosophy, not a standard of education.
Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast had an in-game keyboard that you could use with your controller. You could also use pre-made phrases (automatically translated) or customizable thought-balloon pictures. So there is a lower cost option at least keyboard-wise. (dunno if the mech game will work with a regular controller.) But a lot of the fun of games like this is the human interaction, and it's hard to communicate via a clunky letter-at-a-time onscreen keyboard while trying to kill monsters.
Because Tivo wants to make a profit and not be sued out of existence by TV companies. The description in the article sounds like a non-disruptive way of letting TV folks promote their shows.
Anyways, you paid for 40 hours of recording time. You have 40 hours of recording time. Tivo doesn't owe you every inch of recording media in the box.
It sounds like a better plan than death by legislation.
(side thought: Maybe in the future shows won't battle for a good time slot, they'll battle for Tivo priority. 200k for a two-day guaranteed time span on everyone's tivo, 25k for a 4 hour span, etc.)
Not Windows SEX-P ? :) Kind of like apple's old problem. They used 'X' to denote a certain processor in a computer. So: The Mac II, the Mac IIx, the Mac IIci, Mac IIcx, etc. Didn't work so well with the Mac SE. Mac SE, Mac SEx ... hmm. So they called it the SE/030. (seriously, I used to own an SE/030)
It's true that authors only get paid when a new version of a book is sold. But consider it this way. When I buy a new book, and then sell it, I've read the book for a smaller amount of money than if I had bought it and kept it. With that extra money, I can go _buy more books_. More new books sold, more money for authors.
Additionally, books do degrade in quality as they're used. Especially the cheap-o paperback ones. So a book that I purchase new and resell only has a lifespan of only a few more users (depending on how nice people are to them, and whether or not any of them stop and keep it because they like it so much.)
I've run similar programs (at UC Berkeley) that check for structure of student's programs. I don't have numerical analysis of the results, but from my personal observations, anything that hit above 30% on the similarity level was almost always valid in one way or another. (maybe not blatant cheating, but too much collaboration, etc.)
Of course, we only used this on projects, which tended to be much larger than homeworks. (i.e., we would never ask them to just calculate the fibonacci series, more like pseudo-Life simulations, games, etc.)
I think that just saying 'if we pay teachers a lot of money and give them respect, then we'll have more teachers' isn't completely accurate.
While I'm sure it would increase the number of teachers, there's also the small point of teachers having to deal with kids. To be a good teacher (I believe that) you have to really care about what you're doing, and want to teach children/high school students.
On the other hand, you could say that a certain segment of the population would enjoy teaching, and we should make it easy/profitable for them to do that. Which I agree with, certainly. But are there enough 'teaching-prone' people? Does giving people who'd rather not teach lots of money to do it really make things better?
(not that I believe in cutting education funding, but money might not be the _only_ answer.)