Germany's an odd case because it had been forced to become a constitutional democracy by the treaty of Versailles. The public didn't really want or like it - a majority of votes, by the end, were going to parties who opposed democracy and wanted to rewrite the constitution.
Combine an imposed democracy with a state with severe economic problems and a feeling of hurt about the way WW1 had ended, and a dictator who said they'd make Germany great again was pretty much inevitable at some point.
The same could happen elsewhere (Bush sometimes seems to want to head in that direction, as does Blair) but it's far less likely IMO.
OK, this is a daft patent. In fact, we're seeing daft patents by the ton.
This may be down to a truly incompetent PTO. However, I saw an interesting idea a while back.
Let's say you're some lowly patent clerk. Let's say you know that there's systemic problems.
What better way of highlighting the problems is there than putting through patents that can be shown invalid in an instant? People jump up and down, notice and after a while we hopefully get a root and branch review of the organisation and all patents granted in recent times.
We're picking up on all sorts of crappy patents but they can be knocked down quickly and they're normally granted to small companies who can't realistically exploit them. If this sort of patent is turning up, though, there are going to be bigger ones outside our field which are just as bad but are granted to people who can make a nuisance.
Press for review, by all means. But I'm pretty sure by now that the patter of terrible patents is too great for simple incompetence alone.
(Netscape 4 definitely had History, and it was more sortable than IE's.)
IE's
* Isn't accurate, it loses pages * Displays stuff sorted by server title, which will often be some low-level content server rather than the site title.
Registration discourages most? No way. Morality discourages most.
Let's be honest, with most software if you want to install without registering it's not tricky. MS software took a string of 1s for years, most have keygens or large piles of serials available.
What discourages people is morality. I buy software because it's right. I buy films because it's right - I tape stuff when I can't buy it at a reasonable price, and normally buy in a sale. I could download hours of music and have a CD burner, yet I've got well over 100 albums and am adding to that at 2-3 a month. I'm one of the guys they like, and they make quite a bit from me.
While the industry keeps assuming I'm a thief and getting in my way as a legitimate consumer on that basis, it increases the chance that I will agree with them and steal, out of spite and / or frustration. While they continue to trust me and put out decent product, I continue to buy it. Yes, I lend CDs to friends, some of whom have no doubt ripped or burnt. That's free advertising to them, and many new CDs will have been sold because of that. I've certainly bought for this reason.
There is a simple fact here: while they continue to treat me like a thief, they increase the chance I'll become one. Back off, save on PR and money with these ridiculous schemes and I'll be happier. I'll probably also walk straight into an electrical shop and buy a DVD player rather than researching some multiregion macrovision free machine, and waiting far longer to actually buy.
Before I moved, I was Windows support for a _lot_ of people. Part of what helps Windows is that there's already the network of friendly computer literate people that know it.
Now, I'm not saying that Linux is just as easy as Windows. Not looked in for a little while but it certainly wasn't then and information I've heard since hasn't suggested that's changed. But, it remains that Windows is already beyond many users, so Linux being so isn't as much of a problem as some people think.
Macromedia certainly used to produce an addon for Dreamweaver called Coursebuilder which, IIRC (only looked at it briefly, it's only of peripheral relevance to my job) was rather nice and a free add-on.
Toolbook produces strange HTML which doesn't translate that nicely to stuff other than Win/IE from what I recall. Authorware I've not noticed I've come across. Flash / Director require plugins (duh...), Director is a pain to integrate into a Learning Management System. Seminar4Web is another I've come across - again, only really works well with Win/IE and even then it's a little strange to put it tactfully. It's also rather expensive.
I'd look at what you're looking to do, though. For a lot of courses, thinking about how the content should work and it all fit together, it's not rocket science to do the HTML. Breaking the learning down properly into components is interesting, but you're trained educators, right?
My advice? Get the CS department to lay you out a template that you can drop content into and do simple, JavaScript testing. That's not complicated, it's all that's required and will make a nice project for a student.
This is assuming a reasonably small scope, though. If you're ultimately looking at moving this to a larger managed learning environment (which isn't necessarily appropriate) then you'll be better off pumping out stuff which is AICC (http://www.aicc.org/) and / or SCORM (http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=scorma bt&cfid=286743&cftoken=76681359) compliant. For this, you want to use pro tools. A managed learning environment working with non-standards based courses isn't a problem (I write such beasts day in day out) but it does complicate matters. I suppose a student could do this as a project again but, erm, I wouldn't recommend it, having read the standards:-)
Fans I barely notice but then I've got an ancient PII so it's not that noisy:-) I never found sleeping with it on pleasant but I can.
What really irritates me, though, is that the speakers have a terrible power supply that hums constantly. _That_ is a real problem, because of the totally different type of buzz.
(Actually, even more annoying when I'm trying to sleep is that alarm clock! Wakes me up every morning.;-)
Re:How about *this* generated art?
on
Open Source Art?
·
· Score: 2
Wow....
If we can give ourselves slightly more space and allow something with even more artistic content, what about.the.product? http://www.theproduct.de/fr08_final.zip, needs DX8 but _very_ impressive.
The foundation is built on religious faith. Yes, that's rather different to science to put it mildly:-)
Science looking at similar things is making an awful lot of deductive leaps, though, and it's quite a long way from the point of last known fact.
I'm not suggesting the two are equal, or that religious theories should be in the textbooks. I've said before I think the kids should have them mentioned alongside in school, very much in passing, but that's another matter which I'm not about to go in to.
Anyway, all I was doing was agreeing with your comment about science in this area being, erm, less than certain, and whingeing how it's annoying that people comment that religion is less than certain while forgetting that science is too, even if in a very different way.
I'm not remotely intending to bash science either. Science is cool, science is how we find all sorts of things out and science, properly applied, is definitely the final word.
But science isn't certain about a whole bunch of things people seem to think it is and I wish some people would remember this and be a little more humble in discussions.
(Am I about to start a flamewar? Please, no, I certainly won't post in one.)
Yes, but I wish that was better recognised. There's a lot of science which definitely falls into this category - stuff like size and age of universe, planetary history and so on.
Speaking as someone with some scientific background and an interest in religion, it's somewhat irritating when people consistently bleat about how science has proved various things like Earth being however many billion years old. No, it hasn't - and it can't, by definition, because it can't observe or repeat it - it's merely that the current theories, which seem to hold water at the moment, suggest that that's true. But the whole foundation for the theories can be a bit like a house of cards at times.
Speaking personally, I love performing. I love jamming music, I love writing music, I love listening to music. I even enjoy the physical act of playing (I'm a trumpeter). The idea of being able to dedicate myself to that properly is immensely tempting. Heck, when writing music I've got many challenges similar to writing software.
I'll probably always write a little software for personal amusement but it's not exactly a relaxing discipline, as I'm showing by posting this from the office in the UK and I've been here at or around this time for most of the last week.
If I wasn't a musician, I'd teach. Infant or lower primary, so probably the under 8-9s. I do a bit of voluntary work with that age group in my spare time and it's immensely rewarding, but quite frustrating in that you just don't get to see that much of the kids' development.
Equally, I know that there's a strong theory going round in the UK now that says part of the reason we have significantly lower educational attainment in boys than girls is that most primary school teachers are female. The girls have teachers to look up to - the boys have footballers, TV presenters, parents (who, statistically speaking, aren't likely to be models of educational attainment)... and so tend to gravitate towards a culture of success in sport being good and in class being bad, almost social death. Not good. If I could help turn that around for just a few kids...
(Yes, I know teaching's hard work and it wouldn't be an easy ride after software!)
Why can't they just build a UWB receive-only box, stick one on the plane and yell at anyone who flashes up as sending out a signal?
Or, for that matter, build a better insulation system round the components before I just bring on a homemade electrical interference generator. Not difficult to generate RF noise, after all.
* Not everyone needs a screen. If you just want something headless, it's much smaller. * Contractor or other multi-site based role? Well, this gives you a full PC with network in a box not much bigger than a PDA. Take this round, plug it into their keyboard, mouse and monitor and you've got a PC with little carried round. Yes, that's dependent on them being there but how many offices don't have them spare somewhere? Also, means you get a proper one of each rather than the ergonomic nightmare that is a laptop.
Re:A cool idea for a certain type of user
on
Cappuccino PC, Round 3
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I looked at Cappucinos a while back as a small footprint machine. Machine had to go out in a flight case nice and easily but needed normal screen (TFT OK), keyboard and mouse. Last I heard, we were using something else now though. Can't remember what, sorry.
Problems, as I recall:
* NOISY! That cooling fan was, wow, loud. Not good. * Messy. I know it's small, but I'd accept a slightly larger footprint if it meant all the cables came out in the same place. * Icky floppy drive solution. If you want one, how about a docking station? Much tidier.
For us, it was a nice bit of kit but not that fantastic. Still, interesting.
Never tried through GSView for some reason, can't think why - but thanks, will look at it. Was always trying the commmand line before and that always barfed.
Oh, BTW, thanks for everyone giving tips on Ghostscript but I've never had a problem with that, just the PDF conversion bit:-)
This post is utterly commercial, no point denying it.
My employer does exactly this sort of thing. We don't offer online blackboards or self-authored courses as standard because our customers don't tend to ask for them and they're significant extra complication and expense, but they're there if you want them.
We'll write something that does what you want, not just take a CD-ROM off the shelf and copy your name onto it. Basically, if you can describe the function we'll look at including it.
Based on MS technologies, I'm afraid, because we have to run on corporate Intranets and finding NT servers on intranets isn't difficult. This sort of thing doesn't tend to start from IT so getting their consent to install something funny can be a good game.
We ask the question because a very significant percentage of the population profess religious faith and that it influences the way they live their life.
If you showed me a statistically significant population group who believed in a specific type of dragons and used that as the basis for a value system, I'd happily argue for its inclusion on a census. Until then, let's just leave it at the Religion question.
OK, 3.5 year old computer, but that's far from unusual. On this hardware, IE can take significant periods of time just to display a window and will lock my processor on 100% utilisation to do so.
Which is exactly why I initially moved to Mozilla, which is absolute greased lightning in comparison. Opens windows in fractions of the time and almost never coughs. Now I use it because I prefer it (though keywords seem to have packed up now, mumble mumble) but I moved because it was soooooo much faster and IE was barely usable.
Slashdot Mirror
(Heading rapidly OT...)
Germany's an odd case because it had been forced to become a constitutional democracy by the treaty of Versailles. The public didn't really want or like it - a majority of votes, by the end, were going to parties who opposed democracy and wanted to rewrite the constitution.
Combine an imposed democracy with a state with severe economic problems and a feeling of hurt about the way WW1 had ended, and a dictator who said they'd make Germany great again was pretty much inevitable at some point.
The same could happen elsewhere (Bush sometimes seems to want to head in that direction, as does Blair) but it's far less likely IMO.
OK, this is a daft patent. In fact, we're seeing daft patents by the ton.
This may be down to a truly incompetent PTO. However, I saw an interesting idea a while back.
Let's say you're some lowly patent clerk. Let's say you know that there's systemic problems.
What better way of highlighting the problems is there than putting through patents that can be shown invalid in an instant? People jump up and down, notice and after a while we hopefully get a root and branch review of the organisation and all patents granted in recent times.
We're picking up on all sorts of crappy patents but they can be knocked down quickly and they're normally granted to small companies who can't realistically exploit them. If this sort of patent is turning up, though, there are going to be bigger ones outside our field which are just as bad but are granted to people who can make a nuisance.
Press for review, by all means. But I'm pretty sure by now that the patter of terrible patents is too great for simple incompetence alone.
Mailservers often return the mail that was sent to the dud address. I've received this mail and seen it as spam before.
Yes, viruses are most likely but it definitely happens with spam.
Southwest Alaskans say bird is size of a small plane?
OK, has anyone been observed looking up at the sky and asking 'Is it a bird? Is it a plane?'
Sorry...
(Netscape 4 definitely had History, and it was more sortable than IE's.)
IE's
* Isn't accurate, it loses pages
* Displays stuff sorted by server title, which will often be some low-level content server rather than the site title.
It's a nuisance.
Registration discourages most? No way. Morality discourages most.
Let's be honest, with most software if you want to install without registering it's not tricky. MS software took a string of 1s for years, most have keygens or large piles of serials available.
What discourages people is morality. I buy software because it's right. I buy films because it's right - I tape stuff when I can't buy it at a reasonable price, and normally buy in a sale. I could download hours of music and have a CD burner, yet I've got well over 100 albums and am adding to that at 2-3 a month. I'm one of the guys they like, and they make quite a bit from me.
While the industry keeps assuming I'm a thief and getting in my way as a legitimate consumer on that basis, it increases the chance that I will agree with them and steal, out of spite and / or frustration. While they continue to trust me and put out decent product, I continue to buy it. Yes, I lend CDs to friends, some of whom have no doubt ripped or burnt. That's free advertising to them, and many new CDs will have been sold because of that. I've certainly bought for this reason.
There is a simple fact here: while they continue to treat me like a thief, they increase the chance I'll become one. Back off, save on PR and money with these ridiculous schemes and I'll be happier. I'll probably also walk straight into an electrical shop and buy a DVD player rather than researching some multiregion macrovision free machine, and waiting far longer to actually buy.
And people don't do that with Windows already?
Before I moved, I was Windows support for a _lot_ of people. Part of what helps Windows is that there's already the network of friendly computer literate people that know it.
Now, I'm not saying that Linux is just as easy as Windows. Not looked in for a little while but it certainly wasn't then and information I've heard since hasn't suggested that's changed. But, it remains that Windows is already beyond many users, so Linux being so isn't as much of a problem as some people think.
Macromedia certainly used to produce an addon for Dreamweaver called Coursebuilder which, IIRC (only looked at it briefly, it's only of peripheral relevance to my job) was rather nice and a free add-on.
a bt&cfid=286743&cftoken=76681359) compliant. For this, you want to use pro tools. A managed learning environment working with non-standards based courses isn't a problem (I write such beasts day in day out) but it does complicate matters. I suppose a student could do this as a project again but, erm, I wouldn't recommend it, having read the standards :-)
Toolbook produces strange HTML which doesn't translate that nicely to stuff other than Win/IE from what I recall. Authorware I've not noticed I've come across. Flash / Director require plugins (duh...), Director is a pain to integrate into a Learning Management System. Seminar4Web is another I've come across - again, only really works well with Win/IE and even then it's a little strange to put it tactfully. It's also rather expensive.
I'd look at what you're looking to do, though. For a lot of courses, thinking about how the content should work and it all fit together, it's not rocket science to do the HTML. Breaking the learning down properly into components is interesting, but you're trained educators, right?
My advice? Get the CS department to lay you out a template that you can drop content into and do simple, JavaScript testing. That's not complicated, it's all that's required and will make a nice project for a student.
This is assuming a reasonably small scope, though. If you're ultimately looking at moving this to a larger managed learning environment (which isn't necessarily appropriate) then you'll be better off pumping out stuff which is AICC (http://www.aicc.org/) and / or SCORM (http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=scorm
Fans I barely notice but then I've got an ancient PII so it's not that noisy :-) I never found sleeping with it on pleasant but I can.
;-)
What really irritates me, though, is that the speakers have a terrible power supply that hums constantly. _That_ is a real problem, because of the totally different type of buzz.
(Actually, even more annoying when I'm trying to sleep is that alarm clock! Wakes me up every morning.
Wow....
.the .product? http://www.theproduct.de/fr08_final.zip, needs DX8 but _very_ impressive.
If we can give ourselves slightly more space and allow something with even more artistic content, what about
The foundation is built on religious faith. Yes, that's rather different to science to put it mildly :-)
Science looking at similar things is making an awful lot of deductive leaps, though, and it's quite a long way from the point of last known fact.
I'm not suggesting the two are equal, or that religious theories should be in the textbooks. I've said before I think the kids should have them mentioned alongside in school, very much in passing, but that's another matter which I'm not about to go in to.
Anyway, all I was doing was agreeing with your comment about science in this area being, erm, less than certain, and whingeing how it's annoying that people comment that religion is less than certain while forgetting that science is too, even if in a very different way.
Believe me, I agree with you.
Whoops, forgot to add something.
I'm not remotely intending to bash science either. Science is cool, science is how we find all sorts of things out and science, properly applied, is definitely the final word.
But science isn't certain about a whole bunch of things people seem to think it is and I wish some people would remember this and be a little more humble in discussions.
(Am I about to start a flamewar? Please, no, I certainly won't post in one.)
Yes, but I wish that was better recognised. There's a lot of science which definitely falls into this category - stuff like size and age of universe, planetary history and so on.
Speaking as someone with some scientific background and an interest in religion, it's somewhat irritating when people consistently bleat about how science has proved various things like Earth being however many billion years old. No, it hasn't - and it can't, by definition, because it can't observe or repeat it - it's merely that the current theories, which seem to hold water at the moment, suggest that that's true. But the whole foundation for the theories can be a bit like a house of cards at times.
Anyway, that's me out.
Last I recall, two musicians and a fisherman.
... and so tend to gravitate towards a culture of success in sport being good and in class being bad, almost social death. Not good. If I could help turn that around for just a few kids...
Speaking personally, I love performing. I love jamming music, I love writing music, I love listening to music. I even enjoy the physical act of playing (I'm a trumpeter). The idea of being able to dedicate myself to that properly is immensely tempting. Heck, when writing music I've got many challenges similar to writing software.
I'll probably always write a little software for personal amusement but it's not exactly a relaxing discipline, as I'm showing by posting this from the office in the UK and I've been here at or around this time for most of the last week.
If I wasn't a musician, I'd teach. Infant or lower primary, so probably the under 8-9s. I do a bit of voluntary work with that age group in my spare time and it's immensely rewarding, but quite frustrating in that you just don't get to see that much of the kids' development.
Equally, I know that there's a strong theory going round in the UK now that says part of the reason we have significantly lower educational attainment in boys than girls is that most primary school teachers are female. The girls have teachers to look up to - the boys have footballers, TV presenters, parents (who, statistically speaking, aren't likely to be models of educational attainment)
(Yes, I know teaching's hard work and it wouldn't be an easy ride after software!)
Why can't they just build a UWB receive-only box, stick one on the plane and yell at anyone who flashes up as sending out a signal?
Or, for that matter, build a better insulation system round the components before I just bring on a homemade electrical interference generator. Not difficult to generate RF noise, after all.
Much more niche market, this thingy, but:
* Not everyone needs a screen. If you just want something headless, it's much smaller.
* Contractor or other multi-site based role? Well, this gives you a full PC with network in a box not much bigger than a PDA. Take this round, plug it into their keyboard, mouse and monitor and you've got a PC with little carried round. Yes, that's dependent on them being there but how many offices don't have them spare somewhere? Also, means you get a proper one of each rather than the ergonomic nightmare that is a laptop.
I looked at Cappucinos a while back as a small footprint machine. Machine had to go out in a flight case nice and easily but needed normal screen (TFT OK), keyboard and mouse. Last I heard, we were using something else now though. Can't remember what, sorry.
Problems, as I recall:
* NOISY! That cooling fan was, wow, loud. Not good.
* Messy. I know it's small, but I'd accept a slightly larger footprint if it meant all the cables came out in the same place.
* Icky floppy drive solution. If you want one, how about a docking station? Much tidier.
For us, it was a nice bit of kit but not that fantastic. Still, interesting.
Did anyone else think of the B5 episode where some guy is sueing an alien because his grandfather was abducted by the alien's grandfather?
Is anyone at home and so can look up the reference?
Never tried through GSView for some reason, can't think why - but thanks, will look at it. Was always trying the commmand line before and that always barfed.
:-)
Oh, BTW, thanks for everyone giving tips on Ghostscript but I've never had a problem with that, just the PDF conversion bit
<duck>
I have _never_ made that work. Ever.
:-)
Windows, tried several versions though gave up trying a while back now.
Can anyone verify that there's a version that works for Windows now? And tell me which? I'll be your friend forever!
4.1.12 and in its time it was pretty popular.
Given that I thought v5 was hideously archaic when I used it in '97, though, I can understand why you might not have liked it.
My employer does exactly this sort of thing. We don't offer online blackboards or self-authored courses as standard because our customers don't tend to ask for them and they're significant extra complication and expense, but they're there if you want them.
We'll write something that does what you want, not just take a CD-ROM off the shelf and copy your name onto it. Basically, if you can describe the function we'll look at including it.
Based on MS technologies, I'm afraid, because we have to run on corporate Intranets and finding NT servers on intranets isn't difficult. This sort of thing doesn't tend to start from IT so getting their consent to install something funny can be a good game.
If you want more info, have a look or mail me.
Who modded this insightful??!?!
We ask the question because a very significant percentage of the population profess religious faith and that it influences the way they live their life.
If you showed me a statistically significant population group who believed in a specific type of dragons and used that as the basis for a value system, I'd happily argue for its inclusion on a census. Until then, let's just leave it at the Religion question.
Me.
OK, 3.5 year old computer, but that's far from unusual. On this hardware, IE can take significant periods of time just to display a window and will lock my processor on 100% utilisation to do so.
Which is exactly why I initially moved to Mozilla, which is absolute greased lightning in comparison. Opens windows in fractions of the time and almost never coughs. Now I use it because I prefer it (though keywords seem to have packed up now, mumble mumble) but I moved because it was soooooo much faster and IE was barely usable.