Hrm, if socializing at school is called "talking in class," what do you call playing at recess, sitting with people at lunch, picking teams during physical education, and the like? In your "serious" answer, I beleive you're using the word "socialized" where you mean "civilized." If kids at school were truly unsocialized as you suggest, then any school during playtime or recess would be totally silent. Are these kids social? Damn straight. Are they civil? That's another issue...
If you want a kid who will act years ahead of his time when around you, and then be ostracized when he leaves your protctive bubble for being "older than everyone his age" (because it's gonna happen), more power to you. If you want your kid to mature at a normal rate, put him with other kids going through the same process.
Oh, and how do single homeschooled kids learn about the opposite sex...not even the sex ed stuff, just the fact that "girls" exist and that they are fundamentally different than "boys"? i don't deny that homeschooled kids are bright - if you as a parent are willing to devote that much time to teaching them, then you're damn well gonna do a good job of it. however I challenge you this: put a kid from a normal high-school and a homeschooled kid (same age) into a room full of strangers their own age, and challenge them to make the most contacts and get the most phone numbers (watered-down networking) in an hours. The normally-schooled kid would win in a heartbeat.
Presentation-contest wise, I also challenge your comparision with this: if every kid who participated in them had a one-to-one student-teacher ratio, do you think homeschooled kids would still clean up? When you have the direct support and assistance of an adult, you will obviously be able to do more than when you're one of twenty in a class.
I'm the proud owner of a "Friends Don't Let Friends Go To Western" shirt, but had to include it on the grounds that I know some...well, one...really intelligent person that goes there.
Not to echo what many people have said so far, but are you sure it's AD(H)D? I've been working at various summer Camps over tha past years, and as part of the application process parents send us a form with all the information on their kids that we might possibly need in order to manage them and interact with them well. Many times there will be letter from their doctors and/or therapists in there as well. I can't count the number of times that that a kid has looked like a terror on paper but has turned out to be a normal kids. Maybe its the influence of their parents that are screwing them up. maybe they ahd a rough month and were put on the big R but when they have a vacation from it, it turns out they do't need it. Or maybe it's the parents tyring to find a "scientific" way to rationalize the symptoms of shitty parenthood, and find a way to not blame their kids being messed up on themselves.
I'm not saying AD(H)D dosen't exist - I also know kids who are indeed, and who seriously need R/C (take your pick), and I'm not saying the poster is a shitty parent - if they care enough to ask an audience of millions blindly, they must have a genuine care for their kids' wellbeing. Just generally, make sure it's AD(H)D, and not that your kid dosen't like their school/is antisocial/has authority issues/is afraid of failure/the list goes on and on...
On another note, please DON'T homeschool your kid. Ever. Even if both parents are professional teachers, half (at least) of the point of primary school is learning how to interact socially with others. Maybe interact is too strong a word - how about deal and talk to others. How to deal with being put into a room with 20 other kids knowing no-one, and knowing what to do. If you want your kid to end up living in your basement all their live because the're afraid of the outside world and new people, more power to you. if you want a decently-adjusted kid, send them to school, daycare, summer camp, you name it. Teach them to interact and deal with others first - addition can come later.
(For the record I'm a Toronto kid in my first year of McGill ECE, finishing high school with a B+ average from a Toronto-area private school)
Am I the only one that sees this whole UOIT thing as a waste of money? No, not the idea of laptops (seems nice to me), but the whole concept of a new University in Ontario is stupid and shortsighted. In the past few years we've had enough spors at the major Universities for everyone, but they need money to continue to grow and develop new programs.
Based on the timing of this thing, it looks like it's designed to accept the double cohort kids (when two grades come out of high school in the same year, a once-in-a-lifetime thing) - so it will be full for a few years because kids can't go anywhere else, and then we'll have a sinkhole of money in Oshawa...I mean really, who wants to go to school in Oshawa. Kids who want to go to a high-end school will apply to the same places they have always applied - U of T, Queen's, McGill, Western - and kids who don't want something that's offered at one of those schools have plenty of choices as-is.
<RANT>Bottom line is that the sixty million the province is spending on this could be used in a myriad of better places: high-schools, polution cleanup, OHIP...the list goes on. What we DON'T need is another second-rate school in the middle of nowhere. </RANT>
One of the best reasources if you're just looking to go somewhere that will impress you in the UNESCO World Heritage Site list. I've been ot a fair number of the places on the list (one of my goals in life is to see them all), an not one has failed to impress me. The awe-inspiring beauty of many of the natural ones, and the engineering feats of many of the historic civilizations.
Another thing always woth checking out is practically anyting by everyone's favourite engineer-who-wants-to-be-an-architect Santiago Calatrava. Personally, I love his bridges, but pretty much everything that he builds is beautiful in appeareance, design, and functionality.
Or just go to Japan, get a JR-Rail Pass, and try to go on every type of Shinkansen in the system. And then spend you last day at an indoor ski hill.
Isn't that what they do at most Universities? Take the kids who would pirate things like VS.net, give the full copies for free in academic non-commerical licences, and get them hooked so that if they ever wanna do something commercial with it they've gotta shell out for the full version (because it's all they know how to use)...
Get out the wands and pointy hats...
on
The Wireless City
·
· Score: 3, Funny
...because according to the Bryant Park People NYCWireless is run by a bunch of computer wizards!
I've seen a fair number of people mention that they want something closer to the command-line, and more involved file-system management. That may be fine for you, but what about for my grandma who just wants to use word, outlook, and her knitting pattern designer. She dosen't want anything to do with the command line - she wants a (virtual) button to press that will "make it go" and run what she means.
So when you say a better GUI, I challenge you to qualify what you mean. Do you want a better GUI for the programmers and hardcore command-line-junkies out there, or do you want somthing for the majority of users who don't give a shit about the command line or the filesystem, and who just want to "make it go?"
Fos us who like the line (and like things like gcc, regexps, or **nix), then maybe a GUI with command lines everywhere is what we need. But all my grandma (or Joe Sixpack) needs is a bunch of buttons - like (as someone suggested) PalmOS. Or a Mac.
Now (knowing this crowd) I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but I'll put it out: I want on of these. Not a wishy-washy TabletPC, but a "SmartDisplay."
As opposed to trying to find all the negatives about it (although I do agree on the security and bandwidth points), think of what you could do with one of these. Put it by your bedside table and read the newspaper/your email from the comfort of bed on Sunday morning. Watch a movie from your hammock in the backyard in the summer. Imagine a six-hundred student lecture with one of these terminal in each seat - interactivity that wouldn't suck.
Collaborative work in a design-office setting. Wanna get the guy across the room's opinion on what you did? Bring the screen over to him. Or pretty much any application that needs acces to huge amounts of visual information - categroized bad on where it is either on the monitor wall or on the Mira. And lastly, you know you want to be like Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies, working off one of these and a two-story video wall.
I was actually considering rolling one my own of these things for my dorm (so I could use my computer from bed and across the hall) - two WiFi cards, a laptop, and VNC. Then I remembered that I didn't have the cash for an AP and the the battery life on the laptop blew.
Oh well, I'll wait until these things get cheaper. And would your opinion on this whole thing be different if the words "MS" and "Bill Gates" had nothgin to do with it - what about a <fav distro>-based SmartDisplay?
If you ever come accross an IBM MWave card (combo sound card and modem) - they came with the early Aptivas - do the world a favour and burn it. That has to be one of the worst products ever made. Not only dosne't it work, but the official Tech Support answer for any MWaave question in WinFax Pro was "get a new modem" - after years of work trying ot get the MWave to be compatible, they just gave up on it.
Ideologically I don't really like forking over my money to a huge corporation like Microsoft. Computationally I don't like an OS that has 128M of RAM and 1.5 gigs of space as a requirement (WinXP, I'm looking in your direction). Interface-wise, look at the default layout of XP. Enough said about that.
But the fact is, it works. Whenever anything I might need comes out, it's available almost instantly for Win2K (my Windows of choice). The Office file formats are de facto standards, even if the pirce for them is outrageous. It tells me when I need to update and patch the system, even if that little box comes up much more often than it should. When I reformat, I can reboot with the CD in the drive, select a few options, and half an hour later my system will be up and running, having located all the right drivers for what I have. It's stable - I think the only time I've had a Win2K crash was when I tried to launch 300 instances of WinAmp at once.
So in short, it does the job. Ideologically I may not like it, but when I have to reformat and write a ten page essay in one night, ideology won't help me. Speed and efficiency will. For better or for worse, I've been using Windows for about eight years - I know how it works, I know how to do what I want with it, and I have no practical reason to switch. Give me a Linux that does what I want it to do, in a way that I know how to do, and has software/is compatible with other system, and you'll have a new user. But not until then.
Bottom line: W2K is the right tool for the job. Make Linux that tool and you'll have more people using it. But right now, Winxx does the job.
Clarification - when I meant print the name, I meant the name of the candidate that the voter voted for, not their name. Thus they tell their name to the voting officier who marks them off, and that's it for name association. The machine and the ballot don't knoe who they are.
One of the major things I hear in relation to voting machines is that they provide no accountability in respect to hand-counting ballots, and that they're nothing more than glorified printers.
So why not make them go the who way and make them entirely glorified printers?
I'm serious here. The whole idea of punchcard machines is that they should be a decvice to allow the voter to express their opinion. So why not have a system like this: voter digns in at desk, is given special ballot (paper card with mag strip on the back or somthing to make sure it's legit). Voter goes into booth, inserts ballot card (in any direction), picks candidate from list of names w/ pictures and party logos (like in S.African elections) . Voter presses "Vote!" and confirms. Machine prints out card with name of person voted for on it and simple machine-readable pattern. Voter looks at poster above machine that shows the name of each candidate and the code that corrosponds to them (so we need a relatively simple code) to make sure it's right, voter drops card in box on the way out.
With that system, there's three level of checking. The result comes from the voting computer. If within a certain percent, automatic recount triggered and done by running actual ballots thru counting machines (here's where that machine-readable code come in handy). If another recount is demanded, then use the names printed on the cards.
This seems fairly straightforward - what am I missing here?
Re:GT Snowracer
on
Ultimate Sleds?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's all about the NOMA GT Snowsracer..I think I may even still have mine in my basement somewhere. Never had a problem using it...except that time that my friend went down the hill on his, let go of the wheel for a sec, and the auto-turning spring smashed him into a tree and he broke both his legs.
Moral of the story: it's all about the GT. Except if you ever let go of the wheel, get the fuck off the sled.
Let's take a little mental trip to everyone's favourite un-Unionized workplaces - the EPZs of the Phillipines (or various other countries in that reigion)! There we have workers in factory, doing unsafe jobs, being underpaid, and getting no respect from their superiors. Comparing that to the Tech sector, I can hear all our local/. Liberatarians screaming "that could never happen to us, they're unskilled and we're not, we can just walk if we're unhappy" and other fun things like that. But I encourage you to think with a bit of a more global perspective.
You think you're safe because you're skilled? What about all the people coming out of schools in India and the Far East, who are just as skilled and hardworking as you are. And they're willing to work for a third of the price you are, because cost-of-living is so low there. Or they'll work for an equally low wage here if you dangle the magic letters "H1-B" in front of their faces.
So why don't we all just walk if we're not happy with our situation? Well, for the obvious, where are we gonna walk to, and what will we do when we get there? Sure, you can say you'll walk to Fry's, but in this discussion, that's not what anyone means. Walking is both bad for you (you've gotta find a new job) and bad for teh Company (they've gotta get all the new workers integrated with the project).
On a more general note, is their any other industry where it's considered acceptable for the workers to have to work 16-hour days and weekends, carry pagers 24/7, kill holidays at the last minute, and spend their lives in dark cramped rooms in front of a monitor? No other industry would stand for this - it'd be illegal. If we want any power of negotiation, we need to Unionize.
Having said that, I also think there should be some limits on it. In France, for example, it takes only two people to call a strike (but it has to be over an issue for the common good). The SNCF is en greve literally every week in some part of the country. That's too far. What I want is a Union that will stop my job being transfered to Bangalore (or Wisconsin) for no other reason than the bottom line of a company. I want a Union that will make sure I'm compensated if I have to spend most of my expensive holiday in Austria and my valuble vacation days on the phone because the Global Crossing pipeline went down (happened to a friend of mine). And I want a Union that will stand up for me when I say "no" to the "can you come in on Saturday and Sunday" question because my son has a school play - or because I want to sleep in and watch the Game on TV (or at least make sure I'm well-compensated for it). That's what I want, and what we need.
I think I'm missing something...where are we talking about religious suicide holy war? Not in the article we're not. We're talking about the Nation of Islam - as in the organization currently headed by Louis Farrakan - who's mission is (off the top of my head) a seperate all-black state, not the Nation of all Islamic people (as in the geopolitical sense). It's not a particularly Muslim organization; it's mostly about black empowrement.
I don't like stereotyping, but this is exactly what the above is: somone read it, saw the word 'Islam' and instantly thought "terrorism blaming! terrorism blaming!" without seeing the context.
More power to you for defending your faith. But try and read what the context and the article is before you go calling everyone racist. Unless you're actually Nation yourself, in which case you're allowed to be offended.
Something I've never understood about plans for building high-speed rail networks: if you're gonna go and build on, then you're allready willing to spend a huge amount of money. Why not spend a bit more and get a system that works; i.e. go to the SNCF office in Paris, throw money at them and say "we'd like to borrow the entire TGV developing team for a few years" and then set them to work. SNCF introduced a whole new high-speed line (the TGV Mediteraniee) about a year and a half ago and it was running right on schedule within a few weeks after launch (or as much of a schedule as the French railway has). Acela's been going for how long without fully working?
If you want a practical high-speed rail network, go get the French or the Japanese and be prepared to spend a huge amount of money, both on initial capital and maintenance. SNCF has like six TGV trains who just drive the rails constantly looking for cracks and fissuers - as a result, every inch of track on the network is rechecked every two months, if my memory severs me correctly.
I've always wondered what would happen if you put a horizontally-polarized plate of plastic over a licence plate...it would still be visible if you stood behind it and looked forwards, but if you're at the angle that photo-radar cameras look from (say 40 degrees in the UK) than it would be blocked.
On another vein, what about putting an LCD screen in front of the plate, with a photo sensor to detect the flash of the photo-radar camera. Kinda like the thing that they put on satellites to block them being blinded by lasers (but much cheaper):P
Assuming you're using the book for referenece...it's the exact same sitaution as somone who needs a cookbook to cook. My keyboard dead center suspended just under desk (perfect height), monitor dead center about (::extends arm to measure::) two arms's lengths away from edge, clear desk sapce in between. Midway between me and the monitor just over to the left (as little as possible while maintaining clear view) is one of those cookbook stands with the plastic fronts (both holds the book open and protects it from those deadly aerial attacks), on the right (same position) is a document holder used for notes, etc. Oh, and the wall behind my monitor is covered in large-size photocopies of things I look at often, as well as the Post-It notes surrounding the monitor and wall.
I think the secret (for me, at least), is having everything orientated so that I nevr have to actually move my head. All docs I would reference are within a movement of my eyes (the only real exception is the stuff at the top of the wall, but it's mainly get your war on anyways)
I'm in one of Dr. Ariel Fenster's classes (Chem 110 - not the one mentioned) and I'ma big fan of the cool.mcgill.ca project. Allows me to watch all my lectures from my bed when I'm hungover on Fridays (class ends at 1pm, wake up and watch around 3pm). On another note, he's an amazing teacher - he makes reasonably dry stuff (introductory Chem) come alive and keeps it going and lively in a class of six hundred people.
Coming from living in the UK, reading this thread really reminds me of how US-centric Slashdot really is - not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but a reality. In the UK, almost everyone takes a year off. If they have the money, they go and do somthing cool, if they don't, they scrimp and get a shit job for eight months then go do somthing cool - and it's almost never related to what their degree is going to be in. It's seen over there that the majority of people just arn't ready to go to University at the end of A-Levels (High School). Even Prince William, future King of England (funny how England still has a King) took a year off and went and helped out in South America.
From personal experince, I am just coming off a Gap year, and had an amazing time. Was it essentially one year-long vacation? Yes. But do I have stuff to show from it? Yes. I went to a Language School in France for four months; I had an amazing time partying most night, and also have a DELF (French Government) certificate that says I can speak French. I went and volunteered to do conservation work in Zambia (with Greenforce); got to see a part of the world I'd never been to before, and can now get references from them and say that I've been part of an actual scientific expedition (which would be useful if that was my field). I travelled alone (for the first extended period) around Australia and NZ; nothing to show for that bit except some good stories and pictures and a much deeper understanding of who I am and how I function. So, depending on how you look at it, I either came away with lots, or with nothing. But do I regret it? Not for a second.
Some of the issues raised in other posts are true: I've had friends who have taken a Gap year that extended into their whole lives, but for every one of those I know four who said they'd take one year off, and only ended up taking one year off. You'll be a year older coming out of College - who cares? I'm ninteen and going into first year. On my floor is aged everyone from seventeen to tewenty...beleive it or not, not every education system in the world ends at the same age. The one thing I have noticed is that it's taken me about a month to remember how to work efficiently, and yes, I have forgotten some stuff from HS, but let's be honest - that was the stuff I never really knew anyways.
The other question to ask yourself is "Am I ready for College life now?" At the time, I wasn't sure (and neither were my parents), and in retrospect I now know for sure I wasn't ready.
In sum, talk it over with your parents and you friends. Talk it over wirh people that have and haven't done it. Don't talk it over with your guidance counsellor - or if you do, take their advice with a grain of salt (I've never heard of a US guidance counsellor advocating a Gap year). Get really drunk one night and then discuss it with yourself. What's more important to you - finishing a year early or getting a year of real-world experience that most others (in the US) won't have?
As an aside, I didn't have to worry about getting into College afterwards; I applied to my school (McGill) and then requested to deferr my acceptance. As long as I told them what I was going to do with my year, they wree cool with it. talk to admissions people about it. Financially, my parents told me that if I could plan out a year (and not sit on my ass) thay would back me most of the way. The deferred acceptance also meant it was easy to start school again - no having to worry about applications.
I did it, I loved it. Should you? I think so, but I'm not the one taking it (no one here is) - you are.
I'm the proud used of an SB Audigy Platinum, and was curious to test out what Creative says. Now granted, I don't have the Costello CD (I'm not a fan), but I had no problems - I got a nice digital stream from the TOSLINK out - playing both an MP3 and a CD via WinAmp, Media Player 6, and Creative PlayCentre.
Funnily enough, PlayCenter, a Microsoft DRM supported audio player has a large button that says "Rip This CD" and allows you to rip directly to MP3 (up to 320kbps). Your other choice for format is (surprise, surprise) WMA, but there's a checkbox that just says "DRM" next to to. According to the help file "Click the DRM option if you wish to restrict the transfer of the audio file. Protected WMA files cannot be transferred to other systems." I'm not sure how/if this works as I don't use WMA (or PlayCenter, for that matter) but it seems odd the for such a pro-DRM player you have the choice not to enable it in their integrated ripping program.
Also, how do we reckon this would affect motherboard-integrated soundcards. Can MediaPlayer disable the SPDIF coming from it...do ANY motherboard sound solutions support this now?
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone ever done it yet? Take off that silvery cover and replace it with, I dunno, a clear case and a blue mini-cold cathode.
Why? Why the hell not...
Hrm, if socializing at school is called "talking in class," what do you call playing at recess, sitting with people at lunch, picking teams during physical education, and the like? In your "serious" answer, I beleive you're using the word "socialized" where you mean "civilized." If kids at school were truly unsocialized as you suggest, then any school during playtime or recess would be totally silent. Are these kids social? Damn straight. Are they civil? That's another issue...
If you want a kid who will act years ahead of his time when around you, and then be ostracized when he leaves your protctive bubble for being "older than everyone his age" (because it's gonna happen), more power to you. If you want your kid to mature at a normal rate, put him with other kids going through the same process.
Oh, and how do single homeschooled kids learn about the opposite sex...not even the sex ed stuff, just the fact that "girls" exist and that they are fundamentally different than "boys"? i don't deny that homeschooled kids are bright - if you as a parent are willing to devote that much time to teaching them, then you're damn well gonna do a good job of it. however I challenge you this: put a kid from a normal high-school and a homeschooled kid (same age) into a room full of strangers their own age, and challenge them to make the most contacts and get the most phone numbers (watered-down networking) in an hours. The normally-schooled kid would win in a heartbeat.
Presentation-contest wise, I also challenge your comparision with this: if every kid who participated in them had a one-to-one student-teacher ratio, do you think homeschooled kids would still clean up? When you have the direct support and assistance of an adult, you will obviously be able to do more than when you're one of twenty in a class.
I'm the proud owner of a "Friends Don't Let Friends Go To Western" shirt, but had to include it on the grounds that I know some...well, one...really intelligent person that goes there.
Not to echo what many people have said so far, but are you sure it's AD(H)D? I've been working at various summer Camps over tha past years, and as part of the application process parents send us a form with all the information on their kids that we might possibly need in order to manage them and interact with them well. Many times there will be letter from their doctors and/or therapists in there as well. I can't count the number of times that that a kid has looked like a terror on paper but has turned out to be a normal kids. Maybe its the influence of their parents that are screwing them up. maybe they ahd a rough month and were put on the big R but when they have a vacation from it, it turns out they do't need it. Or maybe it's the parents tyring to find a "scientific" way to rationalize the symptoms of shitty parenthood, and find a way to not blame their kids being messed up on themselves.
I'm not saying AD(H)D dosen't exist - I also know kids who are indeed, and who seriously need R/C (take your pick), and I'm not saying the poster is a shitty parent - if they care enough to ask an audience of millions blindly, they must have a genuine care for their kids' wellbeing. Just generally, make sure it's AD(H)D, and not that your kid dosen't like their school/is antisocial/has authority issues/is afraid of failure/the list goes on and on...
On another note, please DON'T homeschool your kid. Ever. Even if both parents are professional teachers, half (at least) of the point of primary school is learning how to interact socially with others. Maybe interact is too strong a word - how about deal and talk to others. How to deal with being put into a room with 20 other kids knowing no-one, and knowing what to do. If you want your kid to end up living in your basement all their live because the're afraid of the outside world and new people, more power to you. if you want a decently-adjusted kid, send them to school, daycare, summer camp, you name it. Teach them to interact and deal with others first - addition can come later.
(For the record I'm a Toronto kid in my first year of McGill ECE, finishing high school with a B+ average from a Toronto-area private school)
Am I the only one that sees this whole UOIT thing as a waste of money? No, not the idea of laptops (seems nice to me), but the whole concept of a new University in Ontario is stupid and shortsighted. In the past few years we've had enough spors at the major Universities for everyone, but they need money to continue to grow and develop new programs.
Based on the timing of this thing, it looks like it's designed to accept the double cohort kids (when two grades come out of high school in the same year, a once-in-a-lifetime thing) - so it will be full for a few years because kids can't go anywhere else, and then we'll have a sinkhole of money in Oshawa...I mean really, who wants to go to school in Oshawa. Kids who want to go to a high-end school will apply to the same places they have always applied - U of T, Queen's, McGill, Western - and kids who don't want something that's offered at one of those schools have plenty of choices as-is.
<RANT>Bottom line is that the sixty million the province is spending on this could be used in a myriad of better places: high-schools, polution cleanup, OHIP...the list goes on. What we DON'T need is another second-rate school in the middle of nowhere. </RANT>
One of the best reasources if you're just looking to go somewhere that will impress you in the UNESCO World Heritage Site list. I've been ot a fair number of the places on the list (one of my goals in life is to see them all), an not one has failed to impress me. The awe-inspiring beauty of many of the natural ones, and the engineering feats of many of the historic civilizations.
Another thing always woth checking out is practically anyting by everyone's favourite engineer-who-wants-to-be-an-architect Santiago Calatrava. Personally, I love his bridges, but pretty much everything that he builds is beautiful in appeareance, design, and functionality.
Or just go to Japan, get a JR-Rail Pass, and try to go on every type of Shinkansen in the system. And then spend you last day at an indoor ski hill.
Isn't that what they do at most Universities? Take the kids who would pirate things like VS.net, give the full copies for free in academic non-commerical licences, and get them hooked so that if they ever wanna do something commercial with it they've gotta shell out for the full version (because it's all they know how to use)...
...because according to the Bryant Park People NYCWireless is run by a bunch of computer wizards!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...Beo...shit - I knew this joke would have to end at some point.
I've seen a fair number of people mention that they want something closer to the command-line, and more involved file-system management. That may be fine for you, but what about for my grandma who just wants to use word, outlook, and her knitting pattern designer. She dosen't want anything to do with the command line - she wants a (virtual) button to press that will "make it go" and run what she means.
So when you say a better GUI, I challenge you to qualify what you mean. Do you want a better GUI for the programmers and hardcore command-line-junkies out there, or do you want somthing for the majority of users who don't give a shit about the command line or the filesystem, and who just want to "make it go?"
Fos us who like the line (and like things like gcc, regexps, or **nix), then maybe a GUI with command lines everywhere is what we need. But all my grandma (or Joe Sixpack) needs is a bunch of buttons - like (as someone suggested) PalmOS. Or a Mac.
Now (knowing this crowd) I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but I'll put it out: I want on of these. Not a wishy-washy TabletPC, but a "SmartDisplay."
As opposed to trying to find all the negatives about it (although I do agree on the security and bandwidth points), think of what you could do with one of these. Put it by your bedside table and read the newspaper/your email from the comfort of bed on Sunday morning. Watch a movie from your hammock in the backyard in the summer. Imagine a six-hundred student lecture with one of these terminal in each seat - interactivity that wouldn't suck.
Collaborative work in a design-office setting. Wanna get the guy across the room's opinion on what you did? Bring the screen over to him. Or pretty much any application that needs acces to huge amounts of visual information - categroized bad on where it is either on the monitor wall or on the Mira. And lastly, you know you want to be like Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies, working off one of these and a two-story video wall.
I was actually considering rolling one my own of these things for my dorm (so I could use my computer from bed and across the hall) - two WiFi cards, a laptop, and VNC. Then I remembered that I didn't have the cash for an AP and the the battery life on the laptop blew.
Oh well, I'll wait until these things get cheaper. And would your opinion on this whole thing be different if the words "MS" and "Bill Gates" had nothgin to do with it - what about a <fav distro>-based SmartDisplay?
If you ever come accross an IBM MWave card (combo sound card and modem) - they came with the early Aptivas - do the world a favour and burn it. That has to be one of the worst products ever made. Not only dosne't it work, but the official Tech Support answer for any MWaave question in WinFax Pro was "get a new modem" - after years of work trying ot get the MWave to be compatible, they just gave up on it.
Ideologically I don't really like forking over my money to a huge corporation like Microsoft. Computationally I don't like an OS that has 128M of RAM and 1.5 gigs of space as a requirement (WinXP, I'm looking in your direction). Interface-wise, look at the default layout of XP. Enough said about that.
But the fact is, it works. Whenever anything I might need comes out, it's available almost instantly for Win2K (my Windows of choice). The Office file formats are de facto standards, even if the pirce for them is outrageous. It tells me when I need to update and patch the system, even if that little box comes up much more often than it should. When I reformat, I can reboot with the CD in the drive, select a few options, and half an hour later my system will be up and running, having located all the right drivers for what I have. It's stable - I think the only time I've had a Win2K crash was when I tried to launch 300 instances of WinAmp at once.
So in short, it does the job. Ideologically I may not like it, but when I have to reformat and write a ten page essay in one night, ideology won't help me. Speed and efficiency will. For better or for worse, I've been using Windows for about eight years - I know how it works, I know how to do what I want with it, and I have no practical reason to switch. Give me a Linux that does what I want it to do, in a way that I know how to do, and has software/is compatible with other system, and you'll have a new user. But not until then.
Bottom line: W2K is the right tool for the job. Make Linux that tool and you'll have more people using it. But right now, Winxx does the job.
Clarification - when I meant print the name, I meant the name of the candidate that the voter voted for, not their name. Thus they tell their name to the voting officier who marks them off, and that's it for name association. The machine and the ballot don't knoe who they are.
One of the major things I hear in relation to voting machines is that they provide no accountability in respect to hand-counting ballots, and that they're nothing more than glorified printers.
So why not make them go the who way and make them entirely glorified printers?
I'm serious here. The whole idea of punchcard machines is that they should be a decvice to allow the voter to express their opinion. So why not have a system like this: voter digns in at desk, is given special ballot (paper card with mag strip on the back or somthing to make sure it's legit). Voter goes into booth, inserts ballot card (in any direction), picks candidate from list of names w/ pictures and party logos (like in S.African elections) . Voter presses "Vote!" and confirms. Machine prints out card with name of person voted for on it and simple machine-readable pattern. Voter looks at poster above machine that shows the name of each candidate and the code that corrosponds to them (so we need a relatively simple code) to make sure it's right, voter drops card in box on the way out.
With that system, there's three level of checking. The result comes from the voting computer. If within a certain percent, automatic recount triggered and done by running actual ballots thru counting machines (here's where that machine-readable code come in handy). If another recount is demanded, then use the names printed on the cards.
This seems fairly straightforward - what am I missing here?
It's all about the NOMA GT Snowsracer..I think I may even still have mine in my basement somewhere. Never had a problem using it...except that time that my friend went down the hill on his, let go of the wheel for a sec, and the auto-turning spring smashed him into a tree and he broke both his legs.
Moral of the story: it's all about the GT. Except if you ever let go of the wheel, get the fuck off the sled.
Let's take a little mental trip to everyone's favourite un-Unionized workplaces - the EPZs of the Phillipines (or various other countries in that reigion)! There we have workers in factory, doing unsafe jobs, being underpaid, and getting no respect from their superiors. Comparing that to the Tech sector, I can hear all our local /. Liberatarians screaming "that could never happen to us, they're unskilled and we're not, we can just walk if we're unhappy" and other fun things like that. But I encourage you to think with a bit of a more global perspective.
You think you're safe because you're skilled? What about all the people coming out of schools in India and the Far East, who are just as skilled and hardworking as you are. And they're willing to work for a third of the price you are, because cost-of-living is so low there. Or they'll work for an equally low wage here if you dangle the magic letters "H1-B" in front of their faces.
So why don't we all just walk if we're not happy with our situation? Well, for the obvious, where are we gonna walk to, and what will we do when we get there? Sure, you can say you'll walk to Fry's, but in this discussion, that's not what anyone means. Walking is both bad for you (you've gotta find a new job) and bad for teh Company (they've gotta get all the new workers integrated with the project).
On a more general note, is their any other industry where it's considered acceptable for the workers to have to work 16-hour days and weekends, carry pagers 24/7, kill holidays at the last minute, and spend their lives in dark cramped rooms in front of a monitor? No other industry would stand for this - it'd be illegal. If we want any power of negotiation, we need to Unionize.
Having said that, I also think there should be some limits on it. In France, for example, it takes only two people to call a strike (but it has to be over an issue for the common good). The SNCF is en greve literally every week in some part of the country. That's too far. What I want is a Union that will stop my job being transfered to Bangalore (or Wisconsin) for no other reason than the bottom line of a company. I want a Union that will make sure I'm compensated if I have to spend most of my expensive holiday in Austria and my valuble vacation days on the phone because the Global Crossing pipeline went down (happened to a friend of mine). And I want a Union that will stand up for me when I say "no" to the "can you come in on Saturday and Sunday" question because my son has a school play - or because I want to sleep in and watch the Game on TV (or at least make sure I'm well-compensated for it). That's what I want, and what we need.
...and what did I see? I saw the sea :P
I think I'm missing something...where are we talking about religious suicide holy war? Not in the article we're not. We're talking about the Nation of Islam - as in the organization currently headed by Louis Farrakan - who's mission is (off the top of my head) a seperate all-black state, not the Nation of all Islamic people (as in the geopolitical sense). It's not a particularly Muslim organization; it's mostly about black empowrement.
I don't like stereotyping, but this is exactly what the above is: somone read it, saw the word 'Islam' and instantly thought "terrorism blaming! terrorism blaming!" without seeing the context.
More power to you for defending your faith. But try and read what the context and the article is before you go calling everyone racist. Unless you're actually Nation yourself, in which case you're allowed to be offended.
Something I've never understood about plans for building high-speed rail networks: if you're gonna go and build on, then you're allready willing to spend a huge amount of money. Why not spend a bit more and get a system that works; i.e. go to the SNCF office in Paris, throw money at them and say "we'd like to borrow the entire TGV developing team for a few years" and then set them to work. SNCF introduced a whole new high-speed line (the TGV Mediteraniee) about a year and a half ago and it was running right on schedule within a few weeks after launch (or as much of a schedule as the French railway has). Acela's been going for how long without fully working?
If you want a practical high-speed rail network, go get the French or the Japanese and be prepared to spend a huge amount of money, both on initial capital and maintenance. SNCF has like six TGV trains who just drive the rails constantly looking for cracks and fissuers - as a result, every inch of track on the network is rechecked every two months, if my memory severs me correctly.
I've always wondered what would happen if you put a horizontally-polarized plate of plastic over a licence plate...it would still be visible if you stood behind it and looked forwards, but if you're at the angle that photo-radar cameras look from (say 40 degrees in the UK) than it would be blocked.
:P
On another vein, what about putting an LCD screen in front of the plate, with a photo sensor to detect the flash of the photo-radar camera. Kinda like the thing that they put on satellites to block them being blinded by lasers (but much cheaper)
Assuming you're using the book for referenece...it's the exact same sitaution as somone who needs a cookbook to cook. My keyboard dead center suspended just under desk (perfect height), monitor dead center about (::extends arm to measure::) two arms's lengths away from edge, clear desk sapce in between. Midway between me and the monitor just over to the left (as little as possible while maintaining clear view) is one of those cookbook stands with the plastic fronts (both holds the book open and protects it from those deadly aerial attacks), on the right (same position) is a document holder used for notes, etc. Oh, and the wall behind my monitor is covered in large-size photocopies of things I look at often, as well as the Post-It notes surrounding the monitor and wall.
I think the secret (for me, at least), is having everything orientated so that I nevr have to actually move my head. All docs I would reference are within a movement of my eyes (the only real exception is the stuff at the top of the wall, but it's mainly get your war on anyways)
Big it up Dr. F!
From personal experince, I am just coming off a Gap year, and had an amazing time. Was it essentially one year-long vacation? Yes. But do I have stuff to show from it? Yes. I went to a Language School in France for four months; I had an amazing time partying most night, and also have a DELF (French Government) certificate that says I can speak French. I went and volunteered to do conservation work in Zambia (with Greenforce); got to see a part of the world I'd never been to before, and can now get references from them and say that I've been part of an actual scientific expedition (which would be useful if that was my field). I travelled alone (for the first extended period) around Australia and NZ; nothing to show for that bit except some good stories and pictures and a much deeper understanding of who I am and how I function. So, depending on how you look at it, I either came away with lots, or with nothing. But do I regret it? Not for a second.
Some of the issues raised in other posts are true: I've had friends who have taken a Gap year that extended into their whole lives, but for every one of those I know four who said they'd take one year off, and only ended up taking one year off. You'll be a year older coming out of College - who cares? I'm ninteen and going into first year. On my floor is aged everyone from seventeen to tewenty...beleive it or not, not every education system in the world ends at the same age. The one thing I have noticed is that it's taken me about a month to remember how to work efficiently, and yes, I have forgotten some stuff from HS, but let's be honest - that was the stuff I never really knew anyways.
The other question to ask yourself is "Am I ready for College life now?" At the time, I wasn't sure (and neither were my parents), and in retrospect I now know for sure I wasn't ready.
In sum, talk it over with your parents and you friends. Talk it over wirh people that have and haven't done it. Don't talk it over with your guidance counsellor - or if you do, take their advice with a grain of salt (I've never heard of a US guidance counsellor advocating a Gap year). Get really drunk one night and then discuss it with yourself. What's more important to you - finishing a year early or getting a year of real-world experience that most others (in the US) won't have?
As an aside, I didn't have to worry about getting into College afterwards; I applied to my school (McGill) and then requested to deferr my acceptance. As long as I told them what I was going to do with my year, they wree cool with it. talk to admissions people about it. Financially, my parents told me that if I could plan out a year (and not sit on my ass) thay would back me most of the way. The deferred acceptance also meant it was easy to start school again - no having to worry about applications.
I did it, I loved it. Should you? I think so, but I'm not the one taking it (no one here is) - you are.
Funnily enough, PlayCenter, a Microsoft DRM supported audio player has a large button that says "Rip This CD" and allows you to rip directly to MP3 (up to 320kbps). Your other choice for format is (surprise, surprise) WMA, but there's a checkbox that just says "DRM" next to to. According to the help file "Click the DRM option if you wish to restrict the transfer of the audio file. Protected WMA files cannot be transferred to other systems." I'm not sure how/if this works as I don't use WMA (or PlayCenter, for that matter) but it seems odd the for such a pro-DRM player you have the choice not to enable it in their integrated ripping program.
Also, how do we reckon this would affect motherboard-integrated soundcards. Can MediaPlayer disable the SPDIF coming from it...do ANY motherboard sound solutions support this now?