My guess is that it's marketing akin to the "designed for Windows 95" labels you saw on keyboards and mousepads and blank floppy disks, back when 95 was released.
People here in Ireland are freaking out hardcore about the Euro changeover, and there's a marketing campaign going on that's only slightly less vigorous than the Win95 one was.
The Irish use both, in a somewhat confusing interchange.
Ex: you can buy a pint of Guinness, or a.5 litre bottle of Coke, but not vice versa. Petrol is sold in litres, but the new car stickers sometimes list miles/gallon for fuel effeciency. Distance from a to b is measured in kilometres, but speed is in miles/hour.
Maybe there were some Irishmen working on the conversion screwup?
Re:Open source out with the dot com bust?
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 2
Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars...
This may sound a bit offtopic, but:
'They' really are buying mindshare. I thought I was basically unaffected by advertizing, and that I'd resisted the influence of TV commercials. I moved to Ireland this month, though, and I've discovered that I've been fooling myself the whole time.
Yesterday, I spent 3 minutes looking at various brands of laundry soap, trying to determine which one to buy. Finally, I realized that what I was really doing was looking for a brand name I recognized. I almost bought a brand that had the same color scheme as my old brand. The thing is, I had no info on which one worked best, because I'd never seen commercials for any of them, and that's how I knew which one to buy in the states.
I've discovered that I've developed many more opinions through TV ads than I ever thought I had. It's actually pretty unsettling.
Re:Got way more brains than Salon
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 2
I have also stopped reading Salon. Granted, I really only read it because I disagree with the political slant of the site and I like to see the view from the other side of the aisle...
Unfortunately, that view is now permamently obscured by giant banners and a privacy fence. When I started feeling like I was reading Salon through knotholes, I stopped reading.
Microsoft Lawyers Shut Down Rural Nepalese Computer Lab Due to Alleged Licence Violations
I'd love to see MS go after this guy... they'd get massacred in the press, and end up having to give the guy a truckload of brand new PC's and software just to save face.
The post I was commenting on was describing a situation typical of what I've seen in medium- to low-budget school systems: not a PC in every classroom, but a few in the 'math lab' and one or two in the library, and comp lit with the Apple IIe. In my school, it was the TRS80 in 'cs', Apples in the math/science lab, and a Compaq with Compton's Encyclopedia on it in the library. Oh, and we couldn't use the CDROM encyclopedia for research papers because there wasn't a standard way to reference it in the bibliography.
The point is, no school was spending $8000, or even $4000, per classroom. They were spending maybe that much per school, or perhaps a touch more. Schools still spend, on average, very little on computers.
If you want to find someplace to save $$$ in schools, ban competetive high-school sports. Rewarding as they may be to a small group, schools tend to spend twice as much on the football team as they do on the music dept, the library, the PC or science lab, or any other area of the school. When I was in highschool, we had overhead projectors with no bulbs, the aforementioned TRS80s in the PC lab, 15-year old encyclopedias, and the nicest football field in the district.
...for purchase and maintenance of those units would be around $8,000 for a classroom of 28 students. Can you imagine the jump in the quality of teaching applicants a district would receive if even $4,000 of that amount were being given to the teacher?
Spreading $4000 amongst all the teachers in the school wouldn't amount to any sort of incentive at all. Imagine: "Hey, we've got a new opening for an English teacher! It's a great job, and the money's getting better all the time. We gave all 50 of our teachers a whopping $80 bonus last year!"
Sure he should get a chance, but first he's got to pass 5th grade math.
Would you like to work with a scientist who couldn't do basic math in his head? I suppose, if he's a archaeologist, but I'd venture to say no one ever saw Einstein scrambling for a calculator because he didn't know how to multiply on paper.
Clearly, from your example, learning to write also isn't about correct use of the apostrophe, capitalization, or proper use of commas.
Not only did your teachers fail to teach you to write well, they failed to even teach you what good writing is and why it requires the ability to spell and punctuate properly!
If the point of getting a computer for a 7th grade child is to 'free' the child from learning and understanding the conventions of the language, then it's an awful idea. Personally, I've always viewed a spell checker as a teaching tool, not a safety net.
IMHO, it's a poor idea to forego learning a skill because you can rely on the crutch of a PC to do it for you. Kids should be taught to use a PC because it's faster and more efficient, but never allowed to lean on it to the detriment of their own brains.
Fair use is part of the copyright law itself. Its intention is to prevent people from having to pay to excerpt from works for educational or other purposes, and it's been interpreted to also include what's known as 'time-shifting'. Basically, you can record a broadcast or make oa copy of a work so that you can read, watch, or listen to it later. You can even share it with your friends, i.e. you can give/loan your ST:TNG tapes to a friend without having to pay Paramount. You can't sell them, however, or profit in any way from the exchange (or broadcast or whatever).
The problems began when someone figured out how to share a copyrighted work with 16 million people at once... the fair use section of the copyright law makes no mention of scale, because it never occurred to anyone that you might be able to saturate the market with unlimited perfect copies while also charging $0.00 per copy.
Of course it's not only possible, but easy and convenient. The root problem is, copyright enforcement and fair use of digital material are now mutually exclusive concepts. It's no longer possible to have both.
So to answer your question, it's part of the law itself, and could conceivably be amended, repealed or restricted with new legislation. The holder of a copyright binds himself to the fair use doctrine when he applies for the copyright, not the purchaser when he agrees to an EULA or buys a work. 'Fair use' is not a right enumerated in the Constitution, though some may argue (convincingly IMHO) that perhaps it ought to be.
Thank God for the Supreme Court. Conservative they may be, but that usually means 'strict constructionalist'. Bad news for abortion, good news for civil liberty...
I, for one, and appalled and disgusted that anyone would suggest that any computer hack could possibly rise (or sink, as it were) to the level of a terrorist act. I challenge the Senate to ask the people of New York if they feel that 'Code Red' is a threat of the same, or even slightly similar magnitude.
It is an insult to the memory of all those that have died to suggest that any hacker could cause enough destruction and fear to be labelled 'terrorist' and treated accordingly. Anyone who says otherwise should be forced to try and explain their case to the family of a dead NYC fireman.
For more in this vein (and just in case you don't hate the RIAA enough yet) check out this editorial:
Oh, brother. Of course you don't inform the subject of a wiretap that they're being monitored. The point here is that, even though a wiretap is secret, you still have to prove to a judge, in documents that are publicly available during a trial (if any), that there was 'probable cause' to perform the wiretap. What Gilmore is proposing is that you should be able to ignore probable cause, and that the govt. should be able to use secret evidence, unavailable even to the defense in a trial, to justify the wire.
Of course surveillance should be secret. The judicial branch, however, thrives only if the people trust it, and secrecy destroys trust.
Is it just me, or has VIAHardware fired all the editors and disabled grammar/spell checking on their word processors?
"...opening up the case for maintenance is much simpler and don't require the use of tools."
"Let's take a peak inside..."
And my favorite on page one (I didn't bother with page two):
"Due to the small size of the case, everything inside is cramped in, thus making it impossible to install better cooling, this isn't exactly a negative point, since it is an OEM barebones system, and the lesser the cooling components, the quieter the system runs. "
It's hard to take a review seriously when the writer sounds suspiciously like he's failing 9th grade English.
'Not-for-profit' means not for PROFIT. It does not mean 'not-for-revenue'. Not-for-profit corporations can (and frequently do) charge money for their services. They are prohibited from showing a profit, which means they must roll any net earnings back into the business, either as salary, or investment in the corp, or dividends, or in some other fashion. At the end of the year, they must have made $0 profit. That's the main requirement.
You're welcome to send your check back to your congressional representative, with directions to return it to the US Treasury and a request regarding how you think it ought to be spent.
I think Descent didn't catch on because you needed a Thrustmaster (or equivalent) joystick to play it well. IIRC, those sticks ran around $60 at the time. Compare that to the keyboard/mouse you already have, and you can see why it didn't have as wide an audience.
Incidentally, I remember playing Descent with an I-goggles setup (or some competitor of theirs...). Talk about disorienting! It's the only game that's given me the real, honest-to-god, physical fear of falling experience. I floated out over a giant hole, looked down, and actually took a step back in surprise.
I remember standing around the only PC with net access in the Egghead Software where I worked, watching the ftp site as the qtest files got uploaded... we set up a 6 person network in my house that stayed there for 2 months. Everyone just came over after work and ate whatever and played Quake...
Quake got me into this industry, really... I might never have learned networking if I hadn't had to troubleshoot that damned BNC network.We had old AnselNet NICs that should have been identical but weren't... had to start the server from a PC in the middle of the BNC chain because of the lag at the ends.
I tried to read this, but there were flashy thingies at the top of the screen, and little square things with stuff to click on the sides. And I just got more email. Was I reading something...? Ohyeah, I read some of it, but, umm...
what was I saying? Something about an X-10 webcam... wait... now I'm typing..
From my point of view, it could only be interpreted as a victory. They gain two things by this:
1) If they get treated as journalists, commesurate with implied protections, they won't have to worry about directly or indirectly revealing their sources
But now that the FBI has withdrawn their probe, they revert legally back to the status they held previously. They aren't being treated as journalists, whatever they'd like to think. The only way they would have gained that is by winning the court battle for which they were gearing up. Someone at the FBI must have read 'The Art of War"... the feds just deprived IndyMedia of perhaps their most valuable weapon by avoiding conflict with them.
Another thing... from reading the press reports sent out by them (I'll freely admit I don't frequent their site[s]), it seems an extreme stretch to call everyone who posts a story a 'journalist'. You could make the same case for/. posters. I think the bar ought to be a bit higher than they set it at IndyMedia.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that it's marketing akin to the "designed for Windows 95" labels you saw on keyboards and mousepads and blank floppy disks, back when 95 was released.
People here in Ireland are freaking out hardcore about the Euro changeover, and there's a marketing campaign going on that's only slightly less vigorous than the Win95 one was.
The Irish use both, in a somewhat confusing interchange.
.5 litre bottle of Coke, but not vice versa. Petrol is sold in litres, but the new car stickers sometimes list miles/gallon for fuel effeciency. Distance from a to b is measured in kilometres, but speed is in miles/hour.
Ex: you can buy a pint of Guinness, or a
Maybe there were some Irishmen working on the conversion screwup?
Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars...
This may sound a bit offtopic, but:
'They' really are buying mindshare. I thought I was basically unaffected by advertizing, and that I'd resisted the influence of TV commercials. I moved to Ireland this month, though, and I've discovered that I've been fooling myself the whole time.
Yesterday, I spent 3 minutes looking at various brands of laundry soap, trying to determine which one to buy. Finally, I realized that what I was really doing was looking for a brand name I recognized. I almost bought a brand that had the same color scheme as my old brand. The thing is, I had no info on which one worked best, because I'd never seen commercials for any of them, and that's how I knew which one to buy in the states.
I've discovered that I've developed many more opinions through TV ads than I ever thought I had. It's actually pretty unsettling.
I have also stopped reading Salon. Granted, I really only read it because I disagree with the political slant of the site and I like to see the view from the other side of the aisle...
/. won't be a repeat of Salon.
Unfortunately, that view is now permamently obscured by giant banners and a privacy fence. When I started feeling like I was reading Salon through knotholes, I stopped reading.
I hope
How do you wash your clothes?
Or your body for that matter...
What do you eat?
Absolutes are always dumb!
Right... talk about a PR nightmare!
Microsoft Lawyers Shut Down Rural Nepalese Computer Lab Due to Alleged Licence Violations
I'd love to see MS go after this guy... they'd get massacred in the press, and end up having to give the guy a truckload of brand new PC's and software just to save face.
The post I was commenting on was describing a situation typical of what I've seen in medium- to low-budget school systems: not a PC in every classroom, but a few in the 'math lab' and one or two in the library, and comp lit with the Apple IIe. In my school, it was the TRS80 in 'cs', Apples in the math/science lab, and a Compaq with Compton's Encyclopedia on it in the library. Oh, and we couldn't use the CDROM encyclopedia for research papers because there wasn't a standard way to reference it in the bibliography.
The point is, no school was spending $8000, or even $4000, per classroom. They were spending maybe that much per school, or perhaps a touch more. Schools still spend, on average, very little on computers.
If you want to find someplace to save $$$ in schools, ban competetive high-school sports. Rewarding as they may be to a small group, schools tend to spend twice as much on the football team as they do on the music dept, the library, the PC or science lab, or any other area of the school. When I was in highschool, we had overhead projectors with no bulbs, the aforementioned TRS80s in the PC lab, 15-year old encyclopedias, and the nicest football field in the district.
...for purchase and maintenance of those units would be around $8,000 for a classroom of 28 students. Can you imagine the jump in the quality of teaching applicants a district would receive if even $4,000 of that amount were being given to the teacher?
Spreading $4000 amongst all the teachers in the school wouldn't amount to any sort of incentive at all. Imagine: "Hey, we've got a new opening for an English teacher! It's a great job, and the money's getting better all the time. We gave all 50 of our teachers a whopping $80 bonus last year!"
Sure he should get a chance, but first he's got to pass 5th grade math.
Would you like to work with a scientist who couldn't do basic math in his head? I suppose, if he's a archaeologist, but I'd venture to say no one ever saw Einstein scrambling for a calculator because he didn't know how to multiply on paper.
Clearly, from your example, learning to write also isn't about correct use of the apostrophe, capitalization, or proper use of commas.
Not only did your teachers fail to teach you to write well, they failed to even teach you what good writing is and why it requires the ability to spell and punctuate properly!
If the point of getting a computer for a 7th grade child is to 'free' the child from learning and understanding the conventions of the language, then it's an awful idea. Personally, I've always viewed a spell checker as a teaching tool, not a safety net.
IMHO, it's a poor idea to forego learning a skill because you can rely on the crutch of a PC to do it for you. Kids should be taught to use a PC because it's faster and more efficient, but never allowed to lean on it to the detriment of their own brains.
Fair use is part of the copyright law itself. Its intention is to prevent people from having to pay to excerpt from works for educational or other purposes, and it's been interpreted to also include what's known as 'time-shifting'. Basically, you can record a broadcast or make oa copy of a work so that you can read, watch, or listen to it later. You can even share it with your friends, i.e. you can give/loan your ST:TNG tapes to a friend without having to pay Paramount. You can't sell them, however, or profit in any way from the exchange (or broadcast or whatever).
The problems began when someone figured out how to share a copyrighted work with 16 million people at once... the fair use section of the copyright law makes no mention of scale, because it never occurred to anyone that you might be able to saturate the market with unlimited perfect copies while also charging $0.00 per copy.
Of course it's not only possible, but easy and convenient. The root problem is, copyright enforcement and fair use of digital material are now mutually exclusive concepts. It's no longer possible to have both.
So to answer your question, it's part of the law itself, and could conceivably be amended, repealed or restricted with new legislation. The holder of a copyright binds himself to the fair use doctrine when he applies for the copyright, not the purchaser when he agrees to an EULA or buys a work. 'Fair use' is not a right enumerated in the Constitution, though some may argue (convincingly IMHO) that perhaps it ought to be.
Thank God for the Supreme Court. Conservative they may be, but that usually means 'strict constructionalist'. Bad news for abortion, good news for civil liberty...
I, for one, and appalled and disgusted that anyone would suggest that any computer hack could possibly rise (or sink, as it were) to the level of a terrorist act. I challenge the Senate to ask the people of New York if they feel that 'Code Red' is a threat of the same, or even slightly similar magnitude.
It is an insult to the memory of all those that have died to suggest that any hacker could cause enough destruction and fear to be labelled 'terrorist' and treated accordingly. Anyone who says otherwise should be forced to try and explain their case to the family of a dead NYC fireman.
For more in this vein (and just in case you don't hate the RIAA enough yet) check out this editorial:
Oh, brother. Of course you don't inform the subject of a wiretap that they're being monitored. The point here is that, even though a wiretap is secret, you still have to prove to a judge, in documents that are publicly available during a trial (if any), that there was 'probable cause' to perform the wiretap. What Gilmore is proposing is that you should be able to ignore probable cause, and that the govt. should be able to use secret evidence, unavailable even to the defense in a trial, to justify the wire.
Of course surveillance should be secret. The judicial branch, however, thrives only if the people trust it, and secrecy destroys trust.
Is it just me, or has VIAHardware fired all the editors and disabled grammar/spell checking on their word processors?
"...opening up the case for maintenance is much simpler and don't require the use of tools."
"Let's take a peak inside..."
And my favorite on page one (I didn't bother with page two):
"Due to the small size of the case, everything inside is cramped in, thus making it impossible to install better cooling, this isn't exactly a negative point, since it is an OEM barebones system, and the lesser the cooling components, the quieter the system runs. "
It's hard to take a review seriously when the writer sounds suspiciously like he's failing 9th grade English.
'Not-for-profit' means not for PROFIT. It does not mean 'not-for-revenue'. Not-for-profit corporations can (and frequently do) charge money for their services. They are prohibited from showing a profit, which means they must roll any net earnings back into the business, either as salary, or investment in the corp, or dividends, or in some other fashion. At the end of the year, they must have made $0 profit. That's the main requirement.
You're welcome to send your check back to your congressional representative, with directions to return it to the US Treasury and a request regarding how you think it ought to be spent.
Of course, you won't do that...
I think Descent didn't catch on because you needed a Thrustmaster (or equivalent) joystick to play it well. IIRC, those sticks ran around $60 at the time. Compare that to the keyboard/mouse you already have, and you can see why it didn't have as wide an audience.
Incidentally, I remember playing Descent with an I-goggles setup (or some competitor of theirs...). Talk about disorienting! It's the only game that's given me the real, honest-to-god, physical fear of falling experience. I floated out over a giant hole, looked down, and actually took a step back in surprise.
Yeah, the change from 2.5D to a full 3D environment with real physics modelling was just a babystep.
I remember standing around the only PC with net access in the Egghead Software where I worked, watching the ftp site as the qtest files got uploaded... we set up a 6 person network in my house that stayed there for 2 months. Everyone just came over after work and ate whatever and played Quake...
Quake got me into this industry, really... I might never have learned networking if I hadn't had to troubleshoot that damned BNC network.We had old AnselNet NICs that should have been identical but weren't... had to start the server from a PC in the middle of the BNC chain because of the lag at the ends.
those were the days!
It most certainly IS.
Nobody has a right to be happy, or to own anything. wtf? You have a philosophical right to TRY and be happy... that's about it.
Perhaps Katz has been trying to download warez from T50 again... Your automatic ClosePopUp reaction buys you... Two shiny new popups!
I tried to read this, but there were flashy thingies at the top of the screen, and little square things with stuff to click on the sides. And I just got more email. Was I reading something...? Ohyeah, I read some of it, but, umm...
what was I saying? Something about an X-10 webcam... wait... now I'm typing..
nevermi
But now that the FBI has withdrawn their probe, they revert legally back to the status they held previously. They aren't being treated as journalists, whatever they'd like to think. The only way they would have gained that is by winning the court battle for which they were gearing up. Someone at the FBI must have read 'The Art of War"... the feds just deprived IndyMedia of perhaps their most valuable weapon by avoiding conflict with them.
Another thing... from reading the press reports sent out by them (I'll freely admit I don't frequent their site[s]), it seems an extreme stretch to call everyone who posts a story a 'journalist'. You could make the same case for /. posters. I think the bar ought to be a bit higher than they set it at IndyMedia.