I had already sunk a few moderator points into this discussion, but I really need to put a response on here.
What I continually find is that the Chinese students in particular are very good with memorization and forumlas, but very bad at analysis and application. They can crunch numbers like nothing, but when it comes to applying that knowledge to simple real-world scenarios, they are sunk. For them, being smart is knowing a lot of facts and forulams and being able to mash them together, not being able to synthesize and apply data to the real world.
"Asian countries proved their mathematical and scientific dominance, especially Hong Kong/China, Japan and Korea.
Professor Masters said their performance could not be stereotyped as the result of drilling, as PISA was about problem solving, reasoning and application rather than memorising facts."
They took no larger a risk than the bank. Of course, the bank gets the house when the inevitable layoff happens.
This tells me that they did in fact take a larger risk than the bank. The impact is larger, they lose their house.
Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?
on
AbiWord 2.2 Unleashed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
To get good-looking PDF output (not ugly bitmapped fonts)...
Well, for what it's worth, to get good-looking PDF output, I suggest dvipdf. It's all anti-aliased, etc. etc. and looks fine in Acrobat Reader, etc. Output from dvips looks good when printed, which you'd expect, since it outputs a PostScript file.
I would think that much of the cost of book would go to the production process. Layout, typesetting, printing binding and shipping.
Easy.
Because the price of e-books, as with a lot of other things, have little to do with the cost of production. Book publishers will charge the maximum amount that the market will let them get away with. In addition, there are a whole lot less big-name electronic publishers than paper ones, so there's less competition to reduce prices.
Of course, in Apple style, they'll probably start calling eBooks by their new name, iBooks...
I don't know how tongue-in-cheek your post was, but I'll bite... Apple already has a product called iBook...
Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?
on
AbiWord 2.2 Unleashed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Really, the best all-around word processor is TeX, but AbiWord seems like the best tool I've found so far for little quick jobs where TeX would be too much trouble.
For most of the power of TeX without a lot of the hassle, try LyX. It's a graphical front-end for LaTeX, with an interface akin to a word processor. However, it still applies TeX philosophy, namely, you supply the content and it will supply the layout, you don't need to mess with that.
To that end, as part of the intellectual property right agreement, customers should have a legal right to force eBook publishers to let them print the eBook.
It's always good to have choice, and if we ever get to the point where things are e-book only and there's no option to print it out, things are bad.
However...
For me, and for a lot of other people, we actually prefer a digital copy. The benefits have been discussed in detail elsewhere, so I won't go into them. But for me, there's no point in printing an e-book since it's better as digital, and if I want a printed copy, there are some very nice bookstores that will sell me one. (Now re-read first point re: having choice.)
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but
on
Upbeat on E-books
·
· Score: 1
Reading from a screen just isn't conducive to enjoyment of a book.
Do you have a problem reading large amounts of text off a screen? If so, you probably don't want to visit Slashdot...
With all the DRM on e-books, these days, the best reader is the one that reads your e-books.
My favourite is eReader because most of my books are from their site. They've got a reasonable range of books, including a few mass-market bestsellers. Their software supports Palm OS, Pocket PC, Win32 and Mac.
Another good site is Fictionwise, they sell a variety of books, some are DRM-free and come in a range of formats like PDF; some are encrypted and come in eReader or Microsoft Reader format.
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but
on
Upbeat on E-books
·
· Score: 1
Oh, yeah, and my wife says how are you supposed to read an ebook in the bath?
I don't know how co-ordinated everyone else is, but I'm always scared of splashing water on my book, getting wet fingermarks all over it, or worse, dropping it in. Personally, in the bath, I just stare at the ceiling.
However, the downside of wireless mice is changing batteries. It's annoying to stop to replace the batteries, especially when you're in the middle of round of CounterStrike...
Well, I'm not sure about yours, but mine starts giving warnings (a blinking red light) when I've got a good hour or so of battery left. Defusing the bomb takes less than an hour (god bless Counter-Strike) so you can wait until you've done that before swapping the batteries;-)
...why not get the power from the movement the human being makes?
Oh, and whilst I think about it:
Normal wireless mouses contain batteries, which add extra weight, which makes them slightly harder to move around. So if you have a wireless mouse without batteries, but which was powered by hand movements, it's possible that it could still be easier to move around!
...why not get the power from the movement the human being makes?
I've often wondered why they don't make a wireless keyboard that works that way. Surely there's enough energy from hitting keys to power a RF signal (after all, there's enough to make sound when you hit keys).
On the other hand, the two AA batteries in my wireless keyboard tend to last several months, so there's probably little demand. And it doesn't address what I consider to be the main limitation of wireless keyboards: not having the little caps/num/scroll-lock lights on them.
So you think its the ISPs place to decide which site you realy wanted to go to?
The point I'm going to make hasn't really been emphasised much, so I'll try.
In Australia, there are laws saying that ISPs are obliged to blacklist sites with objectionable content. They can do it by providing filtering software to customers, or presumably by filtering at the ISP end. So it's conceivable that someone in Australia will complain about caseydonovan.com, and by law, they'll get blacklisted.
I bought a copy of the original Half-Life Game of the Year edition, a month ago. Box was sealed, bought from a reputable company etc. etc. Tried to sign up for Steam. CD key was already used.
That night, I e-mailed Vivendi saying, my CD key was in use, but I just bought it. Sent digital photos of the CD, packaging, receipt, etc. No response.
A week ago, before HL2 came out, I sent it again. No response. I'd try again now, but I'd imagine that they're busy now...
If stuff like this banning means that, in 5 years time when I buy HL2, my CD key will actually work... then I'm all for it.
I'm not advocating reducing the Earth to a smoking ball of lava. I try to live "responsibly". Apart from that, I have never discussed my motives, so don't attribute anything to me. And, believe it or not, I'm not trying to be arrogant. In fact, I'm trying to be anti-arrogant by saying how insignificant we are.
I'm saying that the miniscule, scattered organisms, living in a thin film of air and water on the surface of a giant rock in space, doesn't amount to much in the big picture. I'm saying that even if we tried our darndest to affect the weather (detonating every nuclear weapon in our arsenal, for instance), the worst we could do is probably within an order of magnitude or two of an ice age. Which is equivalent to a geological sneeze. The big picture is big.
Quote from linked page: "...on the order of several tenths of a degree."
That's right, folks. In this sense, we really don't have much impact.
The planet started out as a rapidly-spinning, hot ball of rock without an atmosphere. If we can achieve that, then that is affecting the weather. Now, that's not to say that a few degrees up or down isn't significant, because it is. But there's a huge range of temperatures, from absolute zero to one thousand Celsius and over, and we're talking geological timescales here.
Put another way, if we all became extinct over the next few thousand years, one good ice age and there might not be much evidence left that we ever existed. Hell, if we could cause an ice age, it probably wouldn't mean much over millions of years, because there are heaps of ice ages and that's just one.
"...that used to be called Jalapeno that bootstrapped itself..."
Just to let people know, it's now called Jikes RVM and is still under active development. "RVM" is a Research Virtual Machine, which is like a standard VM, only researchers do weird, cutting-edge things to it (advanced garbage collection, advanced runtime optimisations). The idea is, one day, the standard JVM will pick up these changes.
OK, you pay $50 more and get a $50 discount on the U2 everything-we-ever-recorded collection.
The U2 iPod still looks like a good deal to me, and of all the new releases, it's the one I'd be looking at. The reasons:
I like U2 and have a fair bit of respect for them (although many people here don't). But I've never really bought a lot of their stuff. It's probably the sales pitch, but yeah, I'd probably buy their entire collection.
(Although I'm in Australia, and we don't even have an iTunes Music Store... from what I can see, although you still pay more, you don't get the $50 discount voucher...)
It's black and red. That's cool. It's even more distinctive than your usual iPod. Plus, it'll be a limited edition, since I don't see Apple selling these forever.
It comes with a dock, which I'd be buying otherwise.
My music collection lies somewhere between 4GB and 20GB, so I'd be looking at a 20GB device anyway. Obviously, this is not the case for everybody reading Slashdot. But for many people...
As a note, the Palm Tungsten T5 was released today. Since this is a Newton story, I won't go into details, except to say that the T5 has a lot of stuff and costs less than $600.
Slashdot Mirror
I had already sunk a few moderator points into this discussion, but I really need to put a response on here.
What I continually find is that the Chinese students in particular are very good with memorization and forumlas, but very bad at analysis and application. They can crunch numbers like nothing, but when it comes to applying that knowledge to simple real-world scenarios, they are sunk. For them, being smart is knowing a lot of facts and forulams and being able to mash them together, not being able to synthesize and apply data to the real world.
From The Sydney Morning Herald:
"Asian countries proved their mathematical and scientific dominance, especially Hong Kong/China, Japan and Korea.
Professor Masters said their performance could not be stereotyped as the result of drilling, as PISA was about problem solving, reasoning and application rather than memorising facts."
They took no larger a risk than the bank. Of course, the bank gets the house when the inevitable layoff happens.
This tells me that they did in fact take a larger risk than the bank. The impact is larger, they lose their house.
To get good-looking PDF output (not ugly bitmapped fonts)...
Well, for what it's worth, to get good-looking PDF output, I suggest dvipdf. It's all anti-aliased, etc. etc. and looks fine in Acrobat Reader, etc. Output from dvips looks good when printed, which you'd expect, since it outputs a PostScript file.
why are the books still 20 dollars?
I would think that much of the cost of book would go to the production process. Layout, typesetting, printing binding and shipping.
Easy.
Because the price of e-books, as with a lot of other things, have little to do with the cost of production. Book publishers will charge the maximum amount that the market will let them get away with. In addition, there are a whole lot less big-name electronic publishers than paper ones, so there's less competition to reduce prices.
It's all economics!
Of course, in Apple style, they'll probably start calling eBooks by their new name, iBooks...
I don't know how tongue-in-cheek your post was, but I'll bite... Apple already has a product called iBook...
Really, the best all-around word processor is TeX, but AbiWord seems like the best tool I've found so far for little quick jobs where TeX would be too much trouble.
For most of the power of TeX without a lot of the hassle, try LyX. It's a graphical front-end for LaTeX, with an interface akin to a word processor. However, it still applies TeX philosophy, namely, you supply the content and it will supply the layout, you don't need to mess with that.
Till these damn things support PDF...
If it helps, Fictionwise sell all their non-encrypted e-books in PDF, and half a dozen other formats too.
To that end, as part of the intellectual property right agreement, customers should have a legal right to force eBook publishers to let them print the eBook.
It's always good to have choice, and if we ever get to the point where things are e-book only and there's no option to print it out, things are bad.
However...
For me, and for a lot of other people, we actually prefer a digital copy. The benefits have been discussed in detail elsewhere, so I won't go into them. But for me, there's no point in printing an e-book since it's better as digital, and if I want a printed copy, there are some very nice bookstores that will sell me one. (Now re-read first point re: having choice.)
Reading from a screen just isn't conducive to enjoyment of a book.
Do you have a problem reading large amounts of text off a screen? If so, you probably don't want to visit Slashdot...
With all the DRM on e-books, these days, the best reader is the one that reads your e-books.
My favourite is eReader because most of my books are from their site. They've got a reasonable range of books, including a few mass-market bestsellers. Their software supports Palm OS, Pocket PC, Win32 and Mac.
Another good site is Fictionwise, they sell a variety of books, some are DRM-free and come in a range of formats like PDF; some are encrypted and come in eReader or Microsoft Reader format.
Oh, yeah, and my wife says how are you supposed to read an ebook in the bath?
I don't know how co-ordinated everyone else is, but I'm always scared of splashing water on my book, getting wet fingermarks all over it, or worse, dropping it in. Personally, in the bath, I just stare at the ceiling.
However, the downside of wireless mice is changing batteries. It's annoying to stop to replace the batteries, especially when you're in the middle of round of CounterStrike...
;-)
Well, I'm not sure about yours, but mine starts giving warnings (a blinking red light) when I've got a good hour or so of battery left. Defusing the bomb takes less than an hour (god bless Counter-Strike) so you can wait until you've done that before swapping the batteries
...why not get the power from the movement the human being makes?
Oh, and whilst I think about it:
Normal wireless mouses contain batteries, which add extra weight, which makes them slightly harder to move around. So if you have a wireless mouse without batteries, but which was powered by hand movements, it's possible that it could still be easier to move around!
...why not get the power from the movement the human being makes?
I've often wondered why they don't make a wireless keyboard that works that way. Surely there's enough energy from hitting keys to power a RF signal (after all, there's enough to make sound when you hit keys).
On the other hand, the two AA batteries in my wireless keyboard tend to last several months, so there's probably little demand. And it doesn't address what I consider to be the main limitation of wireless keyboards: not having the little caps/num/scroll-lock lights on them.
I'll take my chances. At the moment, it is me as a legit customer who is banned. I paid for a Half-Life CD key and can't use it.
So you think its the ISPs place to decide which site you realy wanted to go to?
The point I'm going to make hasn't really been emphasised much, so I'll try.
In Australia, there are laws saying that ISPs are obliged to blacklist sites with objectionable content. They can do it by providing filtering software to customers, or presumably by filtering at the ISP end. So it's conceivable that someone in Australia will complain about caseydonovan.com, and by law, they'll get blacklisted.
(IANAL.)
I bought a copy of the original Half-Life Game of the Year edition, a month ago. Box was sealed, bought from a reputable company etc. etc. Tried to sign up for Steam. CD key was already used.
That night, I e-mailed Vivendi saying, my CD key was in use, but I just bought it. Sent digital photos of the CD, packaging, receipt, etc. No response.
A week ago, before HL2 came out, I sent it again. No response. I'd try again now, but I'd imagine that they're busy now...
If stuff like this banning means that, in 5 years time when I buy HL2, my CD key will actually work... then I'm all for it.
As a further to this:
Britannica puts a "perfect flag" on everything they write, before they publish the information every year in dead-tree form. (Do they still do that?)
I'm not advocating reducing the Earth to a smoking ball of lava. I try to live "responsibly". Apart from that, I have never discussed my motives, so don't attribute anything to me. And, believe it or not, I'm not trying to be arrogant. In fact, I'm trying to be anti-arrogant by saying how insignificant we are.
I'm saying that the miniscule, scattered organisms, living in a thin film of air and water on the surface of a giant rock in space, doesn't amount to much in the big picture. I'm saying that even if we tried our darndest to affect the weather (detonating every nuclear weapon in our arsenal, for instance), the worst we could do is probably within an order of magnitude or two of an ice age. Which is equivalent to a geological sneeze. The big picture is big.
Quote from linked page: "...on the order of several tenths of a degree."
That's right, folks. In this sense, we really don't have much impact.
The planet started out as a rapidly-spinning, hot ball of rock without an atmosphere. If we can achieve that, then that is affecting the weather. Now, that's not to say that a few degrees up or down isn't significant, because it is. But there's a huge range of temperatures, from absolute zero to one thousand Celsius and over, and we're talking geological timescales here.
Put another way, if we all became extinct over the next few thousand years, one good ice age and there might not be much evidence left that we ever existed. Hell, if we could cause an ice age, it probably wouldn't mean much over millions of years, because there are heaps of ice ages and that's just one.
"...that used to be called Jalapeno that bootstrapped itself..."
Just to let people know, it's now called Jikes RVM and is still under active development. "RVM" is a Research Virtual Machine, which is like a standard VM, only researchers do weird, cutting-edge things to it (advanced garbage collection, advanced runtime optimisations). The idea is, one day, the standard JVM will pick up these changes.
Not related to the Jikes compiler.
"I would rather have Freedom of speech than a fancy parking monitor."
Why not have both? They're not mutually exclusive, you don't need to have a totalitarian government to set up parking monitors.
BTW Mozilla ditched the red star for this very reason [mozilla.org].
The bug you linked to, claiming that the red star was offensive, was closed as VERIFIED INVALID.
OK, you pay $50 more and get a $50 discount on the U2 everything-we-ever-recorded collection.
The U2 iPod still looks like a good deal to me, and of all the new releases, it's the one I'd be looking at. The reasons:
I like U2 and have a fair bit of respect for them (although many people here don't). But I've never really bought a lot of their stuff. It's probably the sales pitch, but yeah, I'd probably buy their entire collection.
(Although I'm in Australia, and we don't even have an iTunes Music Store... from what I can see, although you still pay more, you don't get the $50 discount voucher...)
It's black and red. That's cool. It's even more distinctive than your usual iPod. Plus, it'll be a limited edition, since I don't see Apple selling these forever.
It comes with a dock, which I'd be buying otherwise.
My music collection lies somewhere between 4GB and 20GB, so I'd be looking at a 20GB device anyway. Obviously, this is not the case for everybody reading Slashdot. But for many people...
As a note, the Palm Tungsten T5 was released today. Since this is a Newton story, I won't go into details, except to say that the T5 has a lot of stuff and costs less than $600.