"nobody is ever going to need more than 24 colors"
Seriously though, I think it is much more likely that the knots and colors represent larger concepts, like "llama" or "worker" rather than simply making combinations. (There are better ways to make combinations of bits if that is the point...)
I think there is some artistic intepretation of the knot sets that caused these things to be meaningful to their users; its not a bit-mapping to meaning system.
Here are some of my favorites; Judas Priest - Defenders of the Faith, Deep Purple - Perfect Strangers, Def Leppard - Pyromania and High-n-Dry, all Tool, and just about anything by Van Halen with DLR still as frontman.
On the other hand there are a load of albums where it only makes "artistic sense" to listen to them start to finish; where some songs outright suck when taken out of context, but where the entire album is often really good. For example all the Radiohead stuff, Pink Floyd, Queensryche (Operation Mindcrime), some Alice Cooper (older stuff, "Welcome to My Nightmare" and "From the Inside" come to mind), some Black Sabbath, Nine Inch Nails, TheWho, Tool, some Blue Oyster Cult, Iron Maiden, Sisters of Mercy, Golden Earring (Moon Tan), U2, Billy Thorpe "Children of the Sun" and others. (Tool gets high marks both for individual songs and compilations.)
I think the artists are complaining that they fear the public will lose sight of the entire album concept. They're simply wrong of course, but that's what they are afraid of. (I find the idea they think that type of thing about me sort of insulting. It has never occurred to me ever to listen to less than a full RadioHead album.)
Good songs and good compilations are separable artistic talents. My wife (for example) has odd taste in music that I do not understand, but she can take songs from my collection and her collection and make awesome "mixed CD's" that tells a story or are good for "Driving to St. Louis" or whatever. She even spends time getting the silence between songs just the right length. Some artists (i.e. Pink Floyd) totally depend on the compilation talents to make their stuff work.
Single songs for download is just one of the consumer-enabling steps the Internet and the electronic age have provided us. Worrying about it is silly. The worst that can happen is I never get a sour taste in my mouth again due to getting duped into buying an album with lots of sucky songs on it. I can still buy the single. (Anyone else totally hate Smashmouth after finding out their first single sounded nothing like the rest of the songs? They had the balls to go and bitch about it later, saying their "real" sound was the other songs. Hmm. Nice to know you guys suck so bad, have fun making albums that sit on the shelf guys!)
Don't you mean "Apple purchasers have paid twice the price for leadership again and again"
I sure wish I could modify my settings to never again see Apple-weenies prostelizing about their choice in computers. They, as a collective group irritate the piss out of me.
Come to market at the wrong time, and it's still the wrong time. Even if it is ahead of everybody else.
The point of ABS is that the driver stays in control of steering (i.e. the wheels still roll and have traction), not that the car stop faster.
So in a 'situation' the driver can choose where to go as well as breaking to slow the vehicle.
Your point is that there IS a conspiracy and that the wankers simply increased the stopping distance in order to lie to people and get them to slow down? Pfft.
I'd like to point out, that anti-lock (or anti-skid) breaks work because they keep the tires from skidding. The only way to do that is to flutter the break pressure when a skid is detected... which decreases the overall energy the tires can transmit back to the pavement....
Which will tend to encrease the overall stopping distance.
So having a high percentage of cars with anti-lock breaks on them will also increase the average stopping distance of vehicles.
So put your tin-foil hat away, it's not a conspiracy or lying, its some engineer making average equipment translate into average stopping distance.
(Anti-lock breaks also allow more control while breaking, which is the point of the devices.)
Wearing a seatbelt is a matter of personal safety, but also the safety of of the other people in the car, and other people around the driver on the road.
A seatbelt not only prevents damage to the body in a crash, but also holds the driver in the seat; allowing additional control of the car after hitting something. Try ramming your car into a passenger side guardrail at a 45 degree angle at 90 KPH sometime, with a seatbelt on you'll stay in the seat and be able to control the car (somewhat). Without it, you are not in front of the steering wheel anymore and have NO chance to control the car anymore. That can (and does) mean the difference between a damaged car and a head on with a semi on the other side of the divided highway.
Seatbelts are therefore also a thing that should be worn out of responsability of other drivers, not just the wearer themselves.
Also, insurance companies do not pay, the governement does not pay when you do not wear a belt. *I* pay, along with anybody else that has ever had insurance or who has ever paid taxes. Insurance premiums are used to pay for payouts due to accidents, where do you think the money comes from? Trees?
Your selfish attitude is as disgusting as those people that insist that smoking in a closed room with other people is their "right".
One thing I do not understand about these work-issue articles on Slashdot;
Why the obvious political weight of the place is not applied to this situation.
Is the demand for work wrong? (I think it is.) Then name the damn company! (and the client) Better yet, put a link to their web site so they friggin notice.
The cat will be out of the proverbial bag then and all sorts of things might happen;
- the client realizes they are being dumb and backs off - the company realizes a huge list of potential employees just decided not to work for them, and backs off - potential purchasers of stuff from this client or company can avoid this product. I can tell already it's going to suck. What if it's the control system for the new Nuke plant... or computes YOUR salary or something, think about it. - people can dig up facts about the laws in the state, county and city, forcing the company to back off - they gotta pay for bandwidth, and the programmers can sit back and watch the smoke billow from under the server room door knowing something they did made a difference
Remember, it's not slander if they don't catch who said it, and it's not slander if it is true.
Yeah? The same wench that was either commiting plain fraud or was duped by a couple high-school aged girls about what the sexual culture was like in Samoa? Swallowing hook, line, and sinker an interpretation of what the girls thought their culture was like, without bothering to go check that Samoa is full of rape and violence just like the Mead's culture is.
"Coming of Age in Samoa" is now largely discredited as a useless document, except that it is a good read for those interested in seeing how "soft" sciences can go horribly wrong.
Unless that was your point and I was too dim to catch it.
I would submit that anybody that focuses on TV and not the structure of culture and economics that TV implies is plain stupid. TV requires an economy trading with industrial nations, it requires constant electricity and data, it requires advertising (and thus other profit-oriented industries are in the area) to support itself, none of those other factors have anything to do with cultural change? TV is just the visible part.
Fly MidWest. All the seats on all their planes are "first class", leather, roomy.
Course it's twice the price sometimes.... but no better way to go if you are travelling for pleasure.
Re:Sounds Fantastic -- Now Why Not Hemp
on
Corn-Based Plastic
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· Score: 1
Hemp has strong, flexible and long fibers, thus the traditional use of hemp to make rope. Also good for other fiber related things, such as paper, fabrics and so on...
I do not know how fast it grows, but faster than corn anyway, hemp is always twice as tall as corn stalks later in summer. Don't try to hide your plants with a few rows of corn, it will get too tall.:)
Blocking outgoing traffic helps prevent the "meat" layer from being a problem, where users do stuff that cause problems on the network or with their computers.
For example, routing MS Gaming Zone to 127.0.0.1 via internal DNS did wonders for productivity around here. The same is true for any of the other 100% timewaster sites, Gator, porn, Yahoo, etc.
Sure a few people will figure it out, but those are on my staff.:)
VeriSign (or Network Solutions) had very bad behavior in the past concerning ability for proper people to manage their domains and ability for shiesters to manage other people's domains.
However, in the last year they have gotten A LOT better and are now pretty easy to deal with, providing account numbers and passwords to manage domains; with a reasonably secure and speedy method for getting them if lost.
It sure would be nice if any lawsuits could go after the individuals responsible for running NSI back in the bad-old-days, that's what needs to get done.
I for one am more interested in making TWOCows cough up legitamate domain registrant information, they seem to be hiding a large section of spammer domains.
Yeah, that's it. Remove accountability, remove IP address tracking, make everything wireless and one big peer-to-peer cluster f***... know what you get?
Spammitopia with a good helping of Advertis-mania thrown in and crappy service to boot.
No thanks. I like using my money as a tool to get people to do stuff I want, that includes bandwidth, routing and spam-blocking. Capitolism is good because it is self-organizing; suppliers and buyers agree to do stuff for money.
I can see it now, geo-spam-hunt, use your radio direction finder to find some spammer that hid a wireless access point in a park gazebo, only to find out it belonged to the FBI, and the one you were really after was the one in the garbage can.
You think it's bad now, just wait until spammers can move the fricken server on a bicycle WHILE spamming and nobody knows what state they are in cuz all the routing done by some default Linksys configuration....
As far as the cases I have seen go, ATX and AT does imply a power supply location change as well as the MOBO pins and connections change. (Though I admit I have not seen all cases ever produced.) I do not remember the power supply location being listed in the specs of an ATX mobo though, it could be one of those "no where else to put it" type things.
The case in the video is an el-cheapo mini-tower case, it was not cut in back.
Which again points towards a "staged" event and a "throw away" computer that was smashed.
That does not make the video any less funny though, it does get the point across, cheaters were not to be tolerated.
Dude. Go play it again, all the way through next time. Listen to the geeks examining the wreckage.
One clearly says "It's an AT"
For the folks that do not build their own, that's a P1, 486, 386 class computer motherboard case. It wasnt a gaming machine, it was junk that they trashed.
The whole thing was staged, think they unplugged a case, monitor and all the cables that fast? Ever really try to carry someone that does not want to be carried? It's hard enough with a 2 year old fer chrissake, and they are 1/5th the size of an adult.
It was a publicity stunt, probably shown to make it clear (in a funny way) that cheating is not approved of at their event.
(Your point about being careful concerning liability is dead on though.)
all the people in the company who write well on paper for those that can't write on paper at all but have good keyboarding, typing and mouse skills.
That subset of people that can write nicely is the same group that consumes the 80% in the 80/20% 20/80% rule.
Might as well be mentally retarded if they cannot type (in my opinion).
Schools would do their students a favor by making sure they can use a keyboard, mouse, and have used a computer before graduating. Otherwise it's a one way ticket to the blue collar playland.
The time spent teaching them to 'write' (as my school district called it, the other type was 'printing') should be used for basic literary skills, typing skills, and being able to put thoughts into a computer in a cohenrent manner.
My 'writing' method rapidly turned into incoherent scribbles in college while taking notes in class. To this day I do not bother with 'writing', with the exception of a few letters and groups of letters that still come out nice, its all 'printing'.
Of course, I can bang out 45 pages of software manual per day on a computer... I'll take that over post-it notes with phone numbers and email addresses written in beautiful script.
It sure would be nice if those country folks would help offset the cost of my in-city house, $300k city vs. $120k country house. (3 bedroom, 2 bath same house, different location) Housing costs in the city are WAY more than those bumpkins are paying for the same stuff, taxes, the price of land and buildings included.
When they start paying 60% of my mortgage every month with a subsidy paid for by edge-of-towners by an additional tax on mortgage interest, we can talk about a subsidy tax on cable modems.
Shelter, is a basic need after all. Internet broadband is not.
Country features, city features... make your choice and deal with the pricing. I chose where to live based on how I want to live and now pay for my choice of living space. Part of the deal. If someone else makes the choice to live on the outskirts and does not like the price of broadband, fuck em.
Stick to your modem you cheapskates! Shove the tax up your 28.8 butt!
Sooner or later, if you predict everything, you get one right.
Cripes, don't buy one if you don't like it. What' the point of making an article (or posting) about it? Tech writers annoy me.
I do not own enough devices to care if they all connect, and the ones I do own are too old for BlueTooth.
However, I do use a Microsoft BlueTooth keyboard and mouse setup at work in a training room. It's the presenter's controls, which allows them to move around the room and sit next to a student while controlling the computer connected to the overhead projector screen. (The computer itself sits in the back of the room.) It works great for classes, allowing flexibility in training style, freedom of movement and easy passing of the controls to a student for examples.
I really do not care how long the range since it covers the room nicely.
The mouse is optical, takes two AA batteries. The keyboard has all the bells and whistles on it, and has the type of key action that allows fast and accurate typing.
It was only $85, cheaper than a regular corded optical mouse and a regular (decent) corded keyboard. It could be that MS is taking a loss on it, but even at $100 it would be a decent price.
The base is USB, and could be used on a laptop as easily as a desktop. I could see the setup being really good for a big office, laptop, and big extra screen.
I did disable the mouse once demonstrating I could use my pant leg as the mousepad. (Static probably messed it up.) The fix was simple, just re-initialize it. Of course, it only comes with Windows XP drivers so other OSs are out of luck, but that doesnt mean that a different manufacturer couldn't make one that does not rely on drivers.
As far as I am concerned, Bluetooth has been a great success.
I could easily imagine that it could be used for things like universal remote controls, printers, gaming inputs, keyless vehicle entry and loads of other things.
Though, I would never use it on audio headphones. I tend to like more power on them anyway, and a "low-power-consumption" wireless solution makes no sense for something that needs decent bass.
I have written some courses, and been a paid consultant to help a small graduate school put some seminars online. I will try to answer some of the questions from the original post before going on a rant.:)
A few questions come to mind: Is this a quality education?
That depends on what your goals are; if you need to get the paper to get a better job then sure! If you need to really do real work with the knowledge you gained, probably not.
Should the professors be required to show what they have done because they don't have a real classroom to attend?
Professors should be required to meet whatever criteria happens in a physical classroom. Sometimes that is not much, if you feel like the professor is not getting watched, your gripe is with the school, not the professor.
How much effort should a professor put forth for an online class?
A great deal. Making a class online is pretty hard, under estimating how much time, effort, and work it takes is common.
Shouldn't professors be required to be a little more techno savvy before they give a course like this?
Absolutely. Either that, or have someone around who is participating in what is going on who can teach the professors, or simply do the work for them. (Especially for a CS or technical class, the Prof. should have good to excellent computer usage skills, their students probably have them.) I constantly ran into not only technical ignorance, but arrogance about the techonology, like somehow if they could not push a mouse in the right direction it was the fault of the mouse. Not the fact they were inept and in way over their heads.
Note however, that the school also has the responsability to put forth enough effort to make the departments capable of teaching online (i.e. $$$). It is not as easy as getting a server farm, buying an expensive whiz-bang pile of software and a couple of grad students to admin the thing. It takes massive effort to teach the professors, the students, and generate the material correctly.
Shouldn't the schools be reevaluating the 'new teaching style' and making some adjustments?
No. They should be rebuilding the entire method used to transfer information from one brain to another.
Ok, here's my rant.
Every single client I ever worked with doing online classes severely underestimated the amount of work the presenter and the institution would need to put forth to put classes online. Not one came to me with even an INKLING of how much work it takes.
Even a "1 day" or "2 day" seminar takes a man-months to produce. Each point, concept, conclusion, idea, and so on has to be articulated in a scripted way (HTML, PDF, images, video, sound or whatever) and put together in a massive outline.
Most clients had the attitude "well, give it to the tech guy and he'll put it in there" without ever once thinking about the fact that the whole classroom model they are used to using is busted and needs to be planned out, created and put back together.br>
Once the big outline is done, THEN the whole thing has to be crammed into whatever method use to present the stuff. Next the professor has to figure out how to run all the stuff, and on top of dealing with their material in a new way, learn to deal with the interface, the new "24-hour" nature of the item, figure out how to keep the student's attention, run discussions and chat, and so on....
A few of the presenters were not even able to articulate themselves differently than their habititual ramblings in a classroom. They would say things, but couldn't TYPE them in a way that was understandable.
Struggling through this, they bitched the whole time about how much money it was costing. My response was, "well, hire your own full time geek or put up." (not in those exact words)
Web pages, and the companies that sell the "online classroom" services are only a
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. That type of activity is also a symtom of one of the new Windows worms... Bugbear maybe.
Might want to check that out. (Unless you want an excuse to wipe the machine to put something else on it at any rate....)
"nobody is ever going to need more than 24 colors"
Seriously though, I think it is much more likely that the knots and colors represent larger concepts, like "llama" or "worker" rather than simply making combinations. (There are better ways to make combinations of bits if that is the point...)
I think there is some artistic intepretation of the knot sets that caused these things to be meaningful to their users; its not a bit-mapping to meaning system.
Here are some of my favorites; Judas Priest - Defenders of the Faith, Deep Purple - Perfect Strangers, Def Leppard - Pyromania and High-n-Dry, all Tool, and just about anything by Van Halen with DLR still as frontman.
On the other hand there are a load of albums where it only makes "artistic sense" to listen to them start to finish; where some songs outright suck when taken out of context, but where the entire album is often really good. For example all the Radiohead stuff, Pink Floyd, Queensryche (Operation Mindcrime), some Alice Cooper (older stuff, "Welcome to My Nightmare" and "From the Inside" come to mind), some Black Sabbath, Nine Inch Nails, TheWho, Tool, some Blue Oyster Cult, Iron Maiden, Sisters of Mercy, Golden Earring (Moon Tan), U2, Billy Thorpe "Children of the Sun" and others. (Tool gets high marks both for individual songs and compilations.)
I think the artists are complaining that they fear the public will lose sight of the entire album concept. They're simply wrong of course, but that's what they are afraid of. (I find the idea they think that type of thing about me sort of insulting. It has never occurred to me ever to listen to less than a full RadioHead album.)
Good songs and good compilations are separable artistic talents. My wife (for example) has odd taste in music that I do not understand, but she can take songs from my collection and her collection and make awesome "mixed CD's" that tells a story or are good for "Driving to St. Louis" or whatever. She even spends time getting the silence between songs just the right length. Some artists (i.e. Pink Floyd) totally depend on the compilation talents to make their stuff work.
Single songs for download is just one of the consumer-enabling steps the Internet and the electronic age have provided us. Worrying about it is silly. The worst that can happen is I never get a sour taste in my mouth again due to getting duped into buying an album with lots of sucky songs on it. I can still buy the single. (Anyone else totally hate Smashmouth after finding out their first single sounded nothing like the rest of the songs? They had the balls to go and bitch about it later, saying their "real" sound was the other songs. Hmm. Nice to know you guys suck so bad, have fun making albums that sit on the shelf guys!)
Don't you mean "Apple purchasers have paid twice the price for leadership again and again"
I sure wish I could modify my settings to never again see Apple-weenies prostelizing about their choice in computers. They, as a collective group irritate the piss out of me.
Come to market at the wrong time, and it's still the wrong time. Even if it is ahead of everybody else.
The point of ABS is that the driver stays in control of steering (i.e. the wheels still roll and have traction), not that the car stop faster.
So in a 'situation' the driver can choose where to go as well as breaking to slow the vehicle.
Your point is that there IS a conspiracy and that the wankers simply increased the stopping distance in order to lie to people and get them to slow down? Pfft.
I'd like to point out, that anti-lock (or anti-skid) breaks work because they keep the tires from skidding. The only way to do that is to flutter the break pressure when a skid is detected... which decreases the overall energy the tires can transmit back to the pavement....
Which will tend to encrease the overall stopping distance.
So having a high percentage of cars with anti-lock breaks on them will also increase the average stopping distance of vehicles.
So put your tin-foil hat away, it's not a conspiracy or lying, its some engineer making average equipment translate into average stopping distance.
(Anti-lock breaks also allow more control while breaking, which is the point of the devices.)
Wearing a seatbelt is a matter of personal safety, but also the safety of of the other people in the car, and other people around the driver on the road.
A seatbelt not only prevents damage to the body in a crash, but also holds the driver in the seat; allowing additional control of the car after hitting something. Try ramming your car into a passenger side guardrail at a 45 degree angle at 90 KPH sometime, with a seatbelt on you'll stay in the seat and be able to control the car (somewhat). Without it, you are not in front of the steering wheel anymore and have NO chance to control the car anymore. That can (and does) mean the difference between a damaged car and a head on with a semi on the other side of the divided highway.
Seatbelts are therefore also a thing that should be worn out of responsability of other drivers, not just the wearer themselves.
Also, insurance companies do not pay, the governement does not pay when you do not wear a belt. *I* pay, along with anybody else that has ever had insurance or who has ever paid taxes. Insurance premiums are used to pay for payouts due to accidents, where do you think the money comes from? Trees?
Your selfish attitude is as disgusting as those people that insist that smoking in a closed room with other people is their "right".
They are not particularly private. Many people do post web site logs publicly.
The problem arises when the company says they are not collecting the information in a privacy statement, then does it anyway.
Which is what Netscape did.
One thing I do not understand about these work-issue articles on Slashdot;
Why the obvious political weight of the place is not applied to this situation.
Is the demand for work wrong? (I think it is.) Then name the damn company! (and the client) Better yet, put a link to their web site so they friggin notice.
The cat will be out of the proverbial bag then and all sorts of things might happen;
- the client realizes they are being dumb and backs off
- the company realizes a huge list of potential employees just decided not to work for them, and backs off
- potential purchasers of stuff from this client or company can avoid this product. I can tell already it's going to suck. What if it's the control system for the new Nuke plant... or computes YOUR salary or something, think about it.
- people can dig up facts about the laws in the state, county and city, forcing the company to back off
- they gotta pay for bandwidth, and the programmers can sit back and watch the smoke billow from under the server room door knowing something they did made a difference
Remember, it's not slander if they don't catch who said it, and it's not slander if it is true.
Yeah? The same wench that was either commiting plain fraud or was duped by a couple high-school aged girls about what the sexual culture was like in Samoa? Swallowing hook, line, and sinker an interpretation of what the girls thought their culture was like, without bothering to go check that Samoa is full of rape and violence just like the Mead's culture is.
"Coming of Age in Samoa" is now largely discredited as a useless document, except that it is a good read for those interested in seeing how "soft" sciences can go horribly wrong.
Unless that was your point and I was too dim to catch it.
I would submit that anybody that focuses on TV and not the structure of culture and economics that TV implies is plain stupid. TV requires an economy trading with industrial nations, it requires constant electricity and data, it requires advertising (and thus other profit-oriented industries are in the area) to support itself, none of those other factors have anything to do with cultural change? TV is just the visible part.
Fly MidWest. All the seats on all their planes are "first class", leather, roomy.
Course it's twice the price sometimes.... but no better way to go if you are travelling for pleasure.
Hemp has strong, flexible and long fibers, thus the traditional use of hemp to make rope. Also good for other fiber related things, such as paper, fabrics and so on...
:)
I do not know how fast it grows, but faster than corn anyway, hemp is always twice as tall as corn stalks later in summer. Don't try to hide your plants with a few rows of corn, it will get too tall.
Blocking outgoing traffic helps prevent the "meat" layer from being a problem, where users do stuff that cause problems on the network or with their computers.
:)
For example, routing MS Gaming Zone to 127.0.0.1 via internal DNS did wonders for productivity around here. The same is true for any of the other 100% timewaster sites, Gator, porn, Yahoo, etc.
Sure a few people will figure it out, but those are on my staff.
Wait a second.
VeriSign (or Network Solutions) had very bad behavior in the past concerning ability for proper people to manage their domains and ability for shiesters to manage other people's domains.
However, in the last year they have gotten A LOT better and are now pretty easy to deal with, providing account numbers and passwords to manage domains; with a reasonably secure and speedy method for getting them if lost.
It sure would be nice if any lawsuits could go after the individuals responsible for running NSI back in the bad-old-days, that's what needs to get done.
I for one am more interested in making TWOCows cough up legitamate domain registrant information, they seem to be hiding a large section of spammer domains.
[End: Comic Book Guy Voice]
Yeah, that's it. Remove accountability, remove IP address tracking, make everything wireless and one big peer-to-peer cluster f***... know what you get?
Spammitopia with a good helping of Advertis-mania thrown in and crappy service to boot.
No thanks. I like using my money as a tool to get people to do stuff I want, that includes bandwidth, routing and spam-blocking. Capitolism is good because it is self-organizing; suppliers and buyers agree to do stuff for money.
I can see it now, geo-spam-hunt, use your radio direction finder to find some spammer that hid a wireless access point in a park gazebo, only to find out it belonged to the FBI, and the one you were really after was the one in the garbage can.
You think it's bad now, just wait until spammers can move the fricken server on a bicycle WHILE spamming and nobody knows what state they are in cuz all the routing done by some default Linksys configuration....
You forgot, the best beer on the planet. A pitcher of Blonde Dopplebock can wipe away the worst week ever in no time.
You missed a step.
Wal-Mart is now either hiding, or not selling some magazines such as Cosmo, Elle, and so on because of too much skin on them.
That happened last week.
Radar scramblers are illegal in the US, detectors are illegal in some areas (usually by state or county).
Might as well complain about your cocaine not showing up either...
As far as the cases I have seen go, ATX and AT does imply a power supply location change as well as the MOBO pins and connections change. (Though I admit I have not seen all cases ever produced.) I do not remember the power supply location being listed in the specs of an ATX mobo though, it could be one of those "no where else to put it" type things.
The case in the video is an el-cheapo mini-tower case, it was not cut in back.
Which again points towards a "staged" event and a "throw away" computer that was smashed.
That does not make the video any less funny though, it does get the point across, cheaters were not to be tolerated.
Dude. Go play it again, all the way through next time. Listen to the geeks examining the wreckage.
One clearly says "It's an AT"
For the folks that do not build their own, that's a P1, 486, 386 class computer motherboard case. It wasnt a gaming machine, it was junk that they trashed.
The whole thing was staged, think they unplugged a case, monitor and all the cables that fast? Ever really try to carry someone that does not want to be carried? It's hard enough with a 2 year old fer chrissake, and they are 1/5th the size of an adult.
It was a publicity stunt, probably shown to make it clear (in a funny way) that cheating is not approved of at their event.
(Your point about being careful concerning liability is dead on though.)
Gator has a little timer so the pop up comes up several seconds after it is initiated.
That can sometimes appear to make Gator pop up on web sites that are not actually hosting it.
all the people in the company who write well on paper for those that can't write on paper at all but have good keyboarding, typing and mouse skills.
That subset of people that can write nicely is the same group that consumes the 80% in the 80/20% 20/80% rule.
Might as well be mentally retarded if they cannot type (in my opinion).
Schools would do their students a favor by making sure they can use a keyboard, mouse, and have used a computer before graduating. Otherwise it's a one way ticket to the blue collar playland.
The time spent teaching them to 'write' (as my school district called it, the other type was 'printing') should be used for basic literary skills, typing skills, and being able to put thoughts into a computer in a cohenrent manner.
My 'writing' method rapidly turned into incoherent scribbles in college while taking notes in class. To this day I do not bother with 'writing', with the exception of a few letters and groups of letters that still come out nice, its all 'printing'.
Of course, I can bang out 45 pages of software manual per day on a computer... I'll take that over post-it notes with phone numbers and email addresses written in beautiful script.
Gee.
It sure would be nice if those country folks would help offset the cost of my in-city house, $300k city vs. $120k country house. (3 bedroom, 2 bath same house, different location) Housing costs in the city are WAY more than those bumpkins are paying for the same stuff, taxes, the price of land and buildings included.
When they start paying 60% of my mortgage every month with a subsidy paid for by edge-of-towners by an additional tax on mortgage interest, we can talk about a subsidy tax on cable modems.
Shelter, is a basic need after all. Internet broadband is not.
Country features, city features... make your choice and deal with the pricing. I chose where to live based on how I want to live and now pay for my choice of living space. Part of the deal. If someone else makes the choice to live on the outskirts and does not like the price of broadband, fuck em.
Stick to your modem you cheapskates! Shove the tax up your 28.8 butt!
Sooner or later, if you predict everything, you get one right.
Cripes, don't buy one if you don't like it. What' the point of making an article (or posting) about it? Tech writers annoy me.
I do not own enough devices to care if they all connect, and the ones I do own are too old for BlueTooth.
However, I do use a Microsoft BlueTooth keyboard and mouse setup at work in a training room. It's the presenter's controls, which allows them to move around the room and sit next to a student while controlling the computer connected to the overhead projector screen. (The computer itself sits in the back of the room.) It works great for classes, allowing flexibility in training style, freedom of movement and easy passing of the controls to a student for examples.
I really do not care how long the range since it covers the room nicely.
The mouse is optical, takes two AA batteries. The keyboard has all the bells and whistles on it, and has the type of key action that allows fast and accurate typing.
It was only $85, cheaper than a regular corded optical mouse and a regular (decent) corded keyboard. It could be that MS is taking a loss on it, but even at $100 it would be a decent price.
The base is USB, and could be used on a laptop as easily as a desktop. I could see the setup being really good for a big office, laptop, and big extra screen.
I did disable the mouse once demonstrating I could use my pant leg as the mousepad. (Static probably messed it up.) The fix was simple, just re-initialize it. Of course, it only comes with Windows XP drivers so other OSs are out of luck, but that doesnt mean that a different manufacturer couldn't make one that does not rely on drivers.
As far as I am concerned, Bluetooth has been a great success.
I could easily imagine that it could be used for things like universal remote controls, printers, gaming inputs, keyless vehicle entry and loads of other things.
Though, I would never use it on audio headphones. I tend to like more power on them anyway, and a "low-power-consumption" wireless solution makes no sense for something that needs decent bass.
I have written some courses, and been a paid consultant to help a small graduate school put some seminars online. I will try to answer some of the questions from the original post before going on a rant. :)
A few questions come to mind: Is this a quality education?
That depends on what your goals are; if you need to get the paper to get a better job then sure! If you need to really do real work with the knowledge you gained, probably not.
Should the professors be required to show what they have done because they don't have a real classroom to attend?
Professors should be required to meet whatever criteria happens in a physical classroom. Sometimes that is not much, if you feel like the professor is not getting watched, your gripe is with the school, not the professor.
How much effort should a professor put forth for an online class?
A great deal. Making a class online is pretty hard, under estimating how much time, effort, and work it takes is common.
Shouldn't professors be required to be a little more techno savvy before they give a course like this?
Absolutely. Either that, or have someone around who is participating in what is going on who can teach the professors, or simply do the work for them. (Especially for a CS or technical class, the Prof. should have good to excellent computer usage skills, their students probably have them.) I constantly ran into not only technical ignorance, but arrogance about the techonology, like somehow if they could not push a mouse in the right direction it was the fault of the mouse. Not the fact they were inept and in way over their heads.
Note however, that the school also has the responsability to put forth enough effort to make the departments capable of teaching online (i.e. $$$). It is not as easy as getting a server farm, buying an expensive whiz-bang pile of software and a couple of grad students to admin the thing. It takes massive effort to teach the professors, the students, and generate the material correctly.
Shouldn't the schools be reevaluating the 'new teaching style' and making some adjustments?
No. They should be rebuilding the entire method used to transfer information from one brain to another.
Ok, here's my rant.
Every single client I ever worked with doing online classes severely underestimated the amount of work the presenter and the institution would need to put forth to put classes online. Not one came to me with even an INKLING of how much work it takes.
Even a "1 day" or "2 day" seminar takes a man-months to produce. Each point, concept, conclusion, idea, and so on has to be articulated in a scripted way (HTML, PDF, images, video, sound or whatever) and put together in a massive outline.
Most clients had the attitude "well, give it to the tech guy and he'll put it in there" without ever once thinking about the fact that the whole classroom model they are used to using is busted and needs to be planned out, created and put back together.br>
Once the big outline is done, THEN the whole thing has to be crammed into whatever method use to present the stuff. Next the professor has to figure out how to run all the stuff, and on top of dealing with their material in a new way, learn to deal with the interface, the new "24-hour" nature of the item, figure out how to keep the student's attention, run discussions and chat, and so on....
A few of the presenters were not even able to articulate themselves differently than their habititual ramblings in a classroom. They would say things, but couldn't TYPE them in a way that was understandable.
Struggling through this, they bitched the whole time about how much money it was costing. My response was, "well, hire your own full time geek or put up." (not in those exact words)
Web pages, and the companies that sell the "online classroom" services are only a