For me, my worry would be that non-students get the podcast. That is, people who have not spent thousands of bucks in tuition getting ahold of the precious information imparted by the learned souls at the front of the class. Which points to my general belief on the subject, which is if the person paid tuition for the class, he paid to have access to the podcast (assuming there is one), whether or not he sits in class at the appointed time.
And the whole question reminds me of a movie I once saw but can't remember the name of. Four shots of the same classroom, broken up through the movie. It starts with standard view of the classroom, with students seated, taking notes and looking bored while the professor lectures. Second view, same, with a sprinkling of tape recorders set up on desks. Third view, same, but with tape recorders outnumbering the students. Fourth view, All desks have tape recorders on them. Nobody in the seats. And at the lecturn? A big reel-to-reel, spinning and playing the professor's notes, as if to directly place the notes into the students' tape recorders. Like a podcast. B) It made and makes me laugh, but in all seriousness, if the class is worth the student's time, that student goes.
To make any scheme work, attendance will have to be taken. Preferably in an electronic form, as any other way will take up a lot of TA time, and while TA time is cheap, the professors have better uses for it. And any scheme like that will be unpopular, seen as draconian and stupid. And until DRM comes, there will be little to stop Mary the Model Student from sending the podcast to Sam the Slacker who skips class. And if Sam skips class, might he not avoid listening to the podcast, too?
The profs know the people who skip all the time. They know the Sams of this world. They're the ones dropping out after the first test when they've failed it. They're the ones with incomplete and late assignments. I don't see podcasts changing that.
I haven't looked hard, but I haven't seen new VCRs that weren't dual VCR/DVD units. and a few months ago, Wal-Mart dropped support of VHS, going all DVD. I'm sure they're following the market, not leading it, so the VCR option is going away for Joe Six-Pack.
This is somewhere between a "yeah, but..." and a "yeah, also...".
Desktop and laptop computers are called PC because, really, they're personal. You can call someone over and say "look at this cool video" or whatever, but the common case is unicast, one-to-one, and highly-interactive. TV's common case is broadcast, one-to-many and not interactive (the one-to-one case goes to an array of one, mostly.) Someone trying to be interactive with the TV (programming the DVR, searching the special features on the DVD, channel-surfing) already tries the patience of everyone else in the room.
I think there's a good case to be made for adding computer intelligence into... well, nearly anything, but we'll stick with TV here. First, by going to NIST rather than relying on me, I get a set-top box that'll never have to be time-set. Second, I have a dream idea where weather alerts are on a separated layer from media. This means I can get Larry the Local Weather Guy breaking into the show I'm watching but not show up talking all over the shows I'm trying to DVR. As benefits, I could get him breaking in when I'm watching the Discovery Channel or some other non-local channel, or even watching a DVD. And yeah, that's just a dream right now. But the point we get to is that whatever we put on the TV becomes a set-top box and not a computer like we're used to.
Could you imagine how dull it would be to watch someone else browse?
More than likely, the money for creating the newest, coolest thing would drop off and you'd get fewer players in the field, and far fewer games. Technology is good, standards that allow technology to expand is better. But money drives it.
Before I became a geek, I was a journalism student, and in an advanced editing course, we talked about ads. The professor said that ads are news content as much as stories were. I balked at that idea. Then, after class, I sat somewhere and opened up the new issue of Maximum Rock'n'Roll, saw in an ad from Dischord that Fugazi has a new record out, started scheming about how to afford it, and I was enlightened. Fugazi's new album was news, information that I wanted to know so I could plan my life around it. It was content, not distraction.
Fugazi fans tend to be hardcore punk fans, so an advertisement in a zine for hardcore punk fans is tightly targetted. Slashdot readers tend to be geeks and often Linux geeks, so ThinkGeek and Linux distros are natural advertisers for Slashdot. Brides-to-be, as a class, are so into having the wedding of a lifetime that they're willing to pay for big big magazines full of ads. Incidently, this is why IT professionals can get those magazines for free, because the money for ads in magazines that can say they have $BIGNUM subscribers in the IT industry trumps the money they'd get from subscriptions from the same set of people.
So, who watches Desperate Housewives? Can you say it's thirty-something married women? Teenage and 20-something boys gawking at the hotties? What? Watching Monk, I get the idea that someone thinks that only old people watch the show, because it seems subsidized by powered wheelchairs. "People of limited mobility! Give us money and we'll give you this wheelchair so you don't have to stay in front of the TV, watching Monk!" And watch almost any channel at 2:33am and you'll see ads switching between sex lines and diaper ads, because perverts and parents of bawling infants are the two types of people they know are watching at 2:23am.
So, when they don't know who you are and what you want, they go to the everyone list. Everyone needs to eat, everyone wants to get away, everyone wants to feel sexy, everyone wants to be cool. So, food, cars, travel, beer, deodorants. And, let's pull back from everyone to everyone in one half of the audience, and bring in the tampon ads. And it's this everyone that probably gets hurt the most by ad-skipping. I mean, let's face it, I could watch all the limited-mobility ads on USA that I want and as long as I have two good legs, I won't buy anything.
And one thing to notice: Studies say that women are not sold via humor, so for big ticket items where both responsible adults must agree, you won't see much humor any more. The days of Joe Isuzu are dead.
I was going to post exactly that. It's not such an odd thing, either; I have a friend who used to work for a defense contractor, and what you do to check status on F-18 jets is plug in a crossover cable and fire up a browser. If it works for home routers and fighter jets, it should work for cell-phones, right?
OK, so you have a $100 laptop that you have to wind up sometimes. And a full install of pretty desktop distro will bog it down. So you get some people, go with a pre-canned setup of Debian that has only the basics and whatever educational stuff you put on it. Don't pack in drivers for hardware you'll never see, go with an old X server instead of Gnome or KDE. Wonderful.
But the point of this thing is that the child will create on this thing and share with others. This is a design criteria, IIRC. And when you have the ability to create and share, you'll want new libraries or modules so you can do that better, cooler stuff. Thus more cruft.
I started out with a Palm III and had a Visor for a while. Now I'm an iPaq guy. For the glory of what it did -- and "forget what you think a 'q' looks like, this is what I'll accept as a 'q'" really did open up pen computing -- the Palm always was the prehensile tail for your computer, while PocketPC is 3/4 a complete system. I browse the net and ssh from mine every day. I don't currently run Linux on it, but I can.
A few years ago, I was tasked to build an application for the iPaq. I put together the basics of the application in VB for Win32 so I could send it as a demo to the clients and get a better idea of what they wanted, thinking I could cut and paste a lot of the code when I started working on VB for PPC.
Wrong.
Some things I get. I know.NET has a smaller subset for their handheld version than for their PC version. This was before.NET. The syntax was different! For loop syntax was different. (Or was it the if statement? I haven't looked at the source in years and I no longer work there.) It was sufficiently different that I started from scratch rather than making minor mods on the code. You don't make for loops in C different in Windows and Linux. There was no benefit for having a different syntax.
I give lip service to the standard Microsoft hatred when it comes up. I like Linux and use it whenever possible. But the fact that they switch syntax like that makes me hate them. (And, granted,.NET fixes that problem.)
If you release for Mac-on-G4 and Mac-on-Intel, that means you either have two binaries or you have emulation. Two binaries means expanded headache during development and debugging and emulation means everything runs slower. This is a lose-lose situation.
I still don't see how this isn't Apple shooting themselves in the forehead.
The engineering wonder is not the three blades (although that's nice) but the clear-through gap allowing the hairs to be rinsed out and extending the useful life of the blade. That's the big win with Mach3.
You want to convince me that this is bad legislation? You want me to do more, to call my congresscritter and say "don't vote for this"? Saying "over 600 organizations are against it" doesn't say much. Saying "This is what Bruce Schneier thinks" says a lot, because I accept Bruce as an authority on security matters, and because Bruce writes "this is a bad idea because...", and you can accept, reject or counter the arguments he gives. Saying "Over 600 organizations are against it" isn't debate, it's social pressure. That is what I'm talking about, and all I'm talking about here.
Personal issues -- race, religion, sex and relationships -- are the only parts of a science fiction story that can't be passed over by fiat. FTL drives, instant communications, zap guns: that's all flash we put on top.
Re:Not just developing countries
on
The Sub-$100 Laptop?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
First, I like the idea. It's a good idea. I've long thought that there was an untapped market for trailing-edge technology. I've heard it said that literate Western culture thinks of sitting down all by yourself and reading stuff is considered doing something, which is an alien concept to the tribal cultures of Africa, but I can't tell how much of that is cultural sensitivity and how much is racism. So, I doubt if it would be as transformational as all that, and I remember a story by the guy who coined the term "cyberpunk" about a hacker who runs off into the wilderness with a laptop while being chased by the bad guys, and eventually he smashes it and uses the CPU as a lure so he could eat. Is a PC of any sort really what you need on the Serengeti? But I still like the idea.
It's not that I want to write words with one hand. It's not something I'm wanting to optimize for. It's just that, after noticing that "stewardesses" is a one-handed word, I wanted to know what other words were, and once I did it with QWERTY, I thought I'd try it with DVORAK. Once the program was set, it's just a one-line change to switch.
With any abstract key arrangement, there will have to be words that only require one hand to type, though. And if you use an old-school Mac keyboard, you can one-hand type any word. You could palm that keyboard!
That is, "with one hand". For example, you can type "stewardesses" with only the left hand and "monopoly" and "opinion" with only the right on a QWERTY, and really only "bldg", "blvd" and "ctrl" right-handed and "papaya" and "yuppie" left-handed on DVORAK. The right-handed ones aren't even real words. Just to clarify.
I was not trolling. I was making a joke. The "advantage" was simply that unfamiliar layouts kept her fearful of my PC. To my mind, that bit, that people see your keyboard and think "hey, weird" and either don't use your stuff or think you're way ultra cool for using it is the main "advantage" toward using a Dvorak keyboard. For me, it's like driving with a joystick rather than a wheel and gas pedal. There might be good and logical reasons why you would want to use an XBox controller to drive a car, but my body touch-types in QUERTY and my attempts to try DVORAK felt like I was learning to walk again, so I stopped. That sort of "We have it now, I understand it and it works, so why change?" attitude keeps red-yellow-green stoplights, Windows and quite a number of other functional-but-not-wonderful thinks active.
It's an interesting point about how keyboard layouts relate to different languages. I did a program once that figured out what words could only be written on a QWERTY or DVORAK keyboard, and far fewer could be found for DVORAK, but that actually doesn't say much for usability. I was under the understanding that most language groups had their own keyboard layouts, and I know someone who complains about QWERTY after spending years in Italy and using an Italian keyboard layout.
What are the least QWERTY-friendly language, in your experience?
Slashdot Mirror
For me, my worry would be that non-students get the podcast. That is, people who have not spent thousands of bucks in tuition getting ahold of the precious information imparted by the learned souls at the front of the class. Which points to my general belief on the subject, which is if the person paid tuition for the class, he paid to have access to the podcast (assuming there is one), whether or not he sits in class at the appointed time.
And the whole question reminds me of a movie I once saw but can't remember the name of. Four shots of the same classroom, broken up through the movie. It starts with standard view of the classroom, with students seated, taking notes and looking bored while the professor lectures. Second view, same, with a sprinkling of tape recorders set up on desks. Third view, same, but with tape recorders outnumbering the students. Fourth view, All desks have tape recorders on them. Nobody in the seats. And at the lecturn? A big reel-to-reel, spinning and playing the professor's notes, as if to directly place the notes into the students' tape recorders. Like a podcast. B) It made and makes me laugh, but in all seriousness, if the class is worth the student's time, that student goes.
To make any scheme work, attendance will have to be taken. Preferably in an electronic form, as any other way will take up a lot of TA time, and while TA time is cheap, the professors have better uses for it. And any scheme like that will be unpopular, seen as draconian and stupid. And until DRM comes, there will be little to stop Mary the Model Student from sending the podcast to Sam the Slacker who skips class. And if Sam skips class, might he not avoid listening to the podcast, too?
The profs know the people who skip all the time. They know the Sams of this world. They're the ones dropping out after the first test when they've failed it. They're the ones with incomplete and late assignments. I don't see podcasts changing that.
I haven't looked hard, but I haven't seen new VCRs that weren't dual VCR/DVD units. and a few months ago, Wal-Mart dropped support of VHS, going all DVD. I'm sure they're following the market, not leading it, so the VCR option is going away for Joe Six-Pack.
This is somewhere between a "yeah, but..." and a "yeah, also...".
... well, nearly anything, but we'll stick with TV here. First, by going to NIST rather than relying on me, I get a set-top box that'll never have to be time-set. Second, I have a dream idea where weather alerts are on a separated layer from media. This means I can get Larry the Local Weather Guy breaking into the show I'm watching but not show up talking all over the shows I'm trying to DVR. As benefits, I could get him breaking in when I'm watching the Discovery Channel or some other non-local channel, or even watching a DVD. And yeah, that's just a dream right now. But the point we get to is that whatever we put on the TV becomes a set-top box and not a computer like we're used to.
Desktop and laptop computers are called PC because, really, they're personal. You can call someone over and say "look at this cool video" or whatever, but the common case is unicast, one-to-one, and highly-interactive. TV's common case is broadcast, one-to-many and not interactive (the one-to-one case goes to an array of one, mostly.) Someone trying to be interactive with the TV (programming the DVR, searching the special features on the DVD, channel-surfing) already tries the patience of everyone else in the room.
I think there's a good case to be made for adding computer intelligence into
Could you imagine how dull it would be to watch someone else browse?
More than likely, the money for creating the newest, coolest thing would drop off and you'd get fewer players in the field, and far fewer games. Technology is good, standards that allow technology to expand is better. But money drives it.
The problem is a mass audience.
Before I became a geek, I was a journalism student, and in an advanced editing course, we talked about ads. The professor said that ads are news content as much as stories were. I balked at that idea. Then, after class, I sat somewhere and opened up the new issue of Maximum Rock'n'Roll, saw in an ad from Dischord that Fugazi has a new record out, started scheming about how to afford it, and I was enlightened. Fugazi's new album was news, information that I wanted to know so I could plan my life around it. It was content, not distraction.
Fugazi fans tend to be hardcore punk fans, so an advertisement in a zine for hardcore punk fans is tightly targetted. Slashdot readers tend to be geeks and often Linux geeks, so ThinkGeek and Linux distros are natural advertisers for Slashdot. Brides-to-be, as a class, are so into having the wedding of a lifetime that they're willing to pay for big big magazines full of ads. Incidently, this is why IT professionals can get those magazines for free, because the money for ads in magazines that can say they have $BIGNUM subscribers in the IT industry trumps the money they'd get from subscriptions from the same set of people.
So, who watches Desperate Housewives? Can you say it's thirty-something married women? Teenage and 20-something boys gawking at the hotties? What? Watching Monk, I get the idea that someone thinks that only old people watch the show, because it seems subsidized by powered wheelchairs. "People of limited mobility! Give us money and we'll give you this wheelchair so you don't have to stay in front of the TV, watching Monk!" And watch almost any channel at 2:33am and you'll see ads switching between sex lines and diaper ads, because perverts and parents of bawling infants are the two types of people they know are watching at 2:23am.
So, when they don't know who you are and what you want, they go to the everyone list. Everyone needs to eat, everyone wants to get away, everyone wants to feel sexy, everyone wants to be cool. So, food, cars, travel, beer, deodorants. And, let's pull back from everyone to everyone in one half of the audience, and bring in the tampon ads. And it's this everyone that probably gets hurt the most by ad-skipping. I mean, let's face it, I could watch all the limited-mobility ads on USA that I want and as long as I have two good legs, I won't buy anything.
And one thing to notice: Studies say that women are not sold via humor, so for big ticket items where both responsible adults must agree, you won't see much humor any more. The days of Joe Isuzu are dead.
I was going to post exactly that. It's not such an odd thing, either; I have a friend who used to work for a defense contractor, and what you do to check status on F-18 jets is plug in a crossover cable and fire up a browser. If it works for home routers and fighter jets, it should work for cell-phones, right?
OK, so you have a $100 laptop that you have to wind up sometimes. And a full install of pretty desktop distro will bog it down. So you get some people, go with a pre-canned setup of Debian that has only the basics and whatever educational stuff you put on it. Don't pack in drivers for hardware you'll never see, go with an old X server instead of Gnome or KDE. Wonderful.
But the point of this thing is that the child will create on this thing and share with others. This is a design criteria, IIRC. And when you have the ability to create and share, you'll want new libraries or modules so you can do that better, cooler stuff. Thus more cruft.
I started out with a Palm III and had a Visor for a while. Now I'm an iPaq guy. For the glory of what it did -- and "forget what you think a 'q' looks like, this is what I'll accept as a 'q'" really did open up pen computing -- the Palm always was the prehensile tail for your computer, while PocketPC is 3/4 a complete system. I browse the net and ssh from mine every day. I don't currently run Linux on it, but I can.
"Microsoft Bob" already has meaning, though.
---
You can also create new lines here if you want
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Nobody gets that it's Terminator memorabilia?
A few years ago, I was tasked to build an application for the iPaq. I put together the basics of the application in VB for Win32 so I could send it as a demo to the clients and get a better idea of what they wanted, thinking I could cut and paste a lot of the code when I started working on VB for PPC.
.NET has a smaller subset for their handheld version than for their PC version. This was before .NET. The syntax was different! For loop syntax was different. (Or was it the if statement? I haven't looked at the source in years and I no longer work there.) It was sufficiently different that I started from scratch rather than making minor mods on the code. You don't make for loops in C different in Windows and Linux. There was no benefit for having a different syntax.
.NET fixes that problem.)
Wrong.
Some things I get. I know
I give lip service to the standard Microsoft hatred when it comes up. I like Linux and use it whenever possible. But the fact that they switch syntax like that makes me hate them. (And, granted,
If you release for Mac-on-G4 and Mac-on-Intel, that means you either have two binaries or you have emulation. Two binaries means expanded headache during development and debugging and emulation means everything runs slower. This is a lose-lose situation.
I still don't see how this isn't Apple shooting themselves in the forehead.
What we need is VII, VIII, and IX. Y'know, where Luke goes dark.
The engineering wonder is not the three blades (although that's nice) but the clear-through gap allowing the hairs to be rinsed out and extending the useful life of the blade. That's the big win with Mach3.
From the conventions last summer, I was under the impression that it was the Democrats who were for the mulching of infants.
When a society is run by and for the corporations, it is FASCISM. That is the definition.
Not when I took Ideology in college.
You want to convince me that this is bad legislation? You want me to do more, to call my congresscritter and say "don't vote for this"? Saying "over 600 organizations are against it" doesn't say much. Saying "This is what Bruce Schneier thinks" says a lot, because I accept Bruce as an authority on security matters, and because Bruce writes "this is a bad idea because...", and you can accept, reject or counter the arguments he gives. Saying "Over 600 organizations are against it" isn't debate, it's social pressure. That is what I'm talking about, and all I'm talking about here.
60 million Elvis fans can be wrong, and so can 600 organizations. Try using arguments instead of peer pressure, OK?
Personal issues -- race, religion, sex and relationships -- are the only parts of a science fiction story that can't be passed over by fiat. FTL drives, instant communications, zap guns: that's all flash we put on top.
First, I like the idea. It's a good idea. I've long thought that there was an untapped market for trailing-edge technology. I've heard it said that literate Western culture thinks of sitting down all by yourself and reading stuff is considered doing something, which is an alien concept to the tribal cultures of Africa, but I can't tell how much of that is cultural sensitivity and how much is racism. So, I doubt if it would be as transformational as all that, and I remember a story by the guy who coined the term "cyberpunk" about a hacker who runs off into the wilderness with a laptop while being chased by the bad guys, and eventually he smashes it and uses the CPU as a lure so he could eat. Is a PC of any sort really what you need on the Serengeti? But I still like the idea.
That's one reason. Substitute "boss" for another reason. I trust you don't need it explained if we substitute "desktop" for "laptop"?
It's not that I want to write words with one hand. It's not something I'm wanting to optimize for. It's just that, after noticing that "stewardesses" is a one-handed word, I wanted to know what other words were, and once I did it with QWERTY, I thought I'd try it with DVORAK. Once the program was set, it's just a one-line change to switch.
With any abstract key arrangement, there will have to be words that only require one hand to type, though. And if you use an old-school Mac keyboard, you can one-hand type any word. You could palm that keyboard!
That is, "with one hand". For example, you can type "stewardesses" with only the left hand and "monopoly" and "opinion" with only the right on a QWERTY, and really only "bldg", "blvd" and "ctrl" right-handed and "papaya" and "yuppie" left-handed on DVORAK. The right-handed ones aren't even real words. Just to clarify.
I was not trolling. I was making a joke. The "advantage" was simply that unfamiliar layouts kept her fearful of my PC. To my mind, that bit, that people see your keyboard and think "hey, weird" and either don't use your stuff or think you're way ultra cool for using it is the main "advantage" toward using a Dvorak keyboard. For me, it's like driving with a joystick rather than a wheel and gas pedal. There might be good and logical reasons why you would want to use an XBox controller to drive a car, but my body touch-types in QUERTY and my attempts to try DVORAK felt like I was learning to walk again, so I stopped. That sort of "We have it now, I understand it and it works, so why change?" attitude keeps red-yellow-green stoplights, Windows and quite a number of other functional-but-not-wonderful thinks active.
It's an interesting point about how keyboard layouts relate to different languages. I did a program once that figured out what words could only be written on a QWERTY or DVORAK keyboard, and far fewer could be found for DVORAK, but that actually doesn't say much for usability. I was under the understanding that most language groups had their own keyboard layouts, and I know someone who complains about QWERTY after spending years in Italy and using an Italian keyboard layout.
What are the least QWERTY-friendly language, in your experience?