- Need to move office? Pick it up and off you go. I doubt many desktop machine users can go and work in the garden if they want to. - Laptops generally use less power and are quieter than equivalent dektops
There's not that much processor power difference these days: my Acer Travelmate 8104 (2Ghz P-M, 1Gb RAM, X700) is plenty fast enough.
The unplayable camera angle thing really annoys me. Resident Evil, for example, was a terrible game because you couldn't see what you were doing: what fun is fighting off zombies if the only reason it's hard is because the camera angle means you can't see what's going on?
I think the problem is also that both parties seem to make policy on education without much serious research or even thought.
Also, IMO, the actual solution to the problem would be far too expensive for either main party to consider: make the maximum class size in secondary education 20 and use exam results and reports to ensure that everyone in each class is of similar ability.
Instead, Labour wastes money on getting 50% of people into higher education. So we end up as a country of barely literate or numerate people with degrees in Sports Science and Marketing.
I think the point is that doing five times as many maths problems is not going to make you five times better at maths: it's just going to piss off the bright students and frustrate the less able. There's a middle ground there. Clearly something is wrong in the UK and the USA's education system: that's why we're at the bottom of the social mobility league tables.
The UK system is currently screwed beyond belief, has been for many years and doesn't appear to be going to get any better. Exam scores are going up, yet actual ability as measured by universities and employers is dropping.
A-level maths, for example, got easier every year. I remember getting a load of past exam papers and comparing them: year by year, the syllabus got smaller, the questions got easier and more and more subdivided. Instead of asking one question, they would ask ten small question that lead the student by the hand through the problem.
Something is wrong when an intelligent student can get four good A-levels and hardly have to work at all.
That's a bit of an overstatement. I found at degree level that the kind of person who spent hours doing their homework every night while at school very often struggled when introduced to a world where problems are not arranged in neat groups on one side of A4. Give them a problem sheet and they were quite happy to go and sit down and quietly work through it. Ask them to actually apply that knowledge, or to solve a different, related, problem, or even (heaven-forbid) ask them to combine several ideas at once and suddenly they start to have real trouble. Homework, and the modern style of exam where each question is neatly split up into separate sections for each idea, are great for teaching single, easily examinable facts. But they also instill a very limited, linear mindset which can leave students struggling in the future.
The problem with FFTA was that so much of it was just too easy: 90% of the missions you could complete without thinking. I enjoyed the game, but there wasn't much in the way of tactics for so many of the battles.
Re:I have an idea:
on
Cubicle Privacy
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Cubicles seem to be an American thing: I've never seen one in an office here (UK). You might have a small (like the height of a ring binder) divider to stop your papers spilling onto somebody else's desk, but that's about it. Senior managers get offices, every one else gets open-plan.
To me, cubicles seem to be the worst of both worlds: the noise transmission of an open plan with the visual isolation of an office.
As someone who works entirely from home - my only communication with co-workers is IRC, email and a weekly trans-Atlantic phone conference - working from home is not all good. Being able to choose my hours, dress-code and working environment is great, and the commute time can't be beaten. But I think if I stay more than a few years the complete lack of human communication will get me down.
I've heard that newspaper editors call the results of working from home "freelancer syndrome", and dread getting stuck on the phone to lonely freelance journalists, desperate for conversation. I don't want to turn out like that.
I bought SuSE 9.2 at my local PC World (Cambridge, England) a couple of months ago. They had several versions of Mandrake as well. It surprised me the first time I saw them: this is the kind of place that sells gold-plated USB cables where the most technical information you'll get out of an employee is "The processor is like the brain of a computer".
(and yes, I do wish I hadn't wasted my money on SuSE, Ubuntu is superior in every way, but I needed a linux distro with SATA support immediately).
Isn't part of the reason Scotland looks so small to viewers because they're used to the traditional Mercator projection, which makes things further north look bigger?
Now that they've switched to a 3D globe representation, that distortion has been lost.
I didn't mean to suggest that nobody should try, I was just trying to explain the lack of reviews. It would be fantastic to have a source of software reviews that actually spent serious time using and testing the software, but few people seem prepared to do that.
As it stands, we get reviews of Linux distros and software that barely scratch the surface of the functionality and completely omit most of the important issues (reliability, update schedule, security releases etc.).
I think it's reasonably hard to write a decent review of groupware clients: certainly, most of the magazine-style reviews are worthless. It's very much a matter of personal usage pattern, long-term stability and your environment (servers, other users etc).
Personally, I use Thunderbird: I found Evolution too slow and unstable and I prefer Thunderbird's UI. But then I don't have much need for groupware and Tomboy notes are good enough for my calendaring needs. I've used Outlook 2003 a bit, and I quite like the mail display mode. KMail's UI annoys me too much to use it.
The last time I did it was Lisbon airport: I guess the Portugese are pretty laid back in general, but I was flying BA and the check-in guy I asked was really surprised when I asked if it was OK to take all these bottles of wine etc. in my hand luggage - he just said "Of course you can".
Airline security is so strange. No metal cutlery, no pen knives, nothing vaguely weapon-like in hyour hand luggage, advanced scanner technology everywhere on boarding.
But can I take these four bottles of duty-free vodka which can be turned into extremely sharp weapons in about five seconds in my hand luggage? Of course you can sir.
Why do *more* films? There wasn't enough material to fill I-III.
If I could go back in time and change Lucas' mind, I would convince him to scrap the prequel trilogy and instead spend the money on two films: one prequel, telling the tale of Anakin->Darth Vader, and one sequel, set after ROTJ, dealing with the rebuilding of the New Republic, Leia learning about the Force, Han facing the new responsibility of his position as Admiral. Kind of bookends to the originals.
That's got to be better than the stretched-too-thin, convoluted and dull storyline of Eps I-III.
Re:Haven't you noticed all of the Microsoft ads?
on
Inside the Xbox 360
·
· Score: 1
Well, you could say that as all Slashdot readers are intelligent enough to recognise Microsoft's propoganda for the crap it is, why not let MS waste their advertising budget supporting pro-Linux sites.
Of course, I doubt the OSTG thought that deeply about it.
I was thinking of buying one of the happy hacker keyboards: anybody have any comments on how good they are? I can't see the difference between the lite and the professional, apart from $100.
(I'm looking for a decent coding keyboard, as I'm fed up with this laptop keyboard and my MS Natural pro has gone squishy already. And no, I don't want a type M!)
Palm(One|Whatever) seem to be more like Apple before the "Second Coming of Jobs": lacking direction, floundering around trying to bring a new OS to market to replace their increasingly outdated current version, full of infighting and confusion.
I hope they can sort themselves out, because I really like the PalmOS platform.
OK, so I'm not going to see Ep3. Once everyone saw the direction Lucas was going with Ep1, I don't know why there is so much speculation and discussion about the new trilogy: it was clear they were always going to suck.
- We already know the storyline: Anakin is Luke's father etc. Therefore, as you've thrown all suspense or surprise out the window to start with, you have to either do something interesting with the story that doesn't effect the future or have a really good cast/script to keep things interesting. Lucas doesn't bother with any of that. Instead, he just ploddingly lays out the story and throws in a few fight scenes and pointless pod races.
- Trained Light-side Jedi are really boring characters. Sanctimonious, smug, unemotional, basically never breaking a sweat. Ep4-6 get round this by effectivelt never having any: Obi-wan is killed off quick, Yoda only appears briefly, Luke is untrained and learning and generally very un-Jedi like. Eps1-3 are full of Light side Jedi being dull and knowing.
- CGI. Ep4-6 were made before the current CGI craze. The ships, locations with people in therefore look generally real: dirty, scratched and solid. In EpI-III everything is CGI and looks unreal. No matter how good the CGI is, it can't look as real as reality.
- The backstory is weak: it just about held an audience's attention when it was just background to the action, but bring it to the foreground and it becomes dull. Star Wars was just a fun space opera with a large backstory. EpI-III try to pretend it's more than that. It's the same as The Matrix and its sequels: the story was just about good enough to cover one film, attempt to stretch it beyond that and it starts to show its holes.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't today meant to be the day Debian Sarge is released as well? The end of days is approaching, I tell you.
Some more advantages:
- Need to move office? Pick it up and off you go. I doubt many desktop machine users can go and work in the garden if they want to.
- Laptops generally use less power and are quieter than equivalent dektops
There's not that much processor power difference these days: my Acer Travelmate 8104 (2Ghz P-M, 1Gb RAM, X700) is plenty fast enough.
The unplayable camera angle thing really annoys me. Resident Evil, for example, was a terrible game because you couldn't see what you were doing: what fun is fighting off zombies if the only reason it's hard is because the camera angle means you can't see what's going on?
I didn't know Robert Kilroy Silk posted on Slashdot.
I think the problem is also that both parties seem to make policy on education without much serious research or even thought.
Also, IMO, the actual solution to the problem would be far too expensive for either main party to consider: make the maximum class size in secondary education 20 and use exam results and reports to ensure that everyone in each class is of similar ability.
Instead, Labour wastes money on getting 50% of people into higher education. So we end up as a country of barely literate or numerate people with degrees in Sports Science and Marketing.
I think the point is that doing five times as many maths problems is not going to make you five times better at maths: it's just going to piss off the bright students and frustrate the less able. There's a middle ground there.
Clearly something is wrong in the UK and the USA's education system: that's why we're at the bottom of the social mobility league tables.
The UK system is currently screwed beyond belief, has been for many years and doesn't appear to be going to get any better. Exam scores are going up, yet actual ability as measured by universities and employers is dropping.
A-level maths, for example, got easier every year. I remember getting a load of past exam papers and comparing them: year by year, the syllabus got smaller, the questions got easier and more and more subdivided. Instead of asking one question, they would ask ten small question that lead the student by the hand through the problem.
Something is wrong when an intelligent student can get four good A-levels and hardly have to work at all.
That's a bit of an overstatement. I found at degree level that the kind of person who spent hours doing their homework every night while at school very often struggled when introduced to a world where problems are not arranged in neat groups on one side of A4.
Give them a problem sheet and they were quite happy to go and sit down and quietly work through it. Ask them to actually apply that knowledge, or to solve a different, related, problem, or even (heaven-forbid) ask them to combine several ideas at once and suddenly they start to have real trouble. Homework, and the modern style of exam where each question is neatly split up into separate sections for each idea, are great for teaching single, easily examinable facts. But they also instill a very limited, linear mindset which can leave students struggling in the future.
The problem with FFTA was that so much of it was just too easy: 90% of the missions you could complete without thinking. I enjoyed the game, but there wasn't much in the way of tactics for so many of the battles.
Cubicles seem to be an American thing: I've never seen one in an office here (UK). You might have a small (like the height of a ring binder) divider to stop your papers spilling onto somebody else's desk, but that's about it. Senior managers get offices, every one else gets open-plan.
To me, cubicles seem to be the worst of both worlds: the noise transmission of an open plan with the visual isolation of an office.
As someone who works entirely from home - my only communication with co-workers is IRC, email and a weekly trans-Atlantic phone conference - working from home is not all good. Being able to choose my hours, dress-code and working environment is great, and the commute time can't be beaten. But I think if I stay more than a few years the complete lack of human communication will get me down.
I've heard that newspaper editors call the results of working from home "freelancer syndrome", and dread getting stuck on the phone to lonely freelance journalists, desperate for conversation. I don't want to turn out like that.
I bought SuSE 9.2 at my local PC World (Cambridge, England) a couple of months ago. They had several versions of Mandrake as well. It surprised me the first time I saw them: this is the kind of place that sells gold-plated USB cables where the most technical information you'll get out of an employee is "The processor is like the brain of a computer".
(and yes, I do wish I hadn't wasted my money on SuSE, Ubuntu is superior in every way, but I needed a linux distro with SATA support immediately).
Isn't part of the reason Scotland looks so small to viewers because they're used to the traditional Mercator projection, which makes things further north look bigger?
Now that they've switched to a 3D globe representation, that distortion has been lost.
I didn't mean to suggest that nobody should try, I was just trying to explain the lack of reviews. It would be fantastic to have a source of software reviews that actually spent serious time using and testing the software, but few people seem prepared to do that.
As it stands, we get reviews of Linux distros and software that barely scratch the surface of the functionality and completely omit most of the important issues (reliability, update schedule, security releases etc.).
I think it's reasonably hard to write a decent review of groupware clients: certainly, most of the magazine-style reviews are worthless. It's very much a matter of personal usage pattern, long-term stability and your environment (servers, other users etc).
Personally, I use Thunderbird: I found Evolution too slow and unstable and I prefer Thunderbird's UI. But then I don't have much need for groupware and Tomboy notes are good enough for my calendaring needs. I've used Outlook 2003 a bit, and I quite like the mail display mode. KMail's UI annoys me too much to use it.
The Architect's speech was a lovely twist that touched on the notion of free will.
Hahahahahahahahaa. Great, now I have coffee all over my brand new keyboard. Hang on a minute...you were serious? You weren't joking?
The last time I did it was Lisbon airport: I guess the Portugese are pretty laid back in general, but I was flying BA and the check-in guy I asked was really surprised when I asked if it was OK to take all these bottles of wine etc. in my hand luggage - he just said "Of course you can".
Airline security is so strange. No metal cutlery, no pen knives, nothing vaguely weapon-like in hyour hand luggage, advanced scanner technology everywhere on boarding.
But can I take these four bottles of duty-free vodka which can be turned into extremely sharp weapons in about five seconds in my hand luggage? Of course you can sir.
Why do *more* films? There wasn't enough material to fill I-III.
If I could go back in time and change Lucas' mind, I would convince him to scrap the prequel trilogy and instead spend the money on two films: one prequel, telling the tale of Anakin->Darth Vader, and one sequel, set after ROTJ, dealing with the rebuilding of the New Republic, Leia learning about the Force, Han facing the new responsibility of his position as Admiral. Kind of bookends to the originals.
That's got to be better than the stretched-too-thin, convoluted and dull storyline of Eps I-III.
Well, you could say that as all Slashdot readers are intelligent enough to recognise Microsoft's propoganda for the crap it is, why not let MS waste their advertising budget supporting pro-Linux sites.
Of course, I doubt the OSTG thought that deeply about it.
I was thinking of buying one of the happy hacker keyboards: anybody have any comments on how good they are? I can't see the difference between the lite and the professional, apart from $100.
(I'm looking for a decent coding keyboard, as I'm fed up with this laptop keyboard and my MS Natural pro has gone squishy already. And no, I don't want a type M!)
Palm(One|Whatever) seem to be more like Apple before the "Second Coming of Jobs": lacking direction, floundering around trying to bring a new OS to market to replace their increasingly outdated current version, full of infighting and confusion.
I hope they can sort themselves out, because I really like the PalmOS platform.
OK, so I'm not going to see Ep3. Once everyone saw the direction Lucas was going with Ep1, I don't know why there is so much speculation and discussion about the new trilogy: it was clear they were always going to suck.
- We already know the storyline: Anakin is Luke's father etc. Therefore, as you've thrown all suspense or surprise out the window to start with, you have to either do something interesting with the story that doesn't effect the future or have a really good cast/script to keep things interesting. Lucas doesn't bother with any of that. Instead, he just ploddingly lays out the story and throws in a few fight scenes and pointless pod races.
- Trained Light-side Jedi are really boring characters. Sanctimonious, smug, unemotional, basically never breaking a sweat. Ep4-6 get round this by effectivelt never having any: Obi-wan is killed off quick, Yoda only appears briefly, Luke is untrained and learning and generally very un-Jedi like. Eps1-3 are full of Light side Jedi being dull and knowing.
- CGI. Ep4-6 were made before the current CGI craze. The ships, locations with people in therefore look generally real: dirty, scratched and solid. In EpI-III everything is CGI and looks unreal. No matter how good the CGI is, it can't look as real as reality.
- The backstory is weak: it just about held an audience's attention when it was just background to the action, but bring it to the foreground and it becomes dull. Star Wars was just a fun space opera with a large backstory. EpI-III try to pretend it's more than that. It's the same as The Matrix and its sequels: the story was just about good enough to cover one film, attempt to stretch it beyond that and it starts to show its holes.
Nokia 5210?
Is that a beer belly sticking out in that guy's Matrix imitation, or just the way his shirt hangs? Distinctly less Matrix-stylee if the former.
OK, I'll give you some lumps of silicon, metal and plastic and you give me a GPS reading.
I meant simplest in terms of technology.