That's something I'd be far more interested to see. The history of Han Solo leading up to ANH. Luke, as has been said everywhere, was a boring farm boy on a backwater planet. Han Solo was a riotous space cowboy smuggling for the Fetts. His story would be far more interesting.
Yeah, that was done before, I think it was called Firefly.
I'd rather that more Firefly episodes were made. Mal makes a much better Han Solo.
Thief 3? Horror? I played through the first level or so, and didn't seem to creepy to me (the atmosphere doesn't really seem to scream scary, and it may get scarier as it goes on for all I know)
Midway in the game is the Shalebridge Cradle level. Wikipedia Link. That level made the game change from the normal "First Person Sneaker" to a "Silent Hill" atmosphere. I think it was so unexpected in that game that it spooked alot of people. When you reach the Cradle, you don't find any monsters for a long sequence until you reach the attic door and hear a huge thump and meet the ghost girl.
Westwood Studio's game Red Alert 2 left out an option to play direct modem to modem. The only way to play that game was through a TCP connection through the internet. Modem to Modem had the lowest latency even though it had low bandwidth. I wish today's games would leave in a way to simply dial up someone across town without having to go through a TCP/IP connection. Many laptops still have 56K modems built into them.
More like "necessity". This isn't just to make gamers happy, it's in the publishers best interests as well. If it gets around that online cheating is rampant, people will be much, much less likely to buy the game.
This is true if the game is marketed as a massive multiplayer game like World of Warcraft or Battlefield 1942. However COD2 is a heavily scripted single-player game with a the multiplayer component tacked on. I don't think it's worth that much money to invest in the neverending war against client-side hacks. If you don't pay a monthly fee, then don't expect the company to fight against new hacks.
Cheaters are rampant in the Command and Conquer Generals RTS game. I solve this by only playing people I know.
The idea of downloading your brain reminds me of the forgettable Schwarzenegger
movie The 6th Day. Even
though the movie was crap it made me think of the following:
If a character was about to die, he/she would quickly clone themselves into a new body by downloading his/her brain through the eyeballs. This occured often in the movie.
Would you be the same person?
Would your soul be downloaded as well?
Did anyone else have the same thoughts when they were watching this movie?
T:DS I actually thought rather good. The levels were too small, but with that one thing aside, the gameplay was better than either of the previous games. DX:IW sucked by dumbing things down; T:DS dumbed things UP, like the City as an explorable area and the new more interactive lockpicking system.
And, frankly, any game that contains a universally-admired masterpiece of design like the Cradle as well as classic Thief levels like the Widow's house and the Museum can only be a good thing.
I agree.
I've played all three games. While I understand some grumblings (loading times, smaller town) about the 3rd Thief game, it was pretty faithful to the first two.
The most nerve-shattering level is the infamous Shalebridge Cradle area. Try playing level alone at night in your house with the lights off and the volume turned up abit. You can read how people felt when they played this level. Very immersive and well done.
...an abandonware challenge for the ever-resourceful Slashdot crowd. I'm sure that major mod-points await someone who can post a link to a download of Word 5.1 (preferably one that runs on Windows).:)
Ever heard of key generators?
The idea of a cd key is nice, but if tools exists to generate them, want's th point in using them. Just look at the quake 3 misery where a lot of buyers could not play online. Evertime they tried it, they got a 'cd key already in use' message. Very annoying if you buy a game and cannot play it.
That should never happen if the keysystem is implemented correctly, that is, the number of potential keys should be up there in the trillions. Also, limiting how fast somebody can try to contact the key server should lock down any attempt at brute force searching.
But this doesn't address what I think is the real cause of those people getting "key in use on their new games" - that is, people going around in stores, ripping packages open and typing down the often quite visible key.
To get around online cd key checking, pirates have been launching cracked servers where the keys don't get checked. Browse on Battlefield 1942 servers and you'll find a bunch with cracked in the title.
I still think that Taylor make millions created a TA-like game and simply update the graphics to a 3D engine.
Is the RTS genre dead? Do we we really need another RPG game?
Re:Mini Ipod Review on WinXP
on
iPod Mini Ships
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Well, all I know is that my sotec laptop running WinXP Home and the latest
iTunes threw a message saying this device is USB 2.0 yet I have only USB 1.1 and
iTunes won't sync.
The actual requirements for the mini ipod are below. It says you MUST have USB
2.0 OR Firewire for it to work.
Come on now, this is slashdot. At least consider that some of us are not afraid of opening these devices to replace the battery.
Mini Ipod Review on WinXP
on
iPod Mini Ships
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I've had my ipod mini for about four days now. I have the blue one. I
sync it with my WinXP machine.
I've filled it with mp3's of various bitrates from Kazaa (all legal music of
course) and it hasn't had a problem playing them.
The first thing that strikes me is that it is really small and really
lightweight. It's only $50 less than the 15GB one but this one is way
better than anything iRiver puts out for working out at the gym.
It also has a fun name that tune game where it plays one of your songs and
then has you pick from four tunes that appears on the screen. It's pretty
fun to get familiar with your entire music collection that way.
The mini's also have (finally) a star rating system, so you can rate your
songs as you are listening to them.
One caveat: It does not work with USB 1.1. The older ipods can
sync with 1.1 and 2.0. You'll have to either buy a USB2.0 card or a
firewire card to sync on a USB 1.1 machine.
From reading usenet posts, all of the 261 Subpoena's are Kaza/Gnutella/Shareaza users that leave the "SHOW ALL FILES TO EVERYONE" option on. That's the worst bunch to sue because they are typically non-techie types. It's easier to feel sorry for a single mom with a 12 year old daughter than some software developer who's been downloading Britney Spears.
I've been using Emule. In addition to keeping my shared directory smallish, I've implemented the ipfilter list, turned off the "SHOW ALL FILES" option, and automatically ban ip subnets from users who request to see all my files.
Paramount and Universal, among others, are paying companies like BayTsp to track individual files of movies. That's a tedious and semi-expensive process comparred to simply "showing all files" from a user and sueing them.
So my point is, you are pretty much safe if you leave the "show all files" option off in Kazaa or any other program.
Chris Taylor should create a new RTS that similar to Total Annihilation. Dungeon Siege flopped, and we don't need yet another pay-per-play MMORPG.
Total Annihilation was a revolutionary RTS game which even today still surpases todays RTS with waypoints, build queues, air/naval/army/tank units, fantastic mod capability, and cool weaponry.
Observations from teaching high school for six yrs
on
Half Mast
·
· Score: 1
Observations from teaching high school.
There's about four people during junior high and high school that bullied me. I remember in Phys Ed constantly being terrified of getting pushed around, or coming to find urine in my locker, usually just by some looser. I think only one of the three was considered a popular jock.
The bullying stopped when I decided to enroll in weight liftining.
I later became a high school computer science teacher. One of my goals was to create a safe classroom and do my part to prevent bullying. I guess I wanted to be a hero in some ways.
After six years of teaching, I noticed a few of things related to bullying.
1. Lack of Maturity. A majority of the students I've seen bullied got involved because they carelessly mouthed off or insulted the bully in some way.
2. Lack of confidence. Some students always act like victims. This relates to why women when walking alone should act strong and confident, rapists dont' like to go after those as much. Bully's like other criminals, prefer the easy route, they don't want to deal with someone who will fight back with confidence.
3. Many school does not clarify anti-bullying plan. Some high schools don't have a clear plan for what students should do if they dont' feel safe. Bullying/Teasing isn't usually specified in the code of conduct -- my small part in my career was to get the teachers, principals, parents, and counselors to research and get a plan involved. This was ALOT easier to do after the columbine shootings.
4. Teachers not in control of the classroom. Most of the time, I tried to keep my relationship professional but not military with the students, however I was vicious in going after any mean comments, verbal, or physical aggression towards other students. I talked about this quite a few times a year with my classes about code on conduct. The students knew my position on bullying.
5. I ABSOLUTELY love Karate, Judo, and any self defense courses for high school students. The interesting thing is that students get into LESS fights after they go through a "self defense" oriented class, because they are taught maturity in those courses. I encourged parents to enroll students into self defense classes.
1) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
2) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 3) Star Wars Episode II IMAX
IMHO, the movie was hyped as having a villian that was more interesting than Kahn. That's the biggest problem. I went into the theatre with these huge expectations looking for a battle of wits between Picard and Shemus.
If you look at the successful villians, Borg, Klingons, Kahn, the characters are heavily rooted in the TV shows. Berman decided to construct a villian from scratch and invent this Reman sister planet to educate the audience on why Shinzon was vengeful.
Someone mentioned it before, but Leornard Nimoy as Spock would have helped make the plot more interesting as Spock had ties to the Romulan peace movement. I think this would have generated more buzz for the movie. Otherwise, no one really knows much or cares about Romulans -- other than they are just another random thug like in Star Trek 9 and 5.
Berman has to listen to the fans and ask himself, "What were the most interesting plot lines of the TV shows? Borg, Klingon Peace, Q, Romulan Peace, Dominion etc. Focus on that, and you'll bring in that almighty trekkie nerd dollar.
After teaching AP Compsci for six years in the late 90s (yes and missing out on the dot com boom), this was a common frustration.
Generally you had about one hour to convince a female to stay in the freshman programming class. On the first day of class, many females were looking at their future classmates. If too many were talking about h4xoring AOL, then I'd be sure to see a drop notice from the counselor.
My first year of teaching programming was filled with projects I thought were fun. I let the students create violent video games, chatted about Romero and doom, talked about guy stuff and sports.
By the 2nd year, I was tearing down posters of idsoftware, and putting up portraits of Grace Hopper (one of the more famous CS ppl) and Ada Lovelace. Our district gave out invitations to get MIT female grad CS students to talk about careers. When I would go advertise, I would talk about medical software that helps people rather than what it took to create Grand Theft Auto.
High school females in general are more mature than their male counterparts. They want to know that it all leads to something useful -- an emotional connection.
....for the last few years in Orange County California with the Prosecuting Attorney's office.
Honda donates this car the police department, and they use it in areas that have high reports of car theft. The only new thing in this article is the GPS system. In the past, if the car lost the police, it would simply die because the signal turns off the ignition if out of range.
The interesting thing is that the police really try to almost entrap someone into stealing the car. They stage a fight in front of the car in the busy neighboorhood with high car theft, and one of the actors drop the keys next to the car on the ground. Then the cops wait till someone picks up the keys and steals the car. What usually happens is that the keys will find their way to professional car theives, and at that point they tail the car.
There's a microphone in the car, and the police will listen to the bad guys discussing where they will sell the car and everything is recorded.
At some point, the cops will remote control the car, and the radio, and tell them to pull over. The cops can lock the car doors and slow down the car gracefully, however in some cases, the bad guys will simply kick out the window and try to escape. But the cops only do this when the car is complete surrounded, so no one has escaped yet.
He says that's the funniest part, cause the theives freak out at the voice on the radio, and try to change channels. Then they try pumping the gas pedal to keep the car going.
After cops do this for a while, the rate at which white honda civics get stolen is almost zero, and then they have to get a different model.
Since you can bypass Blizzard's Battlenet by using the IPX emulation software like Kali and Kahn, I wonder why they've never gone after those two. Kali has been around since the Doom days, and I still play with Starcraft with Friends over Kali if Battlenet is down or freaky.
There's another Windows server called "Free Gaming Server" that's floating around. I know it emulates Westwood and Blizzard servers. You have to change your registry with the IP of the new server to get it to work.
for every teacher who demands a pay raise, there are a number of people willing to take that teacher's position at the current pay rate or even less.
True, but this is a more accurate statement:
for every teacher who demands a pay raise, there are a number of poorly qualified candiates willing to take that teacher's position at the current pay rate or even less
There are always crappy instructors that couldn't get a job anywhere else that will take the job.
Principals are not getting cream of the crop these days...
I have six years experience teaching Advanced Placement Computer Science in a public high school.
To introduce a non-MS OS, you will have to sell it to your computer science/Cisco/A+ teachers first. Those teachers are always hurting for extra dept cash for materials, and not having to be Microsoft's bitch for NT Server and Workstation licences would be wonderful. Just take an inservice day to do a Mandrake install on those select group of teachers, and you got the ball rolling. High school Cisco training programs require FTP servers, webservers, and other client/server software to make the labs interesting.
Knowing how my business computer teachers operate, it would be a cold day in hell before they adopt Linux. They would not only have to learn a new OS, but also rewrite every one of their 32438430 dittos.
There's also no textbooks or handouts for teaching at a high school level of Linux or Linux apps. Compare this with the phenominal amount of offerings for teaching MS software.
The big problem with this is too often schools "want to use what businesses use", as if the school is nothing but a trade school. Of course this is ridiculous. By the time some first grader gets into the workforce, everyone will be using something wildly different anyway. It's more important for kids to learn how computers work or how to learn about what a computer can do for them, rather than be trained to use a specific application.
Being a high school Advanced Placement Computer Science teacher for six years, I agree with you.
To Microsoft's credit, we did take advantage of a killer deal on Visual Studio 6 Professional Edition for five bucks a seat. That included Interdev, J++, Visual BASIC, Visual C++, and gobs of other apps. The district in Arizona I worked for only would allow us to adopt Microsoft apps.
Had I not gone into industry the next year, I would have installed Mandrake as a dual boot option for just my lab.
Piracy in high school districts is still pretty rampant. In three districts in Phoenix that I worked in, I saw teachers routinely making copies of Micrograde, usually assuming that all educational software comes with unlimited site licences. I would get asked all the time to make copies of Office 97, crossword puzzle software that I personally bought. When I said no, I got ostracized by the rest of the staff.
I remind teachers that Los Angeles district got busted for one licence of Office 95, AutoCAD 12, being copied about 2000 times all over the district. However, it seems to go in one ear and out the other.
However, there's so much damn free stuff out there on the net for teachers, it's more a matter of educationing administrators about what's out there.
Oh by the way, after six years teaching Cisco, and AP C++/Java and a Master's, I got paid a lousy $30,000. now I'm getting double that a year into industry programming in C++. Don't tell me that high school public teachers have tons of cash.
From a theoretical standpoint, Java skips two important features. First, it does not have (traditional C) pointers. Learning a linked list in Java (if you actually learn one instead of using a library) lacks the effectiveness of learning a linked list in C/C++. Along the same lines, becuase of its garbage collection, Java teaches first time programmers to be lazy with their objects.
As a high school instructor, I strongly disagree.
First time programming students should not care about what platform or how a particular machine handles memory. Look, in the last 20 years, various machines have come and gone, but a binary search, a hash table, a quicksort, a binary search tree have remained the same.
Once students understand algorithms and problem solving, then let em needle into assembly for the Commodore 64, the Pentium IV instruction set, or whatever machine specific stuff in college.
Just a little history of AP CompSci:
1984 The first AP compsci exam in Pascal.
1998 Underpressure from many universities, the College Board changes the exam from Pascal to C++. Java is considered but is dropped since the war between Sun and Microsoft continues over what the Java standard is.
2003 Again, many Universities have Java as the freshman course, so the College Board switches to Java.
2008 Microsoft's domination in CLI through.NET makes C# the number one language. The AP Exam is now in C#.
The College Board actually considered C#. I've done a little programming in C# and feel it would be a much better language than even Java for teaching first time programmers.
I look forward to teaching in languages that enforce great problem solving and algortihm development, yet hide the needless machine details. I was unhappy when Pascal was dumped for C++, but I think the College Board is on the right track now.
Slashdot Mirror
That's something I'd be far more interested to see. The history of Han Solo leading up to ANH. Luke, as has been said everywhere, was a boring farm boy on a backwater planet. Han Solo was a riotous space cowboy smuggling for the Fetts. His story would be far more interesting.
Yeah, that was done before, I think it was called Firefly.
I'd rather that more Firefly episodes were made. Mal makes a much better Han Solo.
Thief 3? Horror? I played through the first level or so, and didn't seem to creepy to me (the atmosphere doesn't really seem to scream scary, and it may get scarier as it goes on for all I know)
Midway in the game is the Shalebridge Cradle level. Wikipedia Link. That level made the game change from the normal "First Person Sneaker" to a "Silent Hill" atmosphere. I think it was so unexpected in that game that it spooked alot of people. When you reach the Cradle, you don't find any monsters for a long sequence until you reach the attic door and hear a huge thump and meet the ghost girl.
Westwood Studio's game Red Alert 2 left out an option to play direct modem to modem. The only way to play that game was through a TCP connection through the internet. Modem to Modem had the lowest latency even though it had low bandwidth. I wish today's games would leave in a way to simply dial up someone across town without having to go through a TCP/IP connection. Many laptops still have 56K modems built into them.
This is true if the game is marketed as a massive multiplayer game like World of Warcraft or Battlefield 1942. However COD2 is a heavily scripted single-player game with a the multiplayer component tacked on. I don't think it's worth that much money to invest in the neverending war against client-side hacks. If you don't pay a monthly fee, then don't expect the company to fight against new hacks.
Cheaters are rampant in the Command and Conquer Generals RTS game. I solve this by only playing people I know.
The idea of downloading your brain reminds me of the forgettable Schwarzenegger movie The 6th Day. Even though the movie was crap it made me think of the following:
Hey! Under Seige wasn't that bad of a flick. Yeah everything else he made is crap, but give the guy some credit!
I agree.
I've played all three games. While I understand some grumblings (loading times, smaller town) about the 3rd Thief game, it was pretty faithful to the first two.
The most nerve-shattering level is the infamous Shalebridge Cradle area. Try playing level alone at night in your house with the lights off and the volume turned up abit. You can read how people felt when they played this level. Very immersive and well done.
...an abandonware challenge for the ever-resourceful Slashdot crowd. I'm sure that major mod-points await someone who can post a link to a download of Word 5.1 (preferably one that runs on Windows). :)
Here's a Emule/Edonkey Link to Word 5.1.[Win3x] Microsoft Office 4.3 Professional.English.rar
Do I get major mod points?
Ever heard of key generators? The idea of a cd key is nice, but if tools exists to generate them, want's th point in using them. Just look at the quake 3 misery where a lot of buyers could not play online. Evertime they tried it, they got a 'cd key already in use' message. Very annoying if you buy a game and cannot play it. That should never happen if the keysystem is implemented correctly, that is, the number of potential keys should be up there in the trillions. Also, limiting how fast somebody can try to contact the key server should lock down any attempt at brute force searching. But this doesn't address what I think is the real cause of those people getting "key in use on their new games" - that is, people going around in stores, ripping packages open and typing down the often quite visible key.
To get around online cd key checking, pirates have been launching cracked servers where the keys don't get checked. Browse on Battlefield 1942 servers and you'll find a bunch with cracked in the title.
I still think that Taylor make millions created a TA-like game and simply update the graphics to a 3D engine.
Is the RTS genre dead? Do we we really need another RPG game?
Well, all I know is that my sotec laptop running WinXP Home and the latest iTunes threw a message saying this device is USB 2.0 yet I have only USB 1.1 and iTunes won't sync.
6 33
The actual requirements for the mini ipod are below. It says you MUST have USB 2.0 OR Firewire for it to work.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93
Come on now, this is slashdot. At least consider that some of us are not afraid of opening these devices to replace the battery.
I've had my ipod mini for about four days now. I have the blue one. I sync it with my WinXP machine.
I've filled it with mp3's of various bitrates from Kazaa (all legal music of course) and it hasn't had a problem playing them.
The first thing that strikes me is that it is really small and really lightweight. It's only $50 less than the 15GB one but this one is way better than anything iRiver puts out for working out at the gym.
It also has a fun name that tune game where it plays one of your songs and then has you pick from four tunes that appears on the screen. It's pretty fun to get familiar with your entire music collection that way.
The mini's also have (finally) a star rating system, so you can rate your songs as you are listening to them.
One caveat: It does not work with USB 1.1. The older ipods can sync with 1.1 and 2.0. You'll have to either buy a USB2.0 card or a firewire card to sync on a USB 1.1 machine.
From reading usenet posts, all of the 261 Subpoena's are Kaza/Gnutella/Shareaza users that leave the "SHOW ALL FILES TO EVERYONE" option on. That's the worst bunch to sue because they are typically non-techie types. It's easier to feel sorry for a single mom with a 12 year old daughter than some software developer who's been downloading Britney Spears.
I've been using Emule. In addition to keeping my shared directory smallish, I've implemented the ipfilter list, turned off the "SHOW ALL FILES" option, and automatically ban ip subnets from users who request to see all my files.
Paramount and Universal, among others, are paying companies like BayTsp to track individual files of movies. That's a tedious and semi-expensive process comparred to simply "showing all files" from a user and sueing them.
So my point is, you are pretty much safe if you leave the "show all files" option off in Kazaa or any other program.
Chris Taylor should create a new RTS that similar to Total Annihilation. Dungeon Siege flopped, and we don't need yet another pay-per-play MMORPG.
Total Annihilation was a revolutionary RTS game which even today still surpases todays RTS with waypoints, build queues, air/naval/army/tank units, fantastic mod capability, and cool weaponry.
Observations from teaching high school.
There's about four people during junior high and high school that bullied me. I remember in Phys Ed constantly being terrified of getting pushed around, or coming to find urine in my locker, usually just by some looser. I think only one of the three was considered a popular jock.
The bullying stopped when I decided to enroll in weight liftining.
I later became a high school computer science teacher. One of my goals was to create a safe classroom and do my part to prevent bullying. I guess I wanted to be a hero in some ways.
After six years of teaching, I noticed a few of things related to bullying.
1. Lack of Maturity. A majority of the students I've seen bullied got involved because they carelessly mouthed off or insulted the bully in some way.
2. Lack of confidence. Some students always act like victims. This relates to why women when walking alone should act strong and confident, rapists dont' like to go after those as much. Bully's like other criminals, prefer the easy route, they don't want to deal with someone who will fight back with confidence.
3. Many school does not clarify anti-bullying plan. Some high schools don't have a clear plan for what students should do if they dont' feel safe. Bullying/Teasing isn't usually specified in the code of conduct -- my small part in my career was to get the teachers, principals, parents, and counselors to research and get a plan involved. This was ALOT easier to do after the columbine shootings.
4. Teachers not in control of the classroom. Most of the time, I tried to keep my relationship professional but not military with the students, however I was vicious in going after any mean comments, verbal, or physical aggression towards other students. I talked about this quite a few times a year with my classes about code on conduct. The students knew my position on bullying.
5. I ABSOLUTELY love Karate, Judo, and any self defense courses for high school students. The interesting thing is that students get into LESS fights after they go through a "self defense" oriented class, because they are taught maturity in those courses. I encourged parents to enroll students into self defense classes.
2) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 3) Star Wars Episode II IMAX
IMHO, the movie was hyped as having a villian that was more interesting than Kahn. That's the biggest problem. I went into the theatre with these huge expectations looking for a battle of wits between Picard and Shemus.
If you look at the successful villians, Borg, Klingons, Kahn, the characters are heavily rooted in the TV shows. Berman decided to construct a villian from scratch and invent this Reman sister planet to educate the audience on why Shinzon was vengeful.
Someone mentioned it before, but Leornard Nimoy as Spock would have helped make the plot more interesting as Spock had ties to the Romulan peace movement. I think this would have generated more buzz for the movie. Otherwise, no one really knows much or cares about Romulans -- other than they are just another random thug like in Star Trek 9 and 5.
Berman has to listen to the fans and ask himself, "What were the most interesting plot lines of the TV shows? Borg, Klingon Peace, Q, Romulan Peace, Dominion etc. Focus on that, and you'll bring in that almighty trekkie nerd dollar.
After teaching AP Compsci for six years in the late 90s (yes and missing out on the dot com boom), this was a common frustration.
Generally you had about one hour to convince a female to stay in the freshman programming class. On the first day of class, many females were looking at their future classmates. If too many were talking about h4xoring AOL, then I'd be sure to see a drop notice from the counselor.
My first year of teaching programming was filled with projects I thought were fun. I let the students create violent video games, chatted about Romero and doom, talked about guy stuff and sports.
By the 2nd year, I was tearing down posters of idsoftware, and putting up portraits of Grace Hopper (one of the more famous CS ppl) and Ada Lovelace. Our district gave out invitations to get MIT female grad CS students to talk about careers. When I would go advertise, I would talk about medical software that helps people rather than what it took to create Grand Theft Auto.
High school females in general are more mature than their male counterparts. They want to know that it all leads to something useful -- an emotional connection.
....for the last few years in Orange County California with the Prosecuting Attorney's office.
Honda donates this car the police department, and they use it in areas that have high reports of car theft. The only new thing in this article is the GPS system. In the past, if the car lost the police, it would simply die because the signal turns off the ignition if out of range.
The interesting thing is that the police really try to almost entrap someone into stealing the car. They stage a fight in front of the car in the busy neighboorhood with high car theft, and one of the actors drop the keys next to the car on the ground. Then the cops wait till someone picks up the keys and steals the car. What usually happens is that the keys will find their way to professional car theives, and at that point they tail the car.
There's a microphone in the car, and the police will listen to the bad guys discussing where they will sell the car and everything is recorded.
At some point, the cops will remote control the car, and the radio, and tell them to pull over. The cops can lock the car doors and slow down the car gracefully, however in some cases, the bad guys will simply kick out the window and try to escape. But the cops only do this when the car is complete surrounded, so no one has escaped yet.
He says that's the funniest part, cause the theives freak out at the voice on the radio, and try to change channels. Then they try pumping the gas pedal to keep the car going.
After cops do this for a while, the rate at which white honda civics get stolen is almost zero, and then they have to get a different model.
Since you can bypass Blizzard's Battlenet by using the IPX emulation software like Kali and Kahn, I wonder why they've never gone after those two. Kali has been around since the Doom days, and I still play with Starcraft with Friends over Kali if Battlenet is down or freaky.
There's another Windows server called "Free Gaming Server" that's floating around. I know it emulates Westwood and Blizzard servers. You have to change your registry with the IP of the new server to get it to work.
for every teacher who demands a pay raise, there are a number of people willing to take that teacher's position at the current pay rate or even less.
True, but this is a more accurate statement:
for every teacher who demands a pay raise, there are a number of poorly qualified candiates willing to take that teacher's position at the current pay rate or even less
There are always crappy instructors that couldn't get a job anywhere else that will take the job.
Principals are not getting cream of the crop these days...
I have six years experience teaching Advanced Placement Computer Science in a public high school.
To introduce a non-MS OS, you will have to sell it to your computer science/Cisco/A+ teachers first. Those teachers are always hurting for extra dept cash for materials, and not having to be Microsoft's bitch for NT Server and Workstation licences would be wonderful. Just take an inservice day to do a Mandrake install on those select group of teachers, and you got the ball rolling. High school Cisco training programs require FTP servers, webservers, and other client/server software to make the labs interesting.
Knowing how my business computer teachers operate, it would be a cold day in hell before they adopt Linux. They would not only have to learn a new OS, but also rewrite every one of their 32438430 dittos.
There's also no textbooks or handouts for teaching at a high school level of Linux or Linux apps. Compare this with the phenominal amount of offerings for teaching MS software.
Actually they should sue Xing for creating AudioCatalyst.
All AudioCatalyst does is rip CD's into WAV's or MP3's (love that normalization feature though)
The big problem with this is too often schools "want to use what businesses use", as if the school is nothing but a trade school. Of course this is ridiculous. By the time some first grader gets into the workforce, everyone will be using something wildly different anyway. It's more important for kids to learn how computers work or how to learn about what a computer can do for them, rather than be trained to use a specific application.
Being a high school Advanced Placement Computer Science teacher for six years, I agree with you.
To Microsoft's credit, we did take advantage of a killer deal on Visual Studio 6 Professional Edition for five bucks a seat. That included Interdev, J++, Visual BASIC, Visual C++, and gobs of other apps. The district in Arizona I worked for only would allow us to adopt Microsoft apps.
Had I not gone into industry the next year, I would have installed Mandrake as a dual boot option for just my lab.
Piracy in high school districts is still pretty rampant. In three districts in Phoenix that I worked in, I saw teachers routinely making copies of Micrograde, usually assuming that all educational software comes with unlimited site licences. I would get asked all the time to make copies of Office 97, crossword puzzle software that I personally bought. When I said no, I got ostracized by the rest of the staff.
I remind teachers that Los Angeles district got busted for one licence of Office 95, AutoCAD 12, being copied about 2000 times all over the district. However, it seems to go in one ear and out the other.
However, there's so much damn free stuff out there on the net for teachers, it's more a matter of educationing administrators about what's out there.
Oh by the way, after six years teaching Cisco, and AP C++/Java and a Master's, I got paid a lousy $30,000. now I'm getting double that a year into industry programming in C++. Don't tell me that high school public teachers have tons of cash.
As a high school instructor, I strongly disagree.
First time programming students should not care about what platform or how a particular machine handles memory. Look, in the last 20 years, various machines have come and gone, but a binary search, a hash table, a quicksort, a binary search tree have remained the same.
Once students understand algorithms and problem solving, then let em needle into assembly for the Commodore 64, the Pentium IV instruction set, or whatever machine specific stuff in college.
Just a little history of AP CompSci:
The College Board actually considered C#. I've done a little programming in C# and feel it would be a much better language than even Java for teaching first time programmers.
I look forward to teaching in languages that enforce great problem solving and algortihm development, yet hide the needless machine details. I was unhappy when Pascal was dumped for C++, but I think the College Board is on the right track now.