What do you run on Macs nowadays that needs this speed?
Well, Photoshop, for one thing...yes, Macs are still used for graphics, dontchaknow.
Try editing CMYK graphics at 600 or 1200 dpi for high-end print work sometime. With layers. And masks (which are essentially added layers). Running filters. The whole she-bang.
Such a file can easily get into hundreds of megabytes in size, and Photoshop generally needs 2x to 3x as much RAM as the actual file size to efficiently work; even then it starts to bog down at those file sizes.
My dual G4/450 with 1.5 GB RAM and Radeon 9000 already gags on that enough so that it's a hassle when I have to design and edit that kind of stuff. Believe me, I'm going to be first in line as soon as I scrape together the $2500 or so for a new G5 system with added RAM (the more RAM, the merrier -- Photoshop is VERY hungry for RAM).
Not to mention video editing and 3D, both of which are markets that the Mac has generally been strong (if not dominant) in for some time.
I might add that you could ask the same question about P4-based PCs. Who needs that kind of firepower? Not many (mainstream) people, really -- aside from perhaps gamers. The vast majority of users just do e-mail, web surfing and word processing, maybe a little photo editing. A P2 or P3 running Linux or an older version of Windows would be more than enough in those cases. Hell, even an old Pentium with a smallish Linux installation would be enough in many cases.
OTOH if you give users and developers the added power of new processors and mainboards (strange that HyperTransport hasn't gotten much mention here), people will find a way of using it. One example: Apple's predicted that video editing will be the next mainstream computing revolution, like desktop publishing was twenty years ago. If you think about it, they're probably right.
Most newer computers can easily handle basic video editing now; the question is just how to make it easier for Joe Sixpack to edit his family videos (and maybe make Junior a budding David Lynch).
For example in southern Germany the tiny town of SchwÃbisch Hall has moved to Linux a few months ago, a few weeks ago Munich was inspired by that and (just a few kilometers away) has decided to do the same and a week later Stuttgart und Oldenburg, 2 other south-German cities are evaluating to join in, others will follow.
Don't get your hopes up. Munich is run by a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens; it was they that decided to choose Linux in spite of Ballmer's pressure.
But the glorious Free State of Bavaria, where Munich is located, is run by the Christian Socialists (which, in spite of the name, is a rather far-right party -- think of them as the Redneck Party of Bavaria minus the gun racks). No way are they going to allow that long-hair hippy OS take hold...so the Bavarian government is trying to force a "review" of the Linux decision and has put it on hold.
Apparently Microsoft made the right donations in the right places. *sigh*
'Course, I'm surprised no one has bothered mentioning to the neo-nationalist CSU idiots in Bavaria that Linux is about as German an operating system as it gets (SuSE, KDE, etc.). At least much more "native" than Microsoft.
Just about every Alien Invasion movie has this problem... they all expect the aliens to come to Earth to grab our "resources" but the fact is earth is a piss poor place to get resources.
Y'all's overlookin' the obvious. "They" don't come here for our resources. They come for our women.
However, if we geeks were to defend the Earth against a large gaggle of female-snatching aliens from the planet Zod, the Zodders would make off with them before we knew what hit us.
Worse, the women would take one look at us (or at the back our Slashdot-reading heads) and go willingly for a little Zodomy.
(I don't know what got into me on that post. I really don't.)
As it happens, my literature class in high school had to read Mishima's work; as part of the studies we watched a movie about his life (or better said it was a retelling of his last day of life interspersed with excerpts from his stories and poetry). I don't remember the name of the movie, though.
I vaguely recall that, in the movie, he committed seppuku on live TV, as he was on top of a barracks (?) reading a speech to the troops, while TV crews were watching; when the troops started to laugh at him, he did the deed right then and there. But then again, this might have been a little artistic licence...
I don't know if seppuku was outlawed, but FWIW the Japanese poet Yukio Mishima committed seppuku in 1970 (ISTR that this was even televised, if only by accident). If I remember correctly, he and his followers went to a Japanese Defence Force base and tried to proclaim a shogunate, but when the soldiers there failed to rally to him and laughed at him, he committed seppuku.
Scientists have noted that the tectonic plates under the Pacific Northwest of the USA have been sinking dramatically, because Redmond is going straight to hell.
Scold them all you want with the benefit 20/20 hindsight, but I'm guessing that if someone told you on Sep. 10 that this scheme was unsecure because both towers were going to be levelled, you would have laughed him out of the room. Just like everyone else in the world.
Except that the WTC had been the target of terrorist attacks before, with the goal of toppling (or at least damaging) both towers. If someone had suggested the idea before the first attack, then yes, I'd have been skeptical.
IANASC (...security consultant), but ISTR that many firms in the WTC were foolish enough to have the "backup" systems...in the other tower. IOW they assumed that if one tower went blooey, the other one would still be there. So much for redundancy.
The point is physical security, not network security. It's kind of like having all your backup CDs in the same room (or building!) as your computer. Fire, fire, oops, it's all gone.
Also, ISTR that in some cases, with the loss of systems in the WTC, financial networks were left in a state of chaos -- perfect time to be hacked, really.
Like I said, the idea was freshly pulled outta my butt.;-)
Still, the number could be raised, maybe to 500 a day (which is a hell of a lot for a private user). And/or the ISP would have to have a caveat in their TOS that you have to have the latest patches for your client, perhaps, to try and keep users from having to pay when they get an e-mail virus.
Corporate/power users could perhaps buy higher limits, with restrictions on type of mail being sent (UCE).
Still, this is something that could be done at the ISP level, rather than through taxation...
So what if you're infected by an e-mail virus that spams everyone in your address book? Should you be held liable and therefore pay for sending e-mail you didn't mean or want to send? Should you be held liable for security flaws in software you have no control over?
Yes, you (usually) have control over *which* e-mail client you use -- but there is no totally secure e-mail client. (Or do we expect everyone to use mutt or pine?)
This sounds like a simple idea, but to me the implications are a lot worse than receiving spams.
My counter-suggestion (pulled fresh outta my butt) would be e-mail quotas. Each account would have a quota of, say, 100 e-mails (or perhaps 100 SMTP SEND reqs) a day -- any more than that and you pay.
OK, I can understand the idea of having a female Terminator to take out Connor. Seems logical enough.
But the actress just doesn't seem to be the right one for the part, at least judging from the trailers. Robert Patrick was absolutely awesome as the T-1000 in T2 -- even though he barely showed any expression, he still felt menacing (maybe because of that utter blankness on his face). But the T-X...just feels wrong to me. (OK, maybe I should see the movie first before passing judgement too much.)
Woulda been even cooler if she was played by Linda Hamilton. Now THAT would mess with your head, wouldn't it?;-)
No not Orwellian. Orwellian would be naming your illegal invasion of a third world dictator something like "Operation Iraqi Freedom", or calling an invading force a "liberating" force etc. It relates to NewsSpeak from his novel 1984.
There were indeed some Orwellian aspects to the way SS positions were named, along with the entire Nazi regime. (The SS was originally "marketed" to the German people as some sort of overgrown Boy Scout troop for grown-ups, almost like a charity -- you should see some of the early propaganda posters. Really chilling when you know what the real meaning of the SS was.)
The Nazis succeeded in perverting the German language to their ends in many ways that are hard for non-German speakers to appreciate -- even today many words that sound innocuous in English have ominous overtones in German because of the way the Nazis (mis-)used them. "Sturmbahn" is a pretty innocuous word -- "storm path", just like in a weather report. But many Germans would be reminded of SS officers. "Fuehrer", which just means "leader", is obviously also corrupted. "Ueberfremdung", which originally meant something like "estrangement", now has xenophobic overtones thanks to the way the Nazis used the word in their propaganda.
Nowadays anyone who wants to "defend" the German language by keeping out English expressions, like the French do now, is usually derided as neo-Nazi (or at least suspiciously nationalistic). Which is why attempts to introduce "German" expressions for Internet ("Zwischennetz") or e-mail ("E-Post"), for example, have largely failed miserably. To be proud to speak "pure" German smacks of being rather right-wing, thanks to the Nazis and their obsession with pure German-ness (if there ever was such a thing).
No, it isn't quite like Newspeak (not NewsSpeak), where "unneeded" words are banned in order to prevent independent thought, but it was in many ways a similar process -- warp a language to suit your own ends. I don't know if Orwell was aware of the Nazi perversion of the German language (he was certainly aware of the regime's other tactics, many of which are reflected in "1984", along with those of Stalin's regime), but there are interesting parallels between the two ideas.
"Sturmbahn" means "path of the storm"; "Sturmbahnfuehrer" essentially means "leader of the path of the storm". It was a rank in the SS in WWII -- most of their ranks had similarly Wagnerian (Orwellian?) sounding titles.
[The Pirahna brothers] began to operate what they called 'The Operation'... They would select a victim and then threaten to beat him up if he paid the so-called protection money.
Four months later they started another operation which the called 'The Other Operation'. In this racket they selected another victim and threatened not to beat him up if he didn't pay them.
One month later they hit upon 'The Santa Cruz Operation'. In this the victim was threatened that if he didn't pay them for their old UNIX patents, they would beat him up. This for the Piranha brothers was the turning point.
Nine, this is kinda offtopic, but what brand of cellphone do you have that it works "for days on a charge"?
I have a Nokia 6210, about two years old, which lasts for about four days on a full charge, depending on what the reception is like (the cellphone has to use more energy if reception is weak) and how much I use it (which is not much -- mainly for being reachable). If I talk on it, the charge lasts for at least a couple of hours -- I have had pretty long conversations on it, anyway.
My wife has a two-year-old phone from Alcatel -- I forget the model number -- which is rated at 360 hours of standby (mine is rated at 240, I think). It generally gets less than that, more like 200, but it's still better than mine. Which is good, because she tends to forget to charge it anyway.;-P
Your cellphone's battery might be suffering from the memory effect -- if you haven't heard of that, it's basically if you recharge it too often when the battery isn't fully drained, then the battery holds less and less of a charge. (It's as if you fill a glass half-full with water, and it shrinks. Drain it halfway and refill it, and it shrinks again.)
Maybe you just need a new battery. But most newer rechargable batteries don't have that problem anymore.
St. Paul Central also has a accelerated-learning program that attracted the smartest kids from the entire city and graduated four National Merit Scholarship winners last year;
Well, goody. In my high school class of 24 students, we had two National Merit Scholars. As it happens, I was one of them. Big deal.
the academic program is regarded as being one of the best in the state.
When I was about to high school in the mid-eighties, that was anything but the case.
It is also predominently black.
Which means...zilch.
Something tells me that you're racist in addition to being a stupid elitist.
What? I chose to go to a private school, and to not go to a school that at the time was a basket case, and that makes me racist? You need to get out more.
What was really "racist" is the fact that at the time, the City of St. Paul was so fscking bassackwards that they had most black students go to Central and didn't do much to integrate their otherwise lily-white schools. (I don't know whether that has gotten any better -- I don't live in MN anymore.) It was pretty much "separate but equal" all over again.
Things have apparently improved there. Thank God for that. No kid, black or white or purple, deserves to be stuck in a shitty school.
You're a *great* example of a geek! Too delicate to go to public school. Yup, I knew the type... never learned hwo to deal with real people, so they intentionally shelter themselves ("Mommy, pleeeese let me go to the private school!!"). Quite honestly, you probably would've turned out much better if you did go to a public school and had to learn how to interact with people different than yourself.
Er, and just what provoked that comment? Good Lord, man, get the chip off your shoulder...
As to my choice of school, my parents were well aware of how shitty the available public schools were. Didn't take much convincing. (Hrm, shall we send Junior to the school that has a 30% dropout rate and zero chances of getting him into college, or send him to the school where he'll probably get shot or stabbed once a month?)
I'm perfectly happy dealing with other people -- I have to in my work, since being self-employed I have to deal with my clients and subcontractors a lot. A lack of people skills wouldn't get me very far in business, and I get along with my clients swimmingly. (At least they recommend me a lot to others, so I can't be all that bad to deal with.)
Why am I self-employed? Not because of a lack of people skills -- actually, I enjoyed my last job a lot and am still friends with my former colleagues and bosses. The reason was money, pure and simple. (Why have the company pocket $120/hr for work that I do, when I only get $25/hr out of it? Doesn't take a rocket scientist...)
There are plenty of other reasons why self-employment (and private school) were the right decisions for me. People skills, or the lack thereof, didn't factor into it at all.
I went to school down the street from Mounds Park Academy at a fairly expensive private highschool,
Aargh...I forgot the name of the place. It was a Catholic school, right?
In fact as I remember, MPA is in the building that your school moved out of in the mid-eighties. But I can't remember the name of the original school. (Was it Hill-Murray?)
but I have a good idea what your other two school choices were like (Were they North St Paul and...???)
No, they were Como Park (the football-mad school) and St. Paul Central (the metal-detector school). Central has since supposedly improved a lot, from what I have heard (though I'm pretty out of touch with Minnesota these days, now that I live on a different continent). But North St. Paul was pretty bad in those days, too...
I may have had a chance to get in at Highland (which had a fairly decent reputation), but it would have meant a lot of bitching at the school system and a long commute. So we went with MPA, which was worth every cent.
I don't quite agree: the school DOES matter
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Why Nerds Are Unpopular
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I think his point in the article was pretty accurate.
Summary for those who haven't read it: American public schools tend to be little more than prisons, with large classes and indifferent teachers, where the kids are more or less left alone to create their own sub-societies (with all the "Lord of the Flies" cruelty that ensues). The nerdy types aren't totally expending their efforts on popularity (unlike most others), so they end up on the bottom of the heap.
This describes the public junior high school I went to perfectly. Education was really a joke there; the main thing was to keep us little darlings under lock and key for some hours while our parents worked, and if we learned something, so much the better (if we didn't, oh well). I got pretty badly picked on, partly for nerdiness (I was taking college-level math at the time) and partly for just being very different (I had just moved from rural Virginia to urban Minnesota).
Before my 9th grade year, I toured the public high school that I was supposed to go to, and immediately my radar told me that I would probably not make it out of that place alive (or at least with all my bones intact). Football stuff everywhere, with glassy-eyed teachers who really didn't give a damn. The other school I could have gone to had just become the first in Minnesota with metal detectors and had a rep for open gang warfare.
I begged my parents to pay for a private school. Somehow, they scraped the money together through loands and so on. (Thank God for my parents.) The first I went to, a boarding school near my parents' home, was a disaster (buncha spoiled rich kids whose parents had dumped them there and never visited them -- Lord of the Flies, Mercedes Edition).
The next year I went to a small, recently founded K-12 private school, where my class was all of 25 students, and where the teachers were all basically rebels from another private school who where determined to make a better school. The kinds of things described in the article just didn't happen there -- the teachers actually gave a sh*t about us, and we didn't feel like we were in some kind of penal colony.
A lot of the reason the school was better was the small class size (harder to have a crushing pyramid hierarchy when you've only got a small number of students) and the teachers actually got involved like *teachers* and not *wardens*.
Another reason is we didn't have jocks. We didn't have a football team, though we did have soccer. And the school's pride and joy was its Quiz Bowl team (hey! I was on it! State Champs in 1989!). Those who had high SAT, PSAT and ACH scores were also publicly praised by the school director (who, by the way, spent lunchtime serving the students corn so he could personally chat with each and every one). So knowledge and nerdiness was actually rewarded, and there was actually positive contact between staff and students.
Sadly, since then the school has grown dramatically (their reputation spread like wildfire, and soon they had huge demand for the school), and the director retired, so I tend to wonder if it has fallen to the same problems as other large schools. But it can be done -- a school in America where nerds are actually valued. I just am very grateful my parents scraped together the money for the place -- otherwise I probably would have spent more time in lockers than in classrooms...
At any rate, even though I tend to be leftish politically, I think the above is a pretty good argument for school vouchers. The public school system in America is so screwed that the only solution is to nuke it flat with vouchers, and let the parents and students sort it out through the market.
As a matter of fact, I happen to know that this system used a cunning mechanism containing a Canadian-built robotic arm, a No. 10 coffee can, a piece of string and a ruler. The machine measured the circumference and diameter of the can over and over again, and then sort of calculated the margin of error (correlated against 22/7) over and over again. And voila! It was discovered that pi is in fact 3.142857143...
Mind you, the article said they calculated pi to over a trillion places. They didn't say it was *accurate*.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Photoshop, for one thing...yes, Macs are still used for graphics, dontchaknow.
Try editing CMYK graphics at 600 or 1200 dpi for high-end print work sometime. With layers. And masks (which are essentially added layers). Running filters. The whole she-bang.
Such a file can easily get into hundreds of megabytes in size, and Photoshop generally needs 2x to 3x as much RAM as the actual file size to efficiently work; even then it starts to bog down at those file sizes.
My dual G4/450 with 1.5 GB RAM and Radeon 9000 already gags on that enough so that it's a hassle when I have to design and edit that kind of stuff. Believe me, I'm going to be first in line as soon as I scrape together the $2500 or so for a new G5 system with added RAM (the more RAM, the merrier -- Photoshop is VERY hungry for RAM).
Not to mention video editing and 3D, both of which are markets that the Mac has generally been strong (if not dominant) in for some time.
I might add that you could ask the same question about P4-based PCs. Who needs that kind of firepower? Not many (mainstream) people, really -- aside from perhaps gamers. The vast majority of users just do e-mail, web surfing and word processing, maybe a little photo editing. A P2 or P3 running Linux or an older version of Windows would be more than enough in those cases. Hell, even an old Pentium with a smallish Linux installation would be enough in many cases.
OTOH if you give users and developers the added power of new processors and mainboards (strange that HyperTransport hasn't gotten much mention here), people will find a way of using it. One example: Apple's predicted that video editing will be the next mainstream computing revolution, like desktop publishing was twenty years ago. If you think about it, they're probably right.
Most newer computers can easily handle basic video editing now; the question is just how to make it easier for Joe Sixpack to edit his family videos (and maybe make Junior a budding David Lynch).
Cheers,
Ethelred
Don't get your hopes up. Munich is run by a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens; it was they that decided to choose Linux in spite of Ballmer's pressure.
But the glorious Free State of Bavaria, where Munich is located, is run by the Christian Socialists (which, in spite of the name, is a rather far-right party -- think of them as the Redneck Party of Bavaria minus the gun racks). No way are they going to allow that long-hair hippy OS take hold...so the Bavarian government is trying to force a "review" of the Linux decision and has put it on hold.
Source: Spiegel.de. (Sorry, you'll have to use the Fish.)
Apparently Microsoft made the right donations in the right places. *sigh*
'Course, I'm surprised no one has bothered mentioning to the neo-nationalist CSU idiots in Bavaria that Linux is about as German an operating system as it gets (SuSE, KDE, etc.). At least much more "native" than Microsoft.
Cheers,
Ethelred
I'd rather you made the joke about falling blue water from airplanes (icy BM's)
Fie! How could I have missed THAT pun?!?
I bow before your superior (if anonymous) pundacity.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Y'all's overlookin' the obvious. "They" don't come here for our resources. They come for our women.
However, if we geeks were to defend the Earth against a large gaggle of female-snatching aliens from the planet Zod, the Zodders would make off with them before we knew what hit us.
Worse, the women would take one look at us (or at the back our Slashdot-reading heads) and go willingly for a little Zodomy.
(I don't know what got into me on that post. I really don't.)
Cheers,
Ethelred
No, this is just part of our nefarious plan to make Linux-powered ICBMs.
Nukes we won't be able to manage, but a passel of penguins "down South" will be lobbing icebergs at Redmond any day now.
In which case they will be "ice-BMs".
Ick. I don't believe I just wrote that. Please mod me down (-1, Dumbshit).
Cheers,
Ethelred
I vaguely recall that, in the movie, he committed seppuku on live TV, as he was on top of a barracks (?) reading a speech to the troops, while TV crews were watching; when the troops started to laugh at him, he did the deed right then and there. But then again, this might have been a little artistic licence...
Cheers,
Ethelred
Anyone remember more about this?
Cheers,
Ethelred
Cheers,
Ethelred
It's "die Innovation", if you're wondering...
FWIW "developer" is "der Entwickler". Not that it matters. Plural is "die Entwickler". So Ballyboy was saying:
Entwickler Entwickler Entwickler Entwickler!
Cheers,
Ethelred
Still, great to see that OSS won there...free Paulaner all around!
Cheers,
Ethelred
Except that the WTC had been the target of terrorist attacks before, with the goal of toppling (or at least damaging) both towers. If someone had suggested the idea before the first attack, then yes, I'd have been skeptical.
Cheers,
Ethelred
IANASC (...security consultant), but ISTR that many firms in the WTC were foolish enough to have the "backup" systems...in the other tower. IOW they assumed that if one tower went blooey, the other one would still be there. So much for redundancy.
The point is physical security, not network security. It's kind of like having all your backup CDs in the same room (or building!) as your computer. Fire, fire, oops, it's all gone.
Also, ISTR that in some cases, with the loss of systems in the WTC, financial networks were left in a state of chaos -- perfect time to be hacked, really.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Still, the number could be raised, maybe to 500 a day (which is a hell of a lot for a private user). And/or the ISP would have to have a caveat in their TOS that you have to have the latest patches for your client, perhaps, to try and keep users from having to pay when they get an e-mail virus.
Corporate/power users could perhaps buy higher limits, with restrictions on type of mail being sent (UCE).
Still, this is something that could be done at the ISP level, rather than through taxation...
Cheers,
Ethelred
So what if you're infected by an e-mail virus that spams everyone in your address book? Should you be held liable and therefore pay for sending e-mail you didn't mean or want to send? Should you be held liable for security flaws in software you have no control over?
Yes, you (usually) have control over *which* e-mail client you use -- but there is no totally secure e-mail client. (Or do we expect everyone to use mutt or pine?)
This sounds like a simple idea, but to me the implications are a lot worse than receiving spams.
My counter-suggestion (pulled fresh outta my butt) would be e-mail quotas. Each account would have a quota of, say, 100 e-mails (or perhaps 100 SMTP SEND reqs) a day -- any more than that and you pay.
Cheers,
Ethelred
OK, I can understand the idea of having a female Terminator to take out Connor. Seems logical enough.
But the actress just doesn't seem to be the right one for the part, at least judging from the trailers. Robert Patrick was absolutely awesome as the T-1000 in T2 -- even though he barely showed any expression, he still felt menacing (maybe because of that utter blankness on his face). But the T-X...just feels wrong to me. (OK, maybe I should see the movie first before passing judgement too much.)
Woulda been even cooler if she was played by Linda Hamilton. Now THAT would mess with your head, wouldn't it? ;-)
Cheers,
Ethelred
There were indeed some Orwellian aspects to the way SS positions were named, along with the entire Nazi regime. (The SS was originally "marketed" to the German people as some sort of overgrown Boy Scout troop for grown-ups, almost like a charity -- you should see some of the early propaganda posters. Really chilling when you know what the real meaning of the SS was.)
The Nazis succeeded in perverting the German language to their ends in many ways that are hard for non-German speakers to appreciate -- even today many words that sound innocuous in English have ominous overtones in German because of the way the Nazis (mis-)used them. "Sturmbahn" is a pretty innocuous word -- "storm path", just like in a weather report. But many Germans would be reminded of SS officers. "Fuehrer", which just means "leader", is obviously also corrupted. "Ueberfremdung", which originally meant something like "estrangement", now has xenophobic overtones thanks to the way the Nazis used the word in their propaganda.
Nowadays anyone who wants to "defend" the German language by keeping out English expressions, like the French do now, is usually derided as neo-Nazi (or at least suspiciously nationalistic). Which is why attempts to introduce "German" expressions for Internet ("Zwischennetz") or e-mail ("E-Post"), for example, have largely failed miserably. To be proud to speak "pure" German smacks of being rather right-wing, thanks to the Nazis and their obsession with pure German-ness (if there ever was such a thing).
No, it isn't quite like Newspeak (not NewsSpeak), where "unneeded" words are banned in order to prevent independent thought, but it was in many ways a similar process -- warp a language to suit your own ends. I don't know if Orwell was aware of the Nazi perversion of the German language (he was certainly aware of the regime's other tactics, many of which are reflected in "1984", along with those of Stalin's regime), but there are interesting parallels between the two ideas.
Cheers,
Ethelred
/me shudders
Cheers,
Ethelred
[The Pirahna brothers] began to operate what they called 'The Operation'... They would select a victim and then threaten to beat him up if he paid the so-called protection money.
Four months later they started another operation which the called 'The Other Operation'. In this racket they selected another victim and threatened not to beat him up if he didn't pay them.
One month later they hit upon 'The Santa Cruz Operation'. In this the victim was threatened that if he didn't pay them for their old UNIX patents, they would beat him up. This for the Piranha brothers was the turning point.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Nine, this is kinda offtopic, but what brand of cellphone do you have that it works "for days on a charge"?
I have a Nokia 6210, about two years old, which lasts for about four days on a full charge, depending on what the reception is like (the cellphone has to use more energy if reception is weak) and how much I use it (which is not much -- mainly for being reachable). If I talk on it, the charge lasts for at least a couple of hours -- I have had pretty long conversations on it, anyway.
My wife has a two-year-old phone from Alcatel -- I forget the model number -- which is rated at 360 hours of standby (mine is rated at 240, I think). It generally gets less than that, more like 200, but it's still better than mine. Which is good, because she tends to forget to charge it anyway. ;-P
Your cellphone's battery might be suffering from the memory effect -- if you haven't heard of that, it's basically if you recharge it too often when the battery isn't fully drained, then the battery holds less and less of a charge. (It's as if you fill a glass half-full with water, and it shrinks. Drain it halfway and refill it, and it shrinks again.)
Maybe you just need a new battery. But most newer rechargable batteries don't have that problem anymore.
Cheers,
Ethelred
What about OpenAL?
Cheers,
Ethelred
St. Paul Central also has a accelerated-learning program that attracted the smartest kids from the entire city and graduated four National Merit Scholarship winners last year;
Well, goody. In my high school class of 24 students, we had two National Merit Scholars. As it happens, I was one of them. Big deal.
the academic program is regarded as being one of the best in the state.
When I was about to high school in the mid-eighties, that was anything but the case.
It is also predominently black.
Which means...zilch.
Something tells me that you're racist in addition to being a stupid elitist.
What? I chose to go to a private school, and to not go to a school that at the time was a basket case, and that makes me racist? You need to get out more.
What was really "racist" is the fact that at the time, the City of St. Paul was so fscking bassackwards that they had most black students go to Central and didn't do much to integrate their otherwise lily-white schools. (I don't know whether that has gotten any better -- I don't live in MN anymore.) It was pretty much "separate but equal" all over again.
Things have apparently improved there. Thank God for that. No kid, black or white or purple, deserves to be stuck in a shitty school.
Cheers,
Ethelred
You're a *great* example of a geek! Too delicate to go to public school. Yup, I knew the type... never learned hwo to deal with real people, so they intentionally shelter themselves ("Mommy, pleeeese let me go to the private school!!"). Quite honestly, you probably would've turned out much better if you did go to a public school and had to learn how to interact with people different than yourself.
Er, and just what provoked that comment? Good Lord, man, get the chip off your shoulder...
As to my choice of school, my parents were well aware of how shitty the available public schools were. Didn't take much convincing. (Hrm, shall we send Junior to the school that has a 30% dropout rate and zero chances of getting him into college, or send him to the school where he'll probably get shot or stabbed once a month?)
I'm perfectly happy dealing with other people -- I have to in my work, since being self-employed I have to deal with my clients and subcontractors a lot. A lack of people skills wouldn't get me very far in business, and I get along with my clients swimmingly. (At least they recommend me a lot to others, so I can't be all that bad to deal with.)
Why am I self-employed? Not because of a lack of people skills -- actually, I enjoyed my last job a lot and am still friends with my former colleagues and bosses. The reason was money, pure and simple. (Why have the company pocket $120/hr for work that I do, when I only get $25/hr out of it? Doesn't take a rocket scientist...)
There are plenty of other reasons why self-employment (and private school) were the right decisions for me. People skills, or the lack thereof, didn't factor into it at all.
Cheers,
Ethelred
I went to school down the street from Mounds Park Academy at a fairly expensive private highschool,
Aargh...I forgot the name of the place. It was a Catholic school, right?
In fact as I remember, MPA is in the building that your school moved out of in the mid-eighties. But I can't remember the name of the original school. (Was it Hill-Murray?)
but I have a good idea what your other two school choices were like (Were they North St Paul and...???)
No, they were Como Park (the football-mad school) and St. Paul Central (the metal-detector school). Central has since supposedly improved a lot, from what I have heard (though I'm pretty out of touch with Minnesota these days, now that I live on a different continent). But North St. Paul was pretty bad in those days, too...
I may have had a chance to get in at Highland (which had a fairly decent reputation), but it would have meant a lot of bitching at the school system and a long commute. So we went with MPA, which was worth every cent.
Cheers,
Ethelred
I think his point in the article was pretty accurate.
Summary for those who haven't read it: American public schools tend to be little more than prisons, with large classes and indifferent teachers, where the kids are more or less left alone to create their own sub-societies (with all the "Lord of the Flies" cruelty that ensues). The nerdy types aren't totally expending their efforts on popularity (unlike most others), so they end up on the bottom of the heap.
This describes the public junior high school I went to perfectly. Education was really a joke there; the main thing was to keep us little darlings under lock and key for some hours while our parents worked, and if we learned something, so much the better (if we didn't, oh well). I got pretty badly picked on, partly for nerdiness (I was taking college-level math at the time) and partly for just being very different (I had just moved from rural Virginia to urban Minnesota).
Before my 9th grade year, I toured the public high school that I was supposed to go to, and immediately my radar told me that I would probably not make it out of that place alive (or at least with all my bones intact). Football stuff everywhere, with glassy-eyed teachers who really didn't give a damn. The other school I could have gone to had just become the first in Minnesota with metal detectors and had a rep for open gang warfare.
I begged my parents to pay for a private school. Somehow, they scraped the money together through loands and so on. (Thank God for my parents.) The first I went to, a boarding school near my parents' home, was a disaster (buncha spoiled rich kids whose parents had dumped them there and never visited them -- Lord of the Flies, Mercedes Edition).
The next year I went to a small, recently founded K-12 private school, where my class was all of 25 students, and where the teachers were all basically rebels from another private school who where determined to make a better school. The kinds of things described in the article just didn't happen there -- the teachers actually gave a sh*t about us, and we didn't feel like we were in some kind of penal colony.
A lot of the reason the school was better was the small class size (harder to have a crushing pyramid hierarchy when you've only got a small number of students) and the teachers actually got involved like *teachers* and not *wardens*.
Another reason is we didn't have jocks. We didn't have a football team, though we did have soccer. And the school's pride and joy was its Quiz Bowl team (hey! I was on it! State Champs in 1989!). Those who had high SAT, PSAT and ACH scores were also publicly praised by the school director (who, by the way, spent lunchtime serving the students corn so he could personally chat with each and every one). So knowledge and nerdiness was actually rewarded, and there was actually positive contact between staff and students.
Sadly, since then the school has grown dramatically (their reputation spread like wildfire, and soon they had huge demand for the school), and the director retired, so I tend to wonder if it has fallen to the same problems as other large schools. But it can be done -- a school in America where nerds are actually valued. I just am very grateful my parents scraped together the money for the place -- otherwise I probably would have spent more time in lockers than in classrooms...
The school, by the way, was Mounds Park Academy, if anyone's interested.
At any rate, even though I tend to be leftish politically, I think the above is a pretty good argument for school vouchers. The public school system in America is so screwed that the only solution is to nuke it flat with vouchers, and let the parents and students sort it out through the market.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Just how is Pi calculated?
As a matter of fact, I happen to know that this system used a cunning mechanism containing a Canadian-built robotic arm, a No. 10 coffee can, a piece of string and a ruler. The machine measured the circumference and diameter of the can over and over again, and then sort of calculated the margin of error (correlated against 22/7) over and over again. And voila! It was discovered that pi is in fact 3.142857143...
Mind you, the article said they calculated pi to over a trillion places. They didn't say it was *accurate*.
Cheers,
Ethelred