"I don't know where the hell you live, but the whole west coast..."
He's living precisely in that, oh, 3000 miles between San Francisco and New York that constitutes the portion of the country that is doing exactly what he's saying. Ever driven through North Dakota, South Dakota, most of Montana, Nebraska, Kansas or any of those other states that DON'T end up as settings for TV and movies? Abandoned farms with rotting buildings are being taken over by the groves of trees originally planted as windbreaks.
It's actually a rare thing that one or both of the coasts can be used as the basis for extrapolation to what's going on in the rest of the country.
The problem is that this is happening in places that aren't "pretty" or "nice". It's happening exactly where people don't really want to hang out now that there's no gold mining or copper mining or railroad economy anymore.
Sure, it's eroding in the beautiful places, but "wilderness" and "forest" don't always look like the giant redwood forests or Glacier National Park. Instead, it's trees sprouting up where no one notices.
The simple truth is that there are more trees, white tailed deer, raccoons, Canada geese, and other non-predatory wildlife now (with a population of 300 million) than we had in 1900 (with a population of 76 million). What has decreased is the megafauna mentioned in the posting as well as predators. Why? Because most predators need wide territories in order to sustain populations. Setting aside 20,000 acres doesn't help predator populations much because, for some predators, that would only support a few of them, while it might support thousands of "prey" animals.
Re:Podcasting is right up there with blog...
on
Podcasting
·
· Score: 1
Umm. You do know that a LOT of radio *is* produced using "God knows how many takes", right? That much of the best content on NPR and the BBC is painstakingly prepared in advance, edited down from hours of recorded audio from the field and otherwise produced pretty much like video documentaries. Just last week, someone flubbed up in that editing process and one of the field reporter's audio included the 3-2-1 intro for marking edit points on a retake.
Just because your "morning zoo" or call-in show is live doesn't mean that all radio is. And, much of the best in podcasting emulates or directly IS produced radio. Most of my current subscriptions are those exact kinds of content. Heck, in a lot of markets, the "best of" clips from the weekdays are played as the Saturday morning content on the radio. That clipshow is pretty much the same as a podcast.
Radio and podcasting are media. The content delivered via those media are quite varied (despite Clearchannel's best efforts) and only really share one thing in common: they're audio that you can listen to.
Because, in large part, programs like this have different problems than you're thinking. In most large scale projects, the non-technical bits are much bigger and more problematic than the technical portion.
In other words, it only takes a short period of time to write the code to send a credit card number to a payment processor and parse the results. However, to handle customer service for those transactions is a huge deal.
For things like Adsense, or Yahoo's equiv, I'd bet that the logistics on the tax and accounting front as well as handling disputes and other human interactions will take FAR more effort than building the engine that serves up snippets of HTML to Javascript requests and tracks the clicks.
I personally use IMAPSize to archive my IMAP mail that is needed mostly for historical purposes. Just yesterday, I pulled 12,000 messages off of my IMAP server for long-term storage. It turns them either into an mbox file or individual emails. I've then got a script that dumps them into a database as well as just zipping them up for burning to optical media. The database is for quick searching, the files for backup/recovery.
I looked for the solution mostly to speed up my IMAP server and client both, which weren't happy with the huge numbers of email I was storing or occasionally crappy connections. I've got a web interface to it that also lets me easily reply to a message directly from there, pull out related messages, etc.
You do know you can have VLC buffer pretty much anything right? It's one of the settings when you open a file, filestream, etc. I use it all the time to stream DVD ISO files across my wireless network. Due to phones, microwaves, etc. you occasionally need 20 seconds or so of buffering for a DVD.
VLC really takes the idea of "everything's a file" to a neat level with media. Everything can be an input and everything can be an output. Transcode, stream, buffer, etc. If you can open it with VLC, you can also save it into whatever else you want or stream it to wherever you want.
Thank God they've discovered, on the frontier beyond The Bay, such cities as Seattle, Portland, Pheonix, Houston, Dallas, Sante Fe, Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and many others. And, if the legends are true, they have even heard of computers in the land beyond The Bay. Some of the barbarians in the hinterlands may even have learned how to program computers (though certainly they learned to do so in the cradle of computer civilization before venturing out into the wilderness). Of course brilliant ideas can only be conceived in the shadow of the Golden Gate. Too bad none of those backwater programmers are anywhere nearly as skilled as the chosen 500.
"Well, if you want to work like this or need feature foo then SubVersion might not be the correct solution for you, try OtherVersionControlSystem instead."
I think this is really important as a part of their success. So often, projects and products (not just an open source thing) tend to try to be all things to all people. They actually understand and stick to their "way of doing things". They aren't afraid to say, "That's not how SVN works, and, quite frankly, it's never going to work like that" and back it up.
As versioning tools tend to be tightly integrated into the way people work, they also tend to get more of this than some other types of projects and they handle it well. People tend to want to make SVN bend to their particular way of working. However, in many cases, doing that actually means that you're asking the rest of the SVN users to bend to your unique way of working. And, given some of the requests I've seen go across that mailing list, I'm glad they handle this stuff well.
I do a LOT of scripting on Windows for a variety of things including: image processing, data munging, building tiny special purpose apps quickly, etc.
I personally favor a mix of PHP, Perl and Javascript combined with AutoHotkey, Cygwin and HTA files. Between them they have:
* Extensive libraries of functionality and examples available. * All have COM object access to all of the same stuff VBScript has access to on Windows. * Abilities to connect to just about anything outside the Windows box. * C style syntax that, while you still have to shift gears when one of them doesn't do what you want easily, still allows you to stay in the same mindset when switching between them. * Simple GUI capability for entering basic parameters, etc. for non-techie users. AutoHotkey uses native or more native looking widgets and HTA's give you the familiarity of HTML/Javascript for the GUI. * All of them can build either Windows "normal" DLL's and EXE's or.NET versions for easy packaging and bundling of scripts.
Overall, they bridge the gap between Unix-y ways of doing things and Windows-y ways, making really nice glue to string together custom solutions on Windows.
I used to work with a guy who would sit, staring at a completely empty, default WindowsXP desktop for HOURS at a time. Just stare. No dozing off, no listening to music, no spreadsheet or requirements document or text editor open even to look like he was working. Just the rolling hills wallpaper from Redmond. You could walk by on your way to a meeting and then on your way back and he wouldn't have moved an inch. Downright creepy.
BUT, he wasn't surfing the Internet, so they left him alone.
"Sounds great until you realize wireless everything will probably conflict with your neighbor's wireless everything"
No doubt. Just witness the ever-frequency-climbing cordless phone. Every unlicensed band wireless technology that has reached *true ubiquity* has run into collision issues. Phones went from 900Mhz to 2.4Ghz and now on to 5.8Ghz, with each change happening faster. While we, as geeks, like to think of wireless Internet as having "widespread" use, it's nothing compared to things like baby monitors and cordless phones.
I have an 802.11g setup at home with several laptops, as well as a few PC's hidden away with PCI wireless cards (home automation, etc). When all of them, the microwave, the bluetooth adapters, etc. are all using the 2.4Ghz spectrum simultaneously, I can watch my bandwidth completely plummet. And, that's with only 1 other access point within range of any of my clients.
Wired networks scale (not necessarily a simple task, but they do) where wireless ones break down. I can have hundreds of PC's all physically networked together through a few switches without any major issues. Try setting up even 10-20 machines for heavy network use between each other (transferring multi-gigabyte files) and you can pretty much plan for failure.
Wireless works where it does because it's primarily been used for outbound connectivity, i.e. web browsing, email checking, etc. In other words, each connected client is really using the connection to connect to the Internet at large. Because our use of the Internet tends to be in short bursts and relatively small files*, this works, and the slower speeds are OK. However, the kind of usage that internal networks with Samba file storage, regular backups, large email attachments, etc. flying back and forth, wireless takes SERIOUS effort to get working at all.
*In terms of network transfers MP3s and even DivX files are small. I transferred 10 DVD images last night from one machine to another on my wired network. I wouldn't even try that from the wireless side.
While I agree with the "school-boy" writing comment, I think you meant written in the present tense rather than first person (from what I read of it before I wanted to chuck my monitor out the window). And, present tense usually IS a gimmick.
First person would be, "I woke up tangled in bright-white sheets, an IV shunt freshly pulled from my arm. I reached to pull back the sheet from my face and was denied by the leather strap restraining my left hand." 3rd person would be "He woke up...." Either one, made present tense becomes "I wake up" or "He wakes up".
Writing, like so many other things, has modes that shouldn't be attempted by amateurs. When writing fiction, 3rd person, past tense omniscient narrators are the easiest to write, by virtue of the fact that's what readers are most used to and comfortable with. When straying from any of these by shifting from 3rd to 1st (or heaven forbid 2nd) person, by shifting to present tense, or restricting a 3rd person narrator to a "single camera", that shifting draws attention to itself and shines an extra light on the writing.
If the writing is good, the light makes it look even better. However flaws in the writing become more obvious as well. As such, making the shift for reasons like "It's edgy" or "I want my future world to seem like it's happening now" tend to be less convincing than things like big plot twists that are emphasized by the narrator being kept in the dark about the situation, etc.
So, by shifting the tense to present (and moving it to the future would take even more skill) is a deviation that will call attention to anything else that's "off" in the writing. In this case, as with much sci-fi (especially the bad stuff), the focus is really on just trying to create a world and spend the entirety of the text describing just how cool that world is. The fact that the characters need some conflict and movement through the story is just a burden. This is frequently why sci-fi authors are, among genre authors, particularly drawn to present tense. It lends itself well to just rambling for pages on what the narrator sees, smells and touches. There's an appeal to this, which is why there's also a market for it among sci-fi geeks who just want a long description of a world, in which they can imagine their own stuff.
I believe there's actually a tool to turn a Greasemonkey script *into* a full-blown plugin. I can't recall at the moment, but it seems to me that I remember reading that somewhere.
Many of the $300 bulbs are now rated for 4000 hours. Just how much are you watching in a day?
Re:I'm not sure what you're saying.
on
Improving Education?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"The best situation for that kid would be for his parents to get interested and involved in his school work and get him evaluated to see if there is some reason that he cannot grasp basic concepts."
Maybe you should reevaluate the reading comprehension portions of your own education. He specifically cited a child that he is tutoring, noting their *involvement* on a nightly basis, actively working with their child to improve the situation. They were taking actions that included private tutoring. I find it highly unlikely that they've engaged private tutoring and haven't considered any sort of learning disability testing.
Further, you may want to review your own post. You are focusing entirely on everything but your last sentence. However, that single statement is what the parent poster was responding to. See, you made an absolute statement:
"You will not find a kid who is failing any subect who has parents who are interested and involved in his school work."
The respondant invalidated your absolute statement with all he needed to: a verifiable anecdote. Had you made a more reasonable assertion, along the lines of "most of the kids failing their schoolwork don't have parents who are involved". That would have set the required level of refutation a bit higher.
In the future, if you want people to focus on the rest of your statement, you probably want to drop the absolute judgements that are clearly invalidated by the experience of thousands.
You only get robots that way if the "wRiting" part is regurgitation or stops with the ability to form letters and words on paper. When writing, as a discipline, extends into rhetorical structures, supporting your assertions, etc., you have a *method* of teaching thinking.
Beyond that, it really becomes a matter of "leading a horse to water". A certain percentage will NEVER learn to "think" at the level you're talking about. They just won't.
[Edit - I swear I had HTML Formatted selected when I previewed.]
"that's entirely different than having a kid do a powerpoint on WW2"
Yes. That is a problem even for adults. Given the wide range of functionality in Powerpoint or Word, there's too much "stuff" other than the writing to focus on. It's far too easy to spend 20 minutes setting up fonts, margins, etc. instead of actually forming your thoughts. Of the x hours available to dedicate to the project, half of them are on things other than learning the topic or conveying what you've learned.
For the novel I'm going to try to write this fall (during NaNoWriMo), I'm setting up a totally stripped down environment, including a little Javascript/HTA editor I made for myself*. All of it is aimed to give me basic editing capability (including centering, bold, italics, etc that DO help when writing a novel) without any of the other distractions being present.
I've done a bit of editing in that environment and find it surprisingly liberating. Rather than having all of the distractions (web browser, email, IM, extra menu options), I can focus on the writing itself, am happier with the results and finding that writing takes far less time than in the "normal" computer environment. I couldn't, however, go back to handwriting as it long ago deteriorated to the point of unreadability.
While a cliche, the 3 R approach is really the gateway to any other learning, especially when combined. When you have to write about what you've read (and do the practice with math), you really see whether you've learned the material. I've said for a long time to other programmers that until you've tried to explain something to someone else, you don't know whether you know it or not. Additionally, if you really know how to read for comprehension and can write clearly, along with an ability to problem solve (the 3 R results), you can learn the rest of the stuff far more easily.
*NanoNotepad and a description of the setup are at Wynia.org
"that's entirely different than having a kid do a powerpoint on WW2" <p> Yes. That is a problem even for adults. Given the wide range of functionality in Powerpoint or Word, there's too much "stuff" other than the writing to focus on. It's far too easy to spend 20 minutes setting up fonts, margins, etc. instead of actually forming your thoughts. Of the x hours available to dedicate to the project, half of them are on things other than learning the topic or conveying what you've learned. <p> For the novel I'm going to try to write this fall (during NaNoWriMo), I'm setting up a totally stripped down environment, including a little Javascript/HTA editor I made for myself*. All of it is aimed to give me basic editing capability (including centering, bold, italics, etc that DO help when writing a novel) without any of the other distractions being present. <p> I've done a bit of editing in that environment and find it surprisingly liberating. Rather than having all of the distractions (web browser, email, IM, extra menu options), I can focus on the writing itself, am happier with the results and finding that writing takes far less time than in the "normal" computer environment. I couldn't, however, go back to handwriting as it long ago deteriorated to the point of unreadability. <p> While a cliche, the 3 R approach is really the gateway to any other learning, especially when combined. When you have to write about what you've read (and do the practice with math), you really see whether you've learned the material. I've said for a long time to other programmers that until you've tried to explain something to someone else, you don't know whether you know it or not. Additionally, if you really know how to read for comprehension and can write clearly, along with an ability to problem solve (the 3 R results), you can learn the rest of the stuff far more easily. <p>
*NanoNotepad and a description of the setup are at <a href="http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/?page_id=110" >Wynia.org</a>
"Online Netflix means that you'll be able to create wish lists prior to the release of movies on DVD"
Not sure if you're aware or not, but Netflix already handles movies currently in the theater as part of the queue. They're added to a special queue and moved into the normal one as soon as the DVD release is within a week or so. Obviously the normal mailing delays and availability come into play then, but almost all of the movies in my Netflix queue (about 80 at the moment) were added before the DVD was even available.
True, but it's a REALLY rare DVD that uses even 6GB of that for the main title. Other than the Superbit and other such collections, it's pretty typical for the widescreen movie, 1 AC3 soundtrack and the appropriate subtitles to take up right around 3.5-5Gb with a really large number fitting under the single layer limit or just over.
Of course, why on earth would they use straight MPEG-2 for delivery when all of the other new services (like the new DirecTV setup) are going with MPEG-4, which pulls the number down below 1GB?
No. I do understand that. We're actually both agreeing with each other, though that seems to be one of the most common forms of argument on this site:).
What I'm saying is that, long term, it's still a good idea to roll out these "crippled" cars that still depend on exotic input for the fuel cells. However, it's not because I believe that hydrogen will roll out everywhere. Rather, it's because of the research and development of everything AFTER the cell that will get done. Personally, I think that a hydrogen infrastructure rollout is doomed, just as you say.
However, progress is rarely linear and isolated. These hydrogen cars will fail (in a marketable or real deliverable product way) as did the earlier attempts at straight electrical cars. However, much of the research that went into those failed electrical cars later showed up in the currently successful hybrids. Being free of the "burden" of designing with batteries in mind (while depending on the pipedream that is the hydrogen infrastructure), I suspect that we'll see some interesting developments.
Given the barriers to mass adoption of new technologies, we're far more likely to see evolutionary changes than revolutionary ones. While manufacturers and engineers are usually looking for revolutionary change. Just look at all of the 1950's sci-fi dreams of the future. We did have massive changes, but it was all evolutionary. But without some revolutionary thinking (and some serious pipedreams) we wouldn't have had much evolutionary advancement.
Everything I've read on fuel cells (admitedly little) indicates that the output of the fuel cell *is* electricity. Sure, adding that whole process is burdensome to the car, but so is a pile of batteries. Either way, you can leverage electricity to do the spinning and mechanical transfer to the wheels.
Is there some other type of fuel cell that they're using in cars that does the transfer differently requiring something other than an electric motor to provide the physical power?
"If you look at the numbers, electric has more potential to eliminate oil consumption than anything else out there."
This is the thing I wish more of the discussion would focus on. When you look at energy consumption, cars, home furnaces and some water heaters are about the only common* items that people use daily that burn oil/gas/natural gas directly. For pretty much every other device that we use that consumes energy we use electricity and even those have viable alternatives. Cars are the only one that really doesn't have mass market alternatives.
The thing about electricity is that on the consumption end, it's all pretty much the same. A couple of transformers and it's delivered in the right voltage, etc. If we switch over to nuclear at my local power plant, I don't need to change my laptop. If solar suddenly becomes more efficient, it can be switched over.
The thing that fuel cells give us (with most of the designs being put forward) is that the powertrain itself in cars becomes based on electricity. Generating it can move from one method to another as efficiencies change and we don't need to retool the whole automotive motion system. Electrical consumption at the end gives us an abstraction in the middle (like a good API between 2 computer systems) meaning that as long as the middle is electricity, we can change how we get it without having to change the other end.
*Please don't list all of the other items that can burn fuel directly. Focus on the point.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't know where the hell you live, but the whole west coast..."
He's living precisely in that, oh, 3000 miles between San Francisco and New York that constitutes the portion of the country that is doing exactly what he's saying. Ever driven through North Dakota, South Dakota, most of Montana, Nebraska, Kansas or any of those other states that DON'T end up as settings for TV and movies? Abandoned farms with rotting buildings are being taken over by the groves of trees originally planted as windbreaks.
It's actually a rare thing that one or both of the coasts can be used as the basis for extrapolation to what's going on in the rest of the country.
The problem is that this is happening in places that aren't "pretty" or "nice". It's happening exactly where people don't really want to hang out now that there's no gold mining or copper mining or railroad economy anymore.
Sure, it's eroding in the beautiful places, but "wilderness" and "forest" don't always look like the giant redwood forests or Glacier National Park. Instead, it's trees sprouting up where no one notices.
The simple truth is that there are more trees, white tailed deer, raccoons, Canada geese, and other non-predatory wildlife now (with a population of 300 million) than we had in 1900 (with a population of 76 million). What has decreased is the megafauna mentioned in the posting as well as predators. Why? Because most predators need wide territories in order to sustain populations. Setting aside 20,000 acres doesn't help predator populations much because, for some predators, that would only support a few of them, while it might support thousands of "prey" animals.
Umm. You do know that a LOT of radio *is* produced using "God knows how many takes", right? That much of the best content on NPR and the BBC is painstakingly prepared in advance, edited down from hours of recorded audio from the field and otherwise produced pretty much like video documentaries. Just last week, someone flubbed up in that editing process and one of the field reporter's audio included the 3-2-1 intro for marking edit points on a retake.
Just because your "morning zoo" or call-in show is live doesn't mean that all radio is. And, much of the best in podcasting emulates or directly IS produced radio. Most of my current subscriptions are those exact kinds of content. Heck, in a lot of markets, the "best of" clips from the weekdays are played as the Saturday morning content on the radio. That clipshow is pretty much the same as a podcast.
Radio and podcasting are media. The content delivered via those media are quite varied (despite Clearchannel's best efforts) and only really share one thing in common: they're audio that you can listen to.
Because, in large part, programs like this have different problems than you're thinking. In most large scale projects, the non-technical bits are much bigger and more problematic than the technical portion.
In other words, it only takes a short period of time to write the code to send a credit card number to a payment processor and parse the results. However, to handle customer service for those transactions is a huge deal.
For things like Adsense, or Yahoo's equiv, I'd bet that the logistics on the tax and accounting front as well as handling disputes and other human interactions will take FAR more effort than building the engine that serves up snippets of HTML to Javascript requests and tracks the clicks.
I personally use IMAPSize to archive my IMAP mail that is needed mostly for historical purposes. Just yesterday, I pulled 12,000 messages off of my IMAP server for long-term storage. It turns them either into an mbox file or individual emails. I've then got a script that dumps them into a database as well as just zipping them up for burning to optical media. The database is for quick searching, the files for backup/recovery. I looked for the solution mostly to speed up my IMAP server and client both, which weren't happy with the huge numbers of email I was storing or occasionally crappy connections. I've got a web interface to it that also lets me easily reply to a message directly from there, pull out related messages, etc.
Since a quick scan of the article didn't include the actual program address, here it is: http://publisher.yahoo.com
You do know you can have VLC buffer pretty much anything right? It's one of the settings when you open a file, filestream, etc. I use it all the time to stream DVD ISO files across my wireless network. Due to phones, microwaves, etc. you occasionally need 20 seconds or so of buffering for a DVD.
VLC really takes the idea of "everything's a file" to a neat level with media. Everything can be an input and everything can be an output. Transcode, stream, buffer, etc. If you can open it with VLC, you can also save it into whatever else you want or stream it to wherever you want.
Thank God they've discovered, on the frontier beyond The Bay, such cities as Seattle, Portland, Pheonix, Houston, Dallas, Sante Fe, Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and many others. And, if the legends are true, they have even heard of computers in the land beyond The Bay. Some of the barbarians in the hinterlands may even have learned how to program computers (though certainly they learned to do so in the cradle of computer civilization before venturing out into the wilderness). Of course brilliant ideas can only be conceived in the shadow of the Golden Gate. Too bad none of those backwater programmers are anywhere nearly as skilled as the chosen 500.
"Well, if you want to work like this or need feature foo then SubVersion might not be the correct solution for you, try OtherVersionControlSystem instead."
I think this is really important as a part of their success. So often, projects and products (not just an open source thing) tend to try to be all things to all people. They actually understand and stick to their "way of doing things". They aren't afraid to say, "That's not how SVN works, and, quite frankly, it's never going to work like that" and back it up.
As versioning tools tend to be tightly integrated into the way people work, they also tend to get more of this than some other types of projects and they handle it well. People tend to want to make SVN bend to their particular way of working. However, in many cases, doing that actually means that you're asking the rest of the SVN users to bend to your unique way of working. And, given some of the requests I've seen go across that mailing list, I'm glad they handle this stuff well.
I do a LOT of scripting on Windows for a variety of things including: image processing, data munging, building tiny special purpose apps quickly, etc.
.NET versions for easy packaging and bundling of scripts.
I personally favor a mix of PHP, Perl and Javascript combined with AutoHotkey, Cygwin and HTA files. Between them they have:
* Extensive libraries of functionality and examples available.
* All have COM object access to all of the same stuff VBScript has access to on Windows.
* Abilities to connect to just about anything outside the Windows box.
* C style syntax that, while you still have to shift gears when one of them doesn't do what you want easily, still allows you to stay in the same mindset when switching between them.
* Simple GUI capability for entering basic parameters, etc. for non-techie users. AutoHotkey uses native or more native looking widgets and HTA's give you the familiarity of HTML/Javascript for the GUI.
* All of them can build either Windows "normal" DLL's and EXE's or
Overall, they bridge the gap between Unix-y ways of doing things and Windows-y ways, making really nice glue to string together custom solutions on Windows.
AutoHotkey is an open source version of the same kind of thing.
I used to work with a guy who would sit, staring at a completely empty, default WindowsXP desktop for HOURS at a time. Just stare. No dozing off, no listening to music, no spreadsheet or requirements document or text editor open even to look like he was working. Just the rolling hills wallpaper from Redmond. You could walk by on your way to a meeting and then on your way back and he wouldn't have moved an inch. Downright creepy.
BUT, he wasn't surfing the Internet, so they left him alone.
"Sounds great until you realize wireless everything will probably conflict with your neighbor's wireless everything"
No doubt. Just witness the ever-frequency-climbing cordless phone. Every unlicensed band wireless technology that has reached *true ubiquity* has run into collision issues. Phones went from 900Mhz to 2.4Ghz and now on to 5.8Ghz, with each change happening faster. While we, as geeks, like to think of wireless Internet as having "widespread" use, it's nothing compared to things like baby monitors and cordless phones.
I have an 802.11g setup at home with several laptops, as well as a few PC's hidden away with PCI wireless cards (home automation, etc). When all of them, the microwave, the bluetooth adapters, etc. are all using the 2.4Ghz spectrum simultaneously, I can watch my bandwidth completely plummet. And, that's with only 1 other access point within range of any of my clients.
Wired networks scale (not necessarily a simple task, but they do) where wireless ones break down. I can have hundreds of PC's all physically networked together through a few switches without any major issues. Try setting up even 10-20 machines for heavy network use between each other (transferring multi-gigabyte files) and you can pretty much plan for failure.
Wireless works where it does because it's primarily been used for outbound connectivity, i.e. web browsing, email checking, etc. In other words, each connected client is really using the connection to connect to the Internet at large. Because our use of the Internet tends to be in short bursts and relatively small files*, this works, and the slower speeds are OK. However, the kind of usage that internal networks with Samba file storage, regular backups, large email attachments, etc. flying back and forth, wireless takes SERIOUS effort to get working at all.
*In terms of network transfers MP3s and even DivX files are small. I transferred 10 DVD images last night from one machine to another on my wired network. I wouldn't even try that from the wireless side.
While I agree with the "school-boy" writing comment, I think you meant written in the present tense rather than first person (from what I read of it before I wanted to chuck my monitor out the window). And, present tense usually IS a gimmick.
...." Either one, made present tense becomes "I wake up" or "He wakes up".
First person would be, "I woke up tangled in bright-white sheets, an IV shunt freshly pulled from my arm. I reached to pull back the sheet from my face and was denied by the leather strap restraining my left hand." 3rd person would be "He woke up
Writing, like so many other things, has modes that shouldn't be attempted by amateurs. When writing fiction, 3rd person, past tense omniscient narrators are the easiest to write, by virtue of the fact that's what readers are most used to and comfortable with. When straying from any of these by shifting from 3rd to 1st (or heaven forbid 2nd) person, by shifting to present tense, or restricting a 3rd person narrator to a "single camera", that shifting draws attention to itself and shines an extra light on the writing.
If the writing is good, the light makes it look even better. However flaws in the writing become more obvious as well. As such, making the shift for reasons like "It's edgy" or "I want my future world to seem like it's happening now" tend to be less convincing than things like big plot twists that are emphasized by the narrator being kept in the dark about the situation, etc.
So, by shifting the tense to present (and moving it to the future would take even more skill) is a deviation that will call attention to anything else that's "off" in the writing. In this case, as with much sci-fi (especially the bad stuff), the focus is really on just trying to create a world and spend the entirety of the text describing just how cool that world is. The fact that the characters need some conflict and movement through the story is just a burden. This is frequently why sci-fi authors are, among genre authors, particularly drawn to present tense. It lends itself well to just rambling for pages on what the narrator sees, smells and touches. There's an appeal to this, which is why there's also a market for it among sci-fi geeks who just want a long description of a world, in which they can imagine their own stuff.
I believe there's actually a tool to turn a Greasemonkey script *into* a full-blown plugin. I can't recall at the moment, but it seems to me that I remember reading that somewhere.
Many of the $300 bulbs are now rated for 4000 hours. Just how much are you watching in a day?
"The best situation for that kid would be for his parents to get interested and involved in his school work and get him evaluated to see if there is some reason that he cannot grasp basic concepts."
Maybe you should reevaluate the reading comprehension portions of your own education. He specifically cited a child that he is tutoring, noting their *involvement* on a nightly basis, actively working with their child to improve the situation. They were taking actions that included private tutoring. I find it highly unlikely that they've engaged private tutoring and haven't considered any sort of learning disability testing.
Further, you may want to review your own post. You are focusing entirely on everything but your last sentence. However, that single statement is what the parent poster was responding to. See, you made an absolute statement:
"You will not find a kid who is failing any subect who has parents who are interested and involved in his school work."
The respondant invalidated your absolute statement with all he needed to: a verifiable anecdote. Had you made a more reasonable assertion, along the lines of "most of the kids failing their schoolwork don't have parents who are involved". That would have set the required level of refutation a bit higher.
In the future, if you want people to focus on the rest of your statement, you probably want to drop the absolute judgements that are clearly invalidated by the experience of thousands.
You only get robots that way if the "wRiting" part is regurgitation or stops with the ability to form letters and words on paper. When writing, as a discipline, extends into rhetorical structures, supporting your assertions, etc., you have a *method* of teaching thinking.
Beyond that, it really becomes a matter of "leading a horse to water". A certain percentage will NEVER learn to "think" at the level you're talking about. They just won't.
Yes. That is a problem even for adults. Given the wide range of functionality in Powerpoint or Word, there's too much "stuff" other than the writing to focus on. It's far too easy to spend 20 minutes setting up fonts, margins, etc. instead of actually forming your thoughts. Of the x hours available to dedicate to the project, half of them are on things other than learning the topic or conveying what you've learned.
For the novel I'm going to try to write this fall (during NaNoWriMo), I'm setting up a totally stripped down environment, including a little Javascript/HTA editor I made for myself*. All of it is aimed to give me basic editing capability (including centering, bold, italics, etc that DO help when writing a novel) without any of the other distractions being present.
I've done a bit of editing in that environment and find it surprisingly liberating. Rather than having all of the distractions (web browser, email, IM, extra menu options), I can focus on the writing itself, am happier with the results and finding that writing takes far less time than in the "normal" computer environment. I couldn't, however, go back to handwriting as it long ago deteriorated to the point of unreadability.
While a cliche, the 3 R approach is really the gateway to any other learning, especially when combined. When you have to write about what you've read (and do the practice with math), you really see whether you've learned the material. I've said for a long time to other programmers that until you've tried to explain something to someone else, you don't know whether you know it or not. Additionally, if you really know how to read for comprehension and can write clearly, along with an ability to problem solve (the 3 R results), you can learn the rest of the stuff far more easily.
*NanoNotepad and a description of the setup are at Wynia.org
"that's entirely different than having a kid do a powerpoint on WW2"
" >Wynia.org</a>
<p>
Yes. That is a problem even for adults. Given the wide range of functionality in Powerpoint or Word, there's too much "stuff" other than the writing to focus on. It's far too easy to spend 20 minutes setting up fonts, margins, etc. instead of actually forming your thoughts. Of the x hours available to dedicate to the project, half of them are on things other than learning the topic or conveying what you've learned.
<p>
For the novel I'm going to try to write this fall (during NaNoWriMo), I'm setting up a totally stripped down environment, including a little Javascript/HTA editor I made for myself*. All of it is aimed to give me basic editing capability (including centering, bold, italics, etc that DO help when writing a novel) without any of the other distractions being present.
<p>
I've done a bit of editing in that environment and find it surprisingly liberating. Rather than having all of the distractions (web browser, email, IM, extra menu options), I can focus on the writing itself, am happier with the results and finding that writing takes far less time than in the "normal" computer environment. I couldn't, however, go back to handwriting as it long ago deteriorated to the point of unreadability.
<p>
While a cliche, the 3 R approach is really the gateway to any other learning, especially when combined. When you have to write about what you've read (and do the practice with math), you really see whether you've learned the material. I've said for a long time to other programmers that until you've tried to explain something to someone else, you don't know whether you know it or not. Additionally, if you really know how to read for comprehension and can write clearly, along with an ability to problem solve (the 3 R results), you can learn the rest of the stuff far more easily.
<p>
*NanoNotepad and a description of the setup are at <a href="http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/?page_id=110
"Online Netflix means that you'll be able to create wish lists prior to the release of movies on DVD"
Not sure if you're aware or not, but Netflix already handles movies currently in the theater as part of the queue. They're added to a special queue and moved into the normal one as soon as the DVD release is within a week or so. Obviously the normal mailing delays and availability come into play then, but almost all of the movies in my Netflix queue (about 80 at the moment) were added before the DVD was even available.
True, but it's a REALLY rare DVD that uses even 6GB of that for the main title. Other than the Superbit and other such collections, it's pretty typical for the widescreen movie, 1 AC3 soundtrack and the appropriate subtitles to take up right around 3.5-5Gb with a really large number fitting under the single layer limit or just over.
Of course, why on earth would they use straight MPEG-2 for delivery when all of the other new services (like the new DirecTV setup) are going with MPEG-4, which pulls the number down below 1GB?
No. I do understand that. We're actually both agreeing with each other, though that seems to be one of the most common forms of argument on this site :).
What I'm saying is that, long term, it's still a good idea to roll out these "crippled" cars that still depend on exotic input for the fuel cells. However, it's not because I believe that hydrogen will roll out everywhere. Rather, it's because of the research and development of everything AFTER the cell that will get done. Personally, I think that a hydrogen infrastructure rollout is doomed, just as you say.
However, progress is rarely linear and isolated. These hydrogen cars will fail (in a marketable or real deliverable product way) as did the earlier attempts at straight electrical cars. However, much of the research that went into those failed electrical cars later showed up in the currently successful hybrids. Being free of the "burden" of designing with batteries in mind (while depending on the pipedream that is the hydrogen infrastructure), I suspect that we'll see some interesting developments.
Given the barriers to mass adoption of new technologies, we're far more likely to see evolutionary changes than revolutionary ones. While manufacturers and engineers are usually looking for revolutionary change. Just look at all of the 1950's sci-fi dreams of the future. We did have massive changes, but it was all evolutionary. But without some revolutionary thinking (and some serious pipedreams) we wouldn't have had much evolutionary advancement.
Everything I've read on fuel cells (admitedly little) indicates that the output of the fuel cell *is* electricity. Sure, adding that whole process is burdensome to the car, but so is a pile of batteries. Either way, you can leverage electricity to do the spinning and mechanical transfer to the wheels.
Is there some other type of fuel cell that they're using in cars that does the transfer differently requiring something other than an electric motor to provide the physical power?
"If you look at the numbers, electric has more potential to eliminate oil consumption than anything else out there."
This is the thing I wish more of the discussion would focus on. When you look at energy consumption, cars, home furnaces and some water heaters are about the only common* items that people use daily that burn oil/gas/natural gas directly. For pretty much every other device that we use that consumes energy we use electricity and even those have viable alternatives. Cars are the only one that really doesn't have mass market alternatives.
The thing about electricity is that on the consumption end, it's all pretty much the same. A couple of transformers and it's delivered in the right voltage, etc. If we switch over to nuclear at my local power plant, I don't need to change my laptop. If solar suddenly becomes more efficient, it can be switched over.
The thing that fuel cells give us (with most of the designs being put forward) is that the powertrain itself in cars becomes based on electricity. Generating it can move from one method to another as efficiencies change and we don't need to retool the whole automotive motion system. Electrical consumption at the end gives us an abstraction in the middle (like a good API between 2 computer systems) meaning that as long as the middle is electricity, we can change how we get it without having to change the other end.
*Please don't list all of the other items that can burn fuel directly. Focus on the point.
"How many gas stations are there in the US? (and how did you arrive at your answer?)"
187,000 as of 1998. Google.