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  1. Re:Oh sure, but... on The Turbo Entabulator: A 3D-printed Mechanical Computer · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I don't know how else you control side-fumbling.

  2. Oh sure, but... on The Turbo Entabulator: A 3D-printed Mechanical Computer · · Score: 5, Funny

    it's not a turbo-encabulator.I've been wanting one of those for a long time.

  3. Re:quality, security? on Book Review: Moodle 2.0 First Look · · Score: 1

    If I can assay a guess, being a Deb user, I would say that that was probably for a version based on 1.6, or even God forbid, 1.7. 1.8 brought things along nicely, and 1.9 is very solid. It's like all php based apps, though: there are probably ways into it. Php-based apps on Debian do tend to be older, and so I almost always have to install and maintain them out of the main debian process.

  4. Re:Moodle 2.0 is Horrible on Book Review: Moodle 2.0 First Look · · Score: 1

    What are you doing about staff development for the changes in Moodle 2? I support a number of districts, and that's my biggest concern. We've got teachers comfortable using it finally, and training on the new file management system alone is going to be a pain...

  5. Re:Yawn on X-37B Secret Space Plane To Land Soon · · Score: 1

    Years ago, I was a military brat there. One day, everybody spent all day waiting for the MX missile test launch. It was going to happen just after 7. Everybody knew this, even though it was a highly 'secret' event. (They also used to send the MP's around telling everybody to go indoors when there were other 'secret' launches.)7
    It wasn't like the Soviets hadn't been informed there was a launch, anyway.

    Speaking of, the runway wasn't *built* for the shuttle, it was extended. They used it to land c-5a's and such before.

  6. Re:And abandoned fields... on Purple Pokeberries Yield Cheap Solar Power · · Score: 1

    A fan of malignant and malicious neglect, from my experience.

  7. Re:And abandoned fields... on Purple Pokeberries Yield Cheap Solar Power · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not meaning to sound like a dick, but it's poke salat. There was even a song about it way back in the day, Poke Salat Annie.

    It's also poke sallet and salit. It's still pronounced as salad is normally. My grandma spelled it sallet, but said it as salad, so I went for conventional orthography.

  8. And abandoned fields... on Purple Pokeberries Yield Cheap Solar Power · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And abandoned fields across the American south became the new gold fields of the Yukon.

    That stuff pops up everywhere, and grows like you wouldn't believe. I can't imagine how well it would do if you fertilized.

    And of course, you can use the leaves for poke salad. With a lot of boiling...

  9. Re:I want that job on Univ. Help Desk Staffer Extorts Over Copyright Violations · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, he did have another job function that I know of, but they didn't mention it in the article.

    Always fun when you see your place of employment in a newspaper article.

  10. Re:We just need those little mouth shields... on Pen vs. Keyboard vs. Touch vs. Everything Else · · Score: 1

    I don't recall there being the mouth shield before. It might have been there. It probably was, and I just wasn't thinking of applications for cubicle-worker dictation then.

    Regardless, you couldn't hear her speaking into it, and she was definitely recording events. When the judge would ask if anybody knew the defendant, and none of the jurors responded, she was entering that fact; or at least, you could see that she was saying something.

    This was a city-level court in Georgia, dealing with low-level criminal and civil cases.

  11. Re:We just need those little mouth shields... on Pen vs. Keyboard vs. Touch vs. Everything Else · · Score: 1

    I have no idea if they're transcribing as you say; you're probably right. I do know that a) they were recording with a pc there and b) she was using the mouth-hood to record when people nodded, etc. They have this big ol' MOTU firewire box to take input from all the microphones. I didn't actually get a chance to see the software.

    10 years ago, they used digital tape in this same courtroom. 20 years ago, they had a steno machine.

  12. We just need those little mouth shields... on Pen vs. Keyboard vs. Touch vs. Everything Else · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I went to jury duty the other day, and the steno reporter... wasn't really using a steno machine. She was annotating the taping by speaking the non-verbal events into a little mouth-shield thingie.
    So verbal dictation is possible- you'll just like more of a geek.

  13. User education. on Schneier On Un-Authentication · · Score: 1

    User education. It won't go away, you always need to do it, and for most users, you have to do it multiple times. Proximity systems may help, but...

    For the record, on a winders machine, window-L. Two keystrokes, you're done. Well, mostly, but that'll keep most people out.

  14. Re:Where are they going to store it all? on SKA Telescope To Provide a Billion PCs Worth of Processing · · Score: 1

    Well, yeah. But it's still got to take a lot of infrastructure that really sounds beyond their capabilities. Let's say:
    16 tb drives, 1 eb= 62,500 drives.
    Let's say 2 weeks of storage; 875,000.
    Let's say 200 per. Let's say $100 extra per for the racks, cases, controllers.
    $262,000,000 just for the storage.

    I dunno, 1.5billion euros, with first usage in 2013 and full capabilities and usage in 2022; maybe they'll make it with that budget if they speak to somebody who already does lots of computation and storage, say: the Big G.

  15. Where are they going to store it all? on SKA Telescope To Provide a Billion PCs Worth of Processing · · Score: 1

    Okay, if I do some rough math, just on the hard drives to dump that to
    assuming 2tb drives, and ignoring the binary/decimal nonsense to be quick
    assuming that the 1eb per day is correct and not the .25eb/day of wiki
    assuming that 2tb costs $100 (volume discount, you know)
    assuming no costs for things to hold these drives, and electricity, etc.

    180 million drives. 18 billion dollars. Per year.

    Let's assume by 2013 we've gone eightfold, to 16tb drives. Good, now we're at 2million ish drives and 2billionish dollars. Good

    I realize they're planning for it all, but I just can't see how they're really going to store, let alone process, all that data. Whew.

    I mean, they'd max out a btrfs/zfs system in 16 daysish at 1eb per. Perhaps this is just simply too much data...

  16. Re:Nope. on Does Your College Or University Support Linux? · · Score: 1

    Fascinating. Of the universities and colleges in Georgia that I know of, at least a dozen, most of the tech staff uses and likes linux.
    I think some quarters on a campus may gravitate one way or another, of course. The business dept. staff here is more strongly linux; the faculty is more Microsoft. Getting a monolithic 'yes' to anything at any large university is surprising...

  17. Great! on Ridley Scott Directing Alien Prequel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now just sign up James Cameron to do the movie after *that* and we'll be good.

  18. Re:I almost pity Microsoft. on Most Companies Won't Deploy Windows 7 — Survey · · Score: 1

    Not drunk, yet.

    Once again, I apologize for not explaining stuff fully. I just figured the fact that we were discussing businesses upgrading would sort of mean that we were talking about Microsoft-based businesses. (That's the ecosystem.)
    Unfortunately, due to the way things work, for good and ill, if you're a Microsoft shop, you have more pressure to upgrade products than if you're running, say, Gnu/Linux.

    And, as I said above, since these are business apps they're running, that are critical, wouldn't it be nice if the front-end was just a browser, and the back-end was a plain jane web app that could run on any browser.

    I'm not talking about moving everything into the cloud, I'm just talking about moving some of these business apps to modern platforms.

  19. Re:oh here we go with mainframe vs pc again.. on Most Companies Won't Deploy Windows 7 — Survey · · Score: 1

    First paying computer gig was in 1981, so I'm with you on the whole centralized-vs-decentralized thing. (I'm probably of the generation before you.) Really. I was a little bit concise in my post; sorry. I was just excited because for the first time in YEARS I might actually be that dreaded person, the primary poster, I think. (Didn't happen.)

    I should clarify: I see a lot of businesses that switched over from dumb terminals to winxp running frontend apps. The business obviously has some process where they want a central server, hosting a db. If they went to a well-designed webapp, they could deploy WHATEVER on the desk. This excites me for a great many reasons.

    Obviously, webapps will not replace everything. I don't want them for *my* docs. But I'm an individual, not a corporation. And there's quite a few business processes that are, unfortunately, just record keeping.

  20. Re:I almost pity Microsoft. on Most Companies Won't Deploy Windows 7 — Survey · · Score: 1

    I want *my* data locally, sure. But if I'm a business, I'd prefer my data locally, too, on a server serving a webapp.

    However, I'm atypical, since I have a mac and 3 linux boxes at home.

  21. I almost pity Microsoft. on Most Companies Won't Deploy Windows 7 — Survey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's got to be tough. You can't kill off XP like you want to, because people really really might leave. But it looks foolish to support that morass of code in spite of the NEW morass you've spent all that money on.

    In the long run, they'll switch. Until everything becomes a webapp, the ecosystem almost demands it. Here's hoping people realize webapps are where it's at, for most things.

  22. Yes, Citizen Kane needed those sex scenes... on Censored Video Game Content Stifles Artistry · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I admit I haven't read the article yet, and perhaps it's got a very nuanced discussion on this subject that will persuade me otherwise...

    but I doubt it.

    Look, it's a new thing, really. I don't know why we haven't had 'art' in VG yet, but the simple fact is that it isn't because we don't have explicit sex. (Explicit violence has been censored from VG? Uh...)

    I just drew a simple classic off the top of my head. Citizen Kane has nothing approaching violence and sex, and yet it's well regarded. And although Shakespeare had violence (and bawdy puns) it's nothing that you couldn't do without being a MA game.

    I could probably list a 100 movies that affected me greatly, that are well regarded, and at least half of them I'd put forth as art, and of those, at least half again would be lacking in violence and sex. Sometimes, lacking colors in your palette can ENHANCE the experience.

    We're getting there. Things like Braid are a step forward. Quite honestly, though, the real problem is the lack of a broad audience. When the 40 year old gamers of today hit 60, they'll have different tastes and requirements.

  23. Re:Lack of knowledge not an excuse on Teachers Need an Open Source Education · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've worked with them too, here in the US.

    And guess what, they're not different from the vast majority of people, either.

  24. Re:The Truth Of It on Treating ADHD With Games · · Score: 1

    If Montessori is the one best treatment, I would have been a miserable failure. I work best when I do have structure.
    For example, I love reading. (Could read before I spoke, actually.) I have a large vocabulary and an instinctive grasp of grammar because of this.
    It wasn't until I was actually forced to write, in great amounts, as part of an AP English course, that I really learned how to write. (And, am severely out of practice, alas.)
    Montessori, if I remember right, would allow me to read, but not force me to write. And the majority of people I've met with AD(H)D- screw it, hyperactivity- would love to be in an environment that allowed them to do what they like, but would never force them to do other things. I don't know anybody my age with hyperactivity who didn't succeed without a process of careful attention to force them to learn how to do various things until it became a habit.
    So, in a nutshell: how exactly is Montessori the best option?

  25. Re:Boys will be boys on Treating ADHD With Games · · Score: 0

    I too have a mild case of it, and have been diagnosed for... 37 years? Something like that.
    From my standpoint, it's not just sitting down, it's practicing the sitting down, forcing myself to do it, until it becomes a learned instinctive behavior.