When I was on unemployment I got $550 a week. That's equivalent to a $15/hour job, and I thought to myself: "This is a pretty sweet deal. I get paid the same amount as my brother, but while he's truck driving and delivering goods, I'm just sitting here watching TV and playing games."
I'm back to work again, because I'm honest and took the first job offered to me, but it got me to thinking:
Though they've been extending it a bit during the recent economic problems, under normal circumstances in most states, you only get those unemployment checks for a limited period of time, which varies based on how long you were employed. And the amount you get in those checks is also calculated based on the amount you were paid during your previous employment.
While there are plenty of other ways to game the system, sitting around and collecting unemployment isn't one of the better ones long-term.:)
...but it was BASIC. And the expectations were so low. "10 PRINT "Hello, World!", "20 GOTO 10" and it started doing something. The programming manual was well worn by the time I was 10, would that have happened with any other language? I doubt it. Things like lack of scoping makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder. The point isn't to learn everything from your first language, the point is to get started and interested at all. Moving to DOS was sorta ok, but moving to Windows killed my interest. C/C++ was just horribly complicated,...
I wonder about this these days. While I have no desire to push my daughter to be a programmer, I do want her to have some basic understanding of how the computer works underneath. She's almost 5 now and loves to play games on the computer, mostly educational things like Jumpstart. By the time she was 3.5, she could turn on the [Windows] computer, log in [no password], start Firefox, and navigate through the various websites we had set up on her bookmark bar. She could go to and start the games she wanted, and watch the videos she wanted.
That's all well and good, but what is her motivation to take the next step? Back in the day, kids got excited by computers. They were new, and interesting and CLI-based. Turn on the computer and it dropped you to a command prompt, or in some cases, straight to a BASIC programming prompt. To do ANYTHING on the computer largely required that you learn at least a little bit about typing out and writing what you wanted the computer to do. On top of that, many of the computers came with some kind of guide or handbook explaining BASIC and what it could do. It was painfully easy after looking at the manual to type: 10 print "My sister has cooties" 20 goto 10
Tada! After 2 minutes of reading and 30 seconds of typing you had a working program. From there it was fairly small steps as you found out how to do this thing or that thing that the computer was capable of.
But now? First of all, computers are ubiquitous. To my daughter a computer is just a tool for playing games and watching videos, and no real knowledge is required to do almost anything you want on the computer. A few mouse clicks and the game starts or the web-page loads. There's no introduction to the underlying basis of how all those things work and are created.
Then there's the fact that today a kid grows up with the computer booting up straight to a GUI. Windows comes with no real programming capabilities. Linux comes with bash, or perl or maybe python installed, but those are largely text-based languages. Is a child who is used to the computer throwing fancy graphics at them going to get excited about making the computer type out a few lines of text? They don't want to write a text-adventure game [which they've likely never played]. They are going to want to write a 3D Fantasy RPG. That's not something that a kid is likely to look at and find that it's quickly possible. To a large extent, the jump to making a GUI window and then making it do much of anything is significantly more complicated.
How are kids today going to have their imagination sparked and given the opportunity to even think that they can, with just a little bit of work, make the computer do useful things? Or to even think of writing such things themselves rather than thinking, "Oh I need my computer to do this, I'll just Google for one of the hundreds of programs that already do what I want, or load up Synaptic and download one of them."?
I'm sure there ARE kids who see that potential and search it out, but I think it is much less common than it was 35 or even 20 years ago. Are we going to have a shortage of people who are really deeply interested in programming and how computers work, leaving us with only those who didn't start programming until they got to college and decided maybe programming could be a reasonable career path?
As she grows and starts improving in her reading, how do I introduce my daughter to the idea that she can not only consume what's handed to her on the computer, but can actually make the computer do cool things herself?
This is similar to my experience. I wouldn't say I *learned* BASIC, as I never did anything more complicated than drawing circles and making random sounds. But what little experience I had was with BASIC which I had messed around with at home for years.
So then comes my Sr year in high school, and I have a choice of taking "Computer Math" which used BASIC, or "Computer Science" which used Pascal. I saw a bit of someone's Pascal code and thought, "Hey, there's no line numbers! How are you supposed to know where you are or where to 'go to'? ". It looked confusing so I took Computer Math, which taught me nothing and thus I failed to be introduced to real and useful programming.
As a result, I've ended up as a Sysadmin instead of a programmer. Not that I don't like what I do but I think I'd have been a little happier as a programmer.
Thanks to some moderately heavy bash-scripting I've had to do in the last few years, I'm finally starting to feel comfortable with how a program might work without line-numbers, and I'm finally back in school taking some programming classes [Visual C++, because the local community college is TOTALLY in bed with Microsoft], but I feel that because of BASIC, and my initial confusion at seeing non-BASIC code, I lost a good 15 years of programming and experience.
I've had 8-core servers for over a year now. Sun T5220s [1 x 8-core x 8-thread] and T5240s [2 x 8-core x 8-thread]. They may not have the raw number crunching ability of the Intel Chips ( and I know nothing about the IBM chips ), but these things can multi-thread like nobody's business!;) Love seeing the OS report 128 processors!
For the real cpu-hungry stuff - aka. Windows running on ESX:) - we have some 16 core [4 x 4-core] X4450's. I wouldn't mind getting 4 x 8-core Nehalem chips in there.
It would be more expensive on their back-end but I suppose they could do something like Netflix does where it will adjust the resolution/compression based on the current throughput/latency.
Actually the best option is probably to coordinate with Google and their dark-fiber [as I suggested in my original post]. I'm sure that Google can get the video buffered to various datacenters around the country, and then use those to stream out to the end-users based on which proxy point they have the best connectivity to.
This will probably add a bit of delay to the 'broadcast', but really most TV viewing isn't going to be sensitive to a 10-20 second delay from 'live'.
Or we can become re-familiar with those old RealVideo "Buffering..." messages.:)
It seems to me that Tivo's best chances are to go around the incumbent Cable infrastructure completely. For the past half-decade the Cable and Dish companies [and the FCC] have dragged their feet and put obstacle after obstacle in Tivo's path. Scrambled digital channels, terrible Cable Card specs, SDV etc.
I think it's time that Tivo becomes its own Cable company. Except instead of laying tons of physical cable, and making deals with municipalities for local monopolies, Tivo can provide an internet-based TV subscription service. A Tivo IPTV service could be successful I think, if done properly.
Why can't Tivo contract with the TV channels to stream TV signals over the internet with a new Tivo product as the head-end. They'd obviously have to scramble the signals so that only boxes with a valid subscription can view, but a Tivo would make a perfect IPTV head-end box.
They could probably even make arrangements with Google to use their dark fiber for a back-end.
That way, customers can use any Broadband provider they wish, and then subscribe to the TivoTV service. I guess they'd have to have minimum throughput requirements, but I suspect my 15mbit broadband connection could handle an HD channel or two with modern compression technologies. Over time, compression will get better, and this might also be a good push for ISPs to increase available bandwidth to end-users.
Of course if we lose the fight for network neutrality it could be problematic as the cable companies can start throttling 3rd-party IPTV traffic.:(
But for me, I'd be willing to buy a "TivoTV" box, and pay a reasonable subscription fee for TV/DVR service, even if my internet connection could only handle say 1HD stream plus 2 or 3SD streams. Perhaps even having a central "TivoTV" box with the storage and main processing, plus smaller, cheaper extension boxes for the bedrooms that pull video off the main box. AT&T is basically doing it with Uverse. Why can't Tivo do something similar just without the lock-in of requiring you use the same company for connectivity?
Ultimately we could have mixed-age classrooms with a fair bit of self-paced learning and students helping their peers keep up. From which kids leave "when they've learned enough" rather than because the earth has orbited the sun a specified number of times since they arrived.
Maybe you think that wouldn't work as well as what we've got now, but isn't it worth trying?
So basically what you're looking for is a Montessori education. There's some differences in implementation but I get the impression that it largely allows the kids to learn at their own pace, with some guided pressure of course. And the kids stay in the same classes for 3 years. At my daughter's school [starting as pre-school]: 18mo-3yrs - Toddler 3-5yrs - PrePrimary 5-6yrs - PrePrimary-Bridge [aka Kindergarten] 1st-3rd grade - Lower Elementary 4th-6th grade - Upper Elementary
NOTE: There's some flexibility in when the kids move to Pre-PrimaryBridge, depending on their maturity.
Anyway, the idea is that the kids are in each class for three years. They start out as the youngest in the class, learning from the older kids. Then as they get older, they are expected to start taking on roles helping the younger students. As far as school work is concerned they are expected to progress through the various levels but they don't make them stick with doing grade-level work once they've shown mastery. Though they may be technically in X grade, they can do X+1 or X+2 grade level work. And instead of 'skipping a grade', if the kid is doing higher-level work than the section they are in, the school will pull work in from the upper classes for them to do. Actually, my daughter who is 4 is in the Pre-primary. But she's pretty much mastered most of the PP work. And she doesn't like to nap. So instead of making her miserable by forcing her to try to sleep, they bring in work from the PPB [Kindergarten] classes for her to do. Once a week during nap time they even send her to the PPB class to take a spelling test.
Personally I think this is a much better method of instruction for *most* kids. No single education method is going to be perfect for all kids but I think Montessori gives more kids a better chance of succeeding and learning REAL life lessons [responsibility, self-reliance, mentoring, a better awareness of the feelings of others and of the world, etc.]
Unfortunately her school only goes up to 6th grade, and there are no Montessori Junior or Senior high-schools here. But they do exist in some areas.
Now Montessori style education does cost more. It requires a lower ratio of students:teachers, perhaps it's more difficult to develop standardized tests around. But I suspect that the extra cost of room space and teacher salaries could easily be met by other adjustments in education. I suspect moving to such an environment would significantly reduce the amount of money wasted on disciplinary measures, remedial instruction etc.
In addition there is no shortage of wasteful spending by our education system which could be reduced. As an example, the district my wife teaches in has a purchasing policy whereby the school district can only purchase equipment from approved vendors. The process of approving vendors is based on the percentage of discount that vendor will give the school from it's "normal" prices. However no accounting is made for how inflated the vendor's "normal" prices are. The result is, a vendor who sells a Widget for $100 and gives a 50% discount to the district will be approved, while the next vendor which sells the Widget for $75 and gives a 40% discount will not. The result? The school pays $50 for the widget instead of paying $45. Add that kind of thing up over an entire district's budget [and more expensive products] and the savings could be significant.
Anyway, the plan in the article is a good idea in general but I don't think it goes far enough. Our education system needs a massive overhaul and it saddens me that it will never happen. I think there is no better investment for a society to make than education. Yet for some reason nobody in the US seems to want to pay for the education of the people who are the future of our country.
I used to love going into Weirdstuff in the mid-late 90's. I had just moved to Silicon Valley and was in awe of the incredible stuff they had. This was back when they had a location further down in Sunnyvale, right across the street from the old Sunnyvale Fry's location. At the time I worked for NCA down the block. They were a small competitor to Fry's. I think it was on Lawrence Expressway.
Anyway, I remember going in there and they had an old phone company switch board from back in the days when the operators physically connected the two phone lines by hand. It was awesome!
I'm in the DFW area now, and the closest thing I've found is Electronic Discount Sales in Arlington, TX. It's fairly cool but not nearly as awesome as Weirdstuff. And they over-price too much of their used parts.
Fortunately, since then I've ended up with a wife who would love such a trick, although, as I mentioned above, all she really wants (and I know because she made of a point of telling me repeatedly, including emails) is a heart-shaped box of candy from CVS. OK then...
That may be all she "wants" but it's a pretty good bet that she'll be extra happy if you go the extra mile and get her something nice. You don't have to do anything over the top [which might just annoy her], but do something special and I suspect you'll be well rewarded.:)
This is one of the reasons I haven't gotten a Nook [or Kindle, but I think I'd prefer the Nook]. Now I will always prefer a good hard-cover book. I love having books on my shelf.
However I have been using the B&N book software and Stanza on my iPhone. In the last 2 months I've read about 8 full length novels on my phone. While it's not quite a nice as a real book and it does require more 'page turns', it doesn't seem to bother my eyes much at all. I've set it for a black background with white text, turn the brightness down a bit and I have no problems. And I ALWAYS have my phone with me. So if I'm waiting in line for something or waiting at the doctor's office, boom I've got my book with me. My worry is that the ebooks will become just another device that I don't carry around with me and thus don't get used as much as it should.
That said, I'm GLAD of the explosion of interest in ebooks, and hope the pricing gets settled closer to where it should be. Which will probably happen in time as publishers like Murdoch go out of business when the authors realize they only need enough of a middleman to handle editing, layout and scanning. Even scanning is optional if you write the book on a computer in the first place.
My concern with the DIR-655 is that I'm still at v1.21 [HW rev A3]. I've read nothing but nightmare stories of people with perfectly stable 1.2x routers who then upgraded to 1.3X firmwares and had tons of trouble and instability. At v1.21 my router is absolutely rock solid. This is the best, most stable wireless router I've ever had. If the 1.21 firmware is affected, and I'm forced to upgrade to 1.3X and it causes my router to become unstable, I'm going to be PISSED!
I realize I might as well be wishing for a free Ferrari, a Unicorn and a date with Mira Sorvino, but it would be great if D-Link released a 1.2x firmware with just the fix for this issue. Alas, it is unlikely.
You think you're being sarcastic, but has anyone ever seen a network go down in flames due to slashdotting, or has it always been the server?
I'm inclined to think the network can certainly play a part. I had a K6-350Mhz/256MB server slashdotted on 9/11 with ftp/http links to pictures and video. The server ran with no issues, and was able to push out 100Mbit/s worth of data all day. I had a fairly weak server but an incredibly fast and robust network [100Mbit port to dual OC-12s with only a few customers on it].
A less robust network would have surely caused problems. Though also if I had configured the server poorly it would also have caused problems.
Anyway, my point is I have to think it's just as likely that a good number of sites that are not able to handle being slashdotted are due to the network getting saturated/failing long before the hardware is heavily taxed. At least with simple static sites. Obviously a highly dynamic site will put more load on the server.
"We wondered," recalls Gurman, "is that a wave—or just a shadow of the CME overhead?"
Really? They thought it was a shadow? And what pray-tell would be shining brightly enough from above the CME material, to cast a shadow onto the surface of the Sun?
It is "unlimited" in that there is no hard cap at 5GB. You can use all you want, you just have to pay for it. See, no fine print. Your fault to assume that the "unlimited" plan for $30/month includes additional fees...
Technically, it isn't unlimited -- but that is because there's a finite number of minutes in a month so anything less than infinite bandwidth will result in a hard cap.
So under those conditions, I can open up a restaurant that advertises an All-You-Can-Eat buffet for $9.99, with some small print listed on the bottom of the plates that says, "$2 for each additional plate after the 1st plate".
I suspect the FTC would have something to say about that.:)
My guess is Mobile Web is the data plan for the phone and exludeds tethering.
Ah but TFS says, "Verizon will charge $50 for each additional gigabyte over the 5Gb limit on the unlimited data plan. ". That has nothing to do with tethering. If I surf on my phone over 5GB, they charge me more, in spite of being advertised as unlimited web surfing.
That was tried in the UK with ADSL providers advertising "unlimited" broadband. They got around it by reclassifying exactly what is unlimited - it is now "unlimited access" so at any time 24/7/365.25 you can have access, but it isn't unlimited bandwidth.
Except that the website does not advertise "unlimited access". The text on the website reads, and I quote, "Unlimited Data for Mobile Web and Get it Now/Media Center".
It says quite clearly, "unlimited data". I know that Verizon [and the other telcos] will happily fight and say there's fine print somewhere that says otherwise, but please, there *HAS* to be some lawyer out there who's good enough to get a judge to realize that this is nothing but false advertising, and some pretty obvious bait-and-switch tactics.
- Obsolesence; this is why I really replied. You have got to be kidding. The majority of books go obsolete, and the classics are usually kept and handed down. Why would that change. My copy of 1984 will go to my kids (and so will the non-drm'ed pdf). Why will a file format become dead? I don't understand the idea that in 5 to 50 years, suddenly computers will refuse to open pdf files.
Sure PDF's will be around. But I don't think the ebooks that Amazon and B&N sell are PDFs. I don't know what format they are, but I'm pretty sure they are encumbered by DRM. As long as that is the case, I won't pay money for them. Much like Microsoft/Yahoo Music decided to shut down their DRM servers, I have no trust that Amazon/BN will still be supporting this particular file format/DRM method beyond a couple years.
Admittedly I'm not too familiar with the specific file formats that Amazon and BN sell. Are they proprietary? Am I going to be able to buy an e-book reader in 20-50 years that supports that format? Which format is going to be still around? I don't want to buy a Kindle and then have the Nook format be the one that sticks and is available/supported in the future.
As I said, I still want a e-book reader but they're still a bit expensive for me, and I would only end up using it for free, unencumbered files. When there is an open standard for ebooks I might consider spending money on some.
I agree, it is damned cool.:) And your points are all excellent points. But $250 is hard for me to justify. I have a netbook which I can put free books on if I'm traveling. I know some people can't read long on a back-lit screens, and I'm sure the e-ink screens are nice, but I read an LCD all day long at work. Reading one for a few hours on a plane isn't that bad for me personally. Plus I tend to run all my LCD's just a few notches up from the dimmest settings which probably helps.
In addition, I consider the netbook my HHTTG, if there's 802.11 available. And even if not, I have a smartphone that work pays for that I can use to get info from Wikipedia.
Don't get me wrong, I *WANT* a good ebook reader and from an initial look I'd probably pick the Nook over the Kindle right now. But the advantages don't yet outweigh the downsides [or price] for me personally just yet.
These will be instantly obsolete when someone (Apple?) perfects the tablet, single purpose devices won't be competitive.
This right here is one of my main problems with ebooks. Lets face it, I'm a total technogeek. But I have a real issue moving forward with ebooks. I fully understand that these concerns don't apply to everyone, but here are MYcurrent reasons for sticking with paper books, instead of spending money on an ebook reader, and the ebooks themselves.
- Battery - Common complaint, my books don't run out of battery
- Space - I can fit a paperback in my pocket.
- Durability - Both are ruined by water, but I can bang a paper book around pretty good and it's still readable. Even if I totally destroy a paper book, I'm only out the few dollars it cost me for that book [I buy most books used].
- Obsolesence - in 15, or 50 years I can give my books to my daughter or grandkids, and they'll be able to read them all or sell them to someone else to read [hopefully not:) ]. There's a good chance that the ebook I buy today won't be readable in 5 years let alone 50.
- DRM - as above, it's getting better if you can lend them, but when I'm done with my book I can give it to a friend, or sell it back to half-price books. Unless the ebook versions are *significantly* cheaper than the physical books, this is a problem for me. Every couple months I go to Half-Price Books, and pretty much buy their entire sci-fi/fantasy clearance section. I pay an average of about $3.00 for hardcover books and I still have the ability to give it away or sell it after I read it [though I prefer to keep my books]. Ebooks will need to compete with that pricing for me the consider it seriously.
- Physicality - This is a double-edge sword. On the one hand, it'd be great to have 1500 books in the space of one. On the other hand, I love the look of a wall full of books in my office. I love the different covers. I love the smell of the books.
- Disaster - If I were about to freeze to death, I could at least burn my books to keep warm. Can't do that with an ebook.:) Ok that's stretching a bit, and I'd probably spend so much time convincing myself to actually set a book on fire that I'd freeze first anyway.
I think the best thing that could happen, that would get me to buy one of the ebook readers, is if publishers started including the ebook along with the physical book. Obviously this would only be useful to the person who first purchased the book, but still allowing them to give/sell the physical book. And when I do buy a new book, I'd even be willing to pay an extra $1 or so to get the ebook to go along with it.
With all that said, this 'Nook reader looks very cool. If I found something like this on sale at a significant discount, I'd really consider getting one, even if I just used it to read the huge number of free books available via B&N and other sources. But at the current new price, I'd just as soon buy a bunch of paper books.
I'll second this. Look, maybe it's not as sexy as having a Linux based media hub or something, but I've been using my XBox 360 as an extender for a Vista MediaCenter PC and it works great. There's a ton of great games for it, and it still spends many hours a day acting as the prime interface for our living room media needs.
It's the Media Center Extender for a media PC [Vista] with Dual HDTV OTA tuners, I can stream Netflix directly [with XBox Live Gold], I can stream my XVID+AC3 movies with full surround from the media PC [using Media Player sharing]. If you really don't want to mess with a back-end media center PC, you can also just copy your XVID/DIVX/H.264 movies to a USB hard drive, and play them directly. I can play DVD and HD-DVDs. That's what's available natively.
On top of that, by paying $30 [one-time] for PlayON to run on the media center PC, I can browse and watch Hulu and Youtube and various other video sites [or Netflix if you don't want to pay for XBOX Live].
And if you do use a back-end media PC, I'm pretty sure you can use multiple XBox360s as front-ends to different rooms.
The only thing it can't do is play BluRay.
The PS3 can do most of that as well, plus play BluRay. It'll still need a back-end PC to do Hulu/Netflix and such. I'm not sure what the PS3's capabilities are with regards to acting as an extender for a back-end Tuner/DVR solution [maybe a MythTV front end? I dunno].
So it boils down to if you don't already have a BR player, and if you want to deal with selling the XBox, and paying the difference to get a PS3.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe you would prefer read the one that was actually passed, before forming opinions.
When I was on unemployment I got $550 a week. That's equivalent to a $15/hour job, and I thought to myself: "This is a pretty sweet deal. I get paid the same amount as my brother, but while he's truck driving and delivering goods, I'm just sitting here watching TV and playing games."
I'm back to work again, because I'm honest and took the first job offered to me, but it got me to thinking:
Though they've been extending it a bit during the recent economic problems, under normal circumstances in most states, you only get those unemployment checks for a limited period of time, which varies based on how long you were employed. And the amount you get in those checks is also calculated based on the amount you were paid during your previous employment.
While there are plenty of other ways to game the system, sitting around and collecting unemployment isn't one of the better ones long-term. :)
...but it was BASIC. And the expectations were so low. "10 PRINT "Hello, World!", "20 GOTO 10" and it started doing something. The programming manual was well worn by the time I was 10, would that have happened with any other language? I doubt it. Things like lack of scoping makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder. The point isn't to learn everything from your first language, the point is to get started and interested at all. Moving to DOS was sorta ok, but moving to Windows killed my interest. C/C++ was just horribly complicated, ...
I wonder about this these days. While I have no desire to push my daughter to be a programmer, I do want her to have some basic understanding of how the computer works underneath. She's almost 5 now and loves to play games on the computer, mostly educational things like Jumpstart. By the time she was 3.5, she could turn on the [Windows] computer, log in [no password], start Firefox, and navigate through the various websites we had set up on her bookmark bar. She could go to and start the games she wanted, and watch the videos she wanted.
That's all well and good, but what is her motivation to take the next step? Back in the day, kids got excited by computers. They were new, and interesting and CLI-based. Turn on the computer and it dropped you to a command prompt, or in some cases, straight to a BASIC programming prompt. To do ANYTHING on the computer largely required that you learn at least a little bit about typing out and writing what you wanted the computer to do.
On top of that, many of the computers came with some kind of guide or handbook explaining BASIC and what it could do. It was painfully easy after looking at the manual to type:
10 print "My sister has cooties"
20 goto 10
Tada! After 2 minutes of reading and 30 seconds of typing you had a working program. From there it was fairly small steps as you found out how to do this thing or that thing that the computer was capable of.
But now? First of all, computers are ubiquitous. To my daughter a computer is just a tool for playing games and watching videos, and no real knowledge is required to do almost anything you want on the computer. A few mouse clicks and the game starts or the web-page loads. There's no introduction to the underlying basis of how all those things work and are created.
Then there's the fact that today a kid grows up with the computer booting up straight to a GUI. Windows comes with no real programming capabilities. Linux comes with bash, or perl or maybe python installed, but those are largely text-based languages. Is a child who is used to the computer throwing fancy graphics at them going to get excited about making the computer type out a few lines of text? They don't want to write a text-adventure game [which they've likely never played]. They are going to want to write a 3D Fantasy RPG. That's not something that a kid is likely to look at and find that it's quickly possible. To a large extent, the jump to making a GUI window and then making it do much of anything is significantly more complicated.
How are kids today going to have their imagination sparked and given the opportunity to even think that they can, with just a little bit of work, make the computer do useful things? Or to even think of writing such things themselves rather than thinking, "Oh I need my computer to do this, I'll just Google for one of the hundreds of programs that already do what I want, or load up Synaptic and download one of them."?
I'm sure there ARE kids who see that potential and search it out, but I think it is much less common than it was 35 or even 20 years ago. Are we going to have a shortage of people who are really deeply interested in programming and how computers work, leaving us with only those who didn't start programming until they got to college and decided maybe programming could be a reasonable career path?
As she grows and starts improving in her reading, how do I introduce my daughter to the idea that she can not only consume what's handed to her on the computer, but can actually make the computer do cool things herself?
This is similar to my experience. I wouldn't say I *learned* BASIC, as I never did anything more complicated than drawing circles and making random sounds. But what little experience I had was with BASIC which I had messed around with at home for years.
So then comes my Sr year in high school, and I have a choice of taking "Computer Math" which used BASIC, or "Computer Science" which used Pascal. I saw a bit of someone's Pascal code and thought, "Hey, there's no line numbers! How are you supposed to know where you are or where to 'go to'? ". It looked confusing so I took Computer Math, which taught me nothing and thus I failed to be introduced to real and useful programming.
As a result, I've ended up as a Sysadmin instead of a programmer. Not that I don't like what I do but I think I'd have been a little happier as a programmer.
Thanks to some moderately heavy bash-scripting I've had to do in the last few years, I'm finally starting to feel comfortable with how a program might work without line-numbers, and I'm finally back in school taking some programming classes [Visual C++, because the local community college is TOTALLY in bed with Microsoft], but I feel that because of BASIC, and my initial confusion at seeing non-BASIC code, I lost a good 15 years of programming and experience.
I've had 8-core servers for over a year now. Sun T5220s [1 x 8-core x 8-thread] and T5240s [2 x 8-core x 8-thread]. They may not have the raw number crunching ability of the Intel Chips ( and I know nothing about the IBM chips ), but these things can multi-thread like nobody's business! ;) Love seeing the OS report 128 processors!
For the real cpu-hungry stuff - aka. Windows running on ESX :) - we have some 16 core [4 x 4-core] X4450's. I wouldn't mind getting 4 x 8-core Nehalem chips in there.
It would be more expensive on their back-end but I suppose they could do something like Netflix does where it will adjust the resolution/compression based on the current throughput/latency.
Actually the best option is probably to coordinate with Google and their dark-fiber [as I suggested in my original post]. I'm sure that Google can get the video buffered to various datacenters around the country, and then use those to stream out to the end-users based on which proxy point they have the best connectivity to.
This will probably add a bit of delay to the 'broadcast', but really most TV viewing isn't going to be sensitive to a 10-20 second delay from 'live'.
Or we can become re-familiar with those old RealVideo "Buffering..." messages. :)
It seems to me that Tivo's best chances are to go around the incumbent Cable infrastructure completely. For the past half-decade the Cable and Dish companies [and the FCC] have dragged their feet and put obstacle after obstacle in Tivo's path. Scrambled digital channels, terrible Cable Card specs, SDV etc.
I think it's time that Tivo becomes its own Cable company. Except instead of laying tons of physical cable, and making deals with municipalities for local monopolies, Tivo can provide an internet-based TV subscription service. A Tivo IPTV service could be successful I think, if done properly.
Why can't Tivo contract with the TV channels to stream TV signals over the internet with a new Tivo product as the head-end. They'd obviously have to scramble the signals so that only boxes with a valid subscription can view, but a Tivo would make a perfect IPTV head-end box.
They could probably even make arrangements with Google to use their dark fiber for a back-end.
That way, customers can use any Broadband provider they wish, and then subscribe to the TivoTV service. I guess they'd have to have minimum throughput requirements, but I suspect my 15mbit broadband connection could handle an HD channel or two with modern compression technologies. Over time, compression will get better, and this might also be a good push for ISPs to increase available bandwidth to end-users.
Of course if we lose the fight for network neutrality it could be problematic as the cable companies can start throttling 3rd-party IPTV traffic. :(
But for me, I'd be willing to buy a "TivoTV" box, and pay a reasonable subscription fee for TV/DVR service, even if my internet connection could only handle say 1HD stream plus 2 or 3SD streams. Perhaps even having a central "TivoTV" box with the storage and main processing, plus smaller, cheaper extension boxes for the bedrooms that pull video off the main box. AT&T is basically doing it with Uverse. Why can't Tivo do something similar just without the lock-in of requiring you use the same company for connectivity?
Ultimately we could have mixed-age classrooms with a fair bit of self-paced learning and students helping their peers keep up. From which kids leave "when they've learned enough" rather than because the earth has orbited the sun a specified number of times since they arrived.
Maybe you think that wouldn't work as well as what we've got now, but isn't it worth trying?
So basically what you're looking for is a Montessori education. There's some differences in implementation but I get the impression that it largely allows the kids to learn at their own pace, with some guided pressure of course.
And the kids stay in the same classes for 3 years. At my daughter's school [starting as pre-school]:
18mo-3yrs - Toddler
3-5yrs - PrePrimary
5-6yrs - PrePrimary-Bridge [aka Kindergarten]
1st-3rd grade - Lower Elementary
4th-6th grade - Upper Elementary
NOTE: There's some flexibility in when the kids move to Pre-PrimaryBridge, depending on their maturity.
Anyway, the idea is that the kids are in each class for three years. They start out as the youngest in the class, learning from the older kids. Then as they get older, they are expected to start taking on roles helping the younger students.
As far as school work is concerned they are expected to progress through the various levels but they don't make them stick with doing grade-level work once they've shown mastery. Though they may be technically in X grade, they can do X+1 or X+2 grade level work. And instead of 'skipping a grade', if the kid is doing higher-level work than the section they are in, the school will pull work in from the upper classes for them to do.
Actually, my daughter who is 4 is in the Pre-primary. But she's pretty much mastered most of the PP work. And she doesn't like to nap. So instead of making her miserable by forcing her to try to sleep, they bring in work from the PPB [Kindergarten] classes for her to do. Once a week during nap time they even send her to the PPB class to take a spelling test.
Personally I think this is a much better method of instruction for *most* kids. No single education method is going to be perfect for all kids but I think Montessori gives more kids a better chance of succeeding and learning REAL life lessons [responsibility, self-reliance, mentoring, a better awareness of the feelings of others and of the world, etc.]
Unfortunately her school only goes up to 6th grade, and there are no Montessori Junior or Senior high-schools here. But they do exist in some areas.
Now Montessori style education does cost more. It requires a lower ratio of students:teachers, perhaps it's more difficult to develop standardized tests around. But I suspect that the extra cost of room space and teacher salaries could easily be met by other adjustments in education. I suspect moving to such an environment would significantly reduce the amount of money wasted on disciplinary measures, remedial instruction etc.
In addition there is no shortage of wasteful spending by our education system which could be reduced. As an example, the district my wife teaches in has a purchasing policy whereby the school district can only purchase equipment from approved vendors. The process of approving vendors is based on the percentage of discount that vendor will give the school from it's "normal" prices. However no accounting is made for how inflated the vendor's "normal" prices are.
The result is, a vendor who sells a Widget for $100 and gives a 50% discount to the district will be approved, while the next vendor which sells the Widget for $75 and gives a 40% discount will not. The result? The school pays $50 for the widget instead of paying $45. Add that kind of thing up over an entire district's budget [and more expensive products] and the savings could be significant.
Anyway, the plan in the article is a good idea in general but I don't think it goes far enough. Our education system needs a massive overhaul and it saddens me that it will never happen. I think there is no better investment for a society to make than education. Yet for some reason nobody in the US seems to want to pay for the education of the people who are the future of our country.
Darn it! And me without mod points!
I used to love going into Weirdstuff in the mid-late 90's. I had just moved to Silicon Valley and was in awe of the incredible stuff they had. This was back when they had a location further down in Sunnyvale, right across the street from the old Sunnyvale Fry's location. At the time I worked for NCA down the block. They were a small competitor to Fry's. I think it was on Lawrence Expressway.
Anyway, I remember going in there and they had an old phone company switch board from back in the days when the operators physically connected the two phone lines by hand. It was awesome!
I'm in the DFW area now, and the closest thing I've found is Electronic Discount Sales in Arlington, TX. It's fairly cool but not nearly as awesome as Weirdstuff. And they over-price too much of their used parts.
Fortunately, since then I've ended up with a wife who would love such a trick, although, as I mentioned above, all she really wants (and I know because she made of a point of telling me repeatedly, including emails) is a heart-shaped box of candy from CVS. OK then...
That may be all she "wants" but it's a pretty good bet that she'll be extra happy if you go the extra mile and get her something nice. You don't have to do anything over the top [which might just annoy her], but do something special and I suspect you'll be well rewarded. :)
This is one of the reasons I haven't gotten a Nook [or Kindle, but I think I'd prefer the Nook]. Now I will always prefer a good hard-cover book. I love having books on my shelf.
However I have been using the B&N book software and Stanza on my iPhone. In the last 2 months I've read about 8 full length novels on my phone. While it's not quite a nice as a real book and it does require more 'page turns', it doesn't seem to bother my eyes much at all. I've set it for a black background with white text, turn the brightness down a bit and I have no problems. And I ALWAYS have my phone with me. So if I'm waiting in line for something or waiting at the doctor's office, boom I've got my book with me. My worry is that the ebooks will become just another device that I don't carry around with me and thus don't get used as much as it should.
That said, I'm GLAD of the explosion of interest in ebooks, and hope the pricing gets settled closer to where it should be. Which will probably happen in time as publishers like Murdoch go out of business when the authors realize they only need enough of a middleman to handle editing, layout and scanning. Even scanning is optional if you write the book on a computer in the first place.
That's the latest I see too.
My concern with the DIR-655 is that I'm still at v1.21 [HW rev A3]. I've read nothing but nightmare stories of people with perfectly stable 1.2x routers who then upgraded to 1.3X firmwares and had tons of trouble and instability. At v1.21 my router is absolutely rock solid. This is the best, most stable wireless router I've ever had. If the 1.21 firmware is affected, and I'm forced to upgrade to 1.3X and it causes my router to become unstable, I'm going to be PISSED!
I realize I might as well be wishing for a free Ferrari, a Unicorn and a date with Mira Sorvino, but it would be great if D-Link released a 1.2x firmware with just the fix for this issue. Alas, it is unlikely.
You think you're being sarcastic, but has anyone ever seen a network go down in flames due to slashdotting, or has it always been the server?
I'm inclined to think the network can certainly play a part. I had a K6-350Mhz/256MB server slashdotted on 9/11 with ftp/http links to pictures and video. The server ran with no issues, and was able to push out 100Mbit/s worth of data all day. I had a fairly weak server but an incredibly fast and robust network [100Mbit port to dual OC-12s with only a few customers on it].
A less robust network would have surely caused problems. Though also if I had configured the server poorly it would also have caused problems.
Anyway, my point is I have to think it's just as likely that a good number of sites that are not able to handle being slashdotted are due to the network getting saturated/failing long before the hardware is heavily taxed. At least with simple static sites. Obviously a highly dynamic site will put more load on the server.
FTA:
"We wondered," recalls Gurman, "is that a wave—or just a shadow of the CME overhead?"
Really? They thought it was a shadow? And what pray-tell would be shining brightly enough from above the CME material, to cast a shadow onto the surface of the Sun?
They didn't really think that through, did they?
It is "unlimited" in that there is no hard cap at 5GB. You can use all you want, you just have to pay for it. See, no fine print. Your fault to assume that the "unlimited" plan for $30/month includes additional fees...
Technically, it isn't unlimited -- but that is because there's a finite number of minutes in a month so anything less than infinite bandwidth will result in a hard cap.
So under those conditions, I can open up a restaurant that advertises an All-You-Can-Eat buffet for $9.99, with some small print listed on the bottom of the plates that says, "$2 for each additional plate after the 1st plate".
I suspect the FTC would have something to say about that. :)
My guess is Mobile Web is the data plan for the phone and exludeds tethering.
Ah but TFS says, "Verizon will charge $50 for each additional gigabyte over the 5Gb limit on the unlimited data plan. ". That has nothing to do with tethering. If I surf on my phone over 5GB, they charge me more, in spite of being advertised as unlimited web surfing.
That was tried in the UK with ADSL providers advertising "unlimited" broadband. They got around it by reclassifying exactly what is unlimited - it is now "unlimited access" so at any time 24/7/365.25 you can have access, but it isn't unlimited bandwidth.
Except that the website does not advertise "unlimited access". The text on the website reads, and I quote, "Unlimited Data for Mobile Web and Get it Now/Media Center".
It says quite clearly, "unlimited data". I know that Verizon [and the other telcos] will happily fight and say there's fine print somewhere that says otherwise, but please, there *HAS* to be some lawyer out there who's good enough to get a judge to realize that this is nothing but false advertising, and some pretty obvious bait-and-switch tactics.
It's pretty obvious this guy was The Fool on the Hill.
I agree. Lets face it, how are we going to have reliable manned space travel if they can't even handle launching through some light cloud-cover?
You can get some at Jimmy's Food Store [Italian Grocery] in Dallas. It's yummy. :) Or you can go to Mexico.
I'm not sure how this fits in with Windows 7 though. :)
- Obsolesence; this is why I really replied. You have got to be kidding. The majority of books go obsolete, and the classics are usually kept and handed down. Why would that change. My copy of 1984 will go to my kids (and so will the non-drm'ed pdf). Why will a file format become dead? I don't understand the idea that in 5 to 50 years, suddenly computers will refuse to open pdf files.
Sure PDF's will be around. But I don't think the ebooks that Amazon and B&N sell are PDFs. I don't know what format they are, but I'm pretty sure they are encumbered by DRM. As long as that is the case, I won't pay money for them. Much like Microsoft/Yahoo Music decided to shut down their DRM servers, I have no trust that Amazon/BN will still be supporting this particular file format/DRM method beyond a couple years.
Admittedly I'm not too familiar with the specific file formats that Amazon and BN sell. Are they proprietary? Am I going to be able to buy an e-book reader in 20-50 years that supports that format? Which format is going to be still around? I don't want to buy a Kindle and then have the Nook format be the one that sticks and is available/supported in the future.
As I said, I still want a e-book reader but they're still a bit expensive for me, and I would only end up using it for free, unencumbered files. When there is an open standard for ebooks I might consider spending money on some.
I agree, it is damned cool. :) And your points are all excellent points. But $250 is hard for me to justify. I have a netbook which I can put free books on if I'm traveling. I know some people can't read long on a back-lit screens, and I'm sure the e-ink screens are nice, but I read an LCD all day long at work. Reading one for a few hours on a plane isn't that bad for me personally. Plus I tend to run all my LCD's just a few notches up from the dimmest settings which probably helps.
In addition, I consider the netbook my HHTTG, if there's 802.11 available. And even if not, I have a smartphone that work pays for that I can use to get info from Wikipedia.
Don't get me wrong, I *WANT* a good ebook reader and from an initial look I'd probably pick the Nook over the Kindle right now. But the advantages don't yet outweigh the downsides [or price] for me personally just yet.
These will be instantly obsolete when someone (Apple?) perfects the tablet, single purpose devices won't be competitive.
This right here is one of my main problems with ebooks. Lets face it, I'm a total technogeek. But I have a real issue moving forward with ebooks. I fully understand that these concerns don't apply to everyone, but here are MYcurrent reasons for sticking with paper books, instead of spending money on an ebook reader, and the ebooks themselves.
- Battery - Common complaint, my books don't run out of battery
- Space - I can fit a paperback in my pocket.
- Durability - Both are ruined by water, but I can bang a paper book around pretty good and it's still readable. Even if I totally destroy a paper book, I'm only out the few dollars it cost me for that book [I buy most books used].
- Obsolesence - in 15, or 50 years I can give my books to my daughter or grandkids, and they'll be able to read them all or sell them to someone else to read [hopefully not :) ]. There's a good chance that the ebook I buy today won't be readable in 5 years let alone 50.
- DRM - as above, it's getting better if you can lend them, but when I'm done with my book I can give it to a friend, or sell it back to half-price books. Unless the ebook versions are *significantly* cheaper than the physical books, this is a problem for me. Every couple months I go to Half-Price Books, and pretty much buy their entire sci-fi/fantasy clearance section. I pay an average of about $3.00 for hardcover books and I still have the ability to give it away or sell it after I read it [though I prefer to keep my books]. Ebooks will need to compete with that pricing for me the consider it seriously.
- Physicality - This is a double-edge sword. On the one hand, it'd be great to have 1500 books in the space of one. On the other hand, I love the look of a wall full of books in my office. I love the different covers. I love the smell of the books.
- Disaster - If I were about to freeze to death, I could at least burn my books to keep warm. Can't do that with an ebook. :) Ok that's stretching a bit, and I'd probably spend so much time convincing myself to actually set a book on fire that I'd freeze first anyway.
I think the best thing that could happen, that would get me to buy one of the ebook readers, is if publishers started including the ebook along with the physical book. Obviously this would only be useful to the person who first purchased the book, but still allowing them to give/sell the physical book. And when I do buy a new book, I'd even be willing to pay an extra $1 or so to get the ebook to go along with it.
With all that said, this 'Nook reader looks very cool. If I found something like this on sale at a significant discount, I'd really consider getting one, even if I just used it to read the huge number of free books available via B&N and other sources. But at the current new price, I'd just as soon buy a bunch of paper books.
I'll second this. Look, maybe it's not as sexy as having a Linux based media hub or something, but I've been using my XBox 360 as an extender for a Vista MediaCenter PC and it works great. There's a ton of great games for it, and it still spends many hours a day acting as the prime interface for our living room media needs.
It's the Media Center Extender for a media PC [Vista] with Dual HDTV OTA tuners, I can stream Netflix directly [with XBox Live Gold], I can stream my XVID+AC3 movies with full surround from the media PC [using Media Player sharing]. If you really don't want to mess with a back-end media center PC, you can also just copy your XVID/DIVX/H.264 movies to a USB hard drive, and play them directly. I can play DVD and HD-DVDs. That's what's available natively.
On top of that, by paying $30 [one-time] for PlayON to run on the media center PC, I can browse and watch Hulu and Youtube and various other video sites [or Netflix if you don't want to pay for XBOX Live].
And if you do use a back-end media PC, I'm pretty sure you can use multiple XBox360s as front-ends to different rooms.
The only thing it can't do is play BluRay.
The PS3 can do most of that as well, plus play BluRay. It'll still need a back-end PC to do Hulu/Netflix and such. I'm not sure what the PS3's capabilities are with regards to acting as an extender for a back-end Tuner/DVR solution [maybe a MythTV front end? I dunno].
So it boils down to if you don't already have a BR player, and if you want to deal with selling the XBox, and paying the difference to get a PS3.