What exactly in homework these days REQUIRES M$ Office??
Seriously. What absolutely can't be done with paper and pencil, or at worst typewriter and paper? (Which in computer terms, is any text editor.)
If a kid's homework REQUIRES a specific software, then that homework is teaching the kid how to get answers out of that software, NOT about the nominal subject.
I never got regular over there (fact is, I'd forget it existed), but what discussions I did read/post in.... well, it's a shame they're not preserved elsewhere. If Bruce doesn't want to run a forum, that's his business, but it sure would be nice if he'd make the existing content available for someone else to carry on, and so that all those posts are not lost -- surely there were plenty that are worth preserving, that contain good info, etc...
As to what's really wrong with the Constitution... someone above says,
"Please point out where the Constitution restricts the ability of the federal government to spend money."
Ah, now I see... There's where the Framers fucked up -- they failed to restrict gov't spending to no more than gov't income, and also failed to restrict gov't spending to no more than a small fixed percentage of We The People's income.
Actually, I have to provide my own chamber pot -- we call the modern incarnation a "septic system" but it came out of my own pocket. All the gov't did was tell me how much money *I* had to spend on building it. (And then they taxed me on it too!)
And I have to fix my own road if I want it done right. If I call the county to fix the potholes, it winds up worse than before, to the point that I can't even drive on it.
I sure hope the answer to how many he keeps is "none". Because if he keeps all of them, the tax hikes required to fund them are going to drive the last of big business overseas, and put small business in the poorhouse. And that means the people employed by those businesses will be out of work, yet someone's still got to pay the tax bill (I predict that a national sales tax will be implemented to do so, to the complete devastation of the poorer classes). How is that progress??
Works out to approx. $146/person, or around $700 per household. That $44B doesn't just fall from the sky; it comes out of the pockets of people like you and me.
However, that's just the initial cost. As a gov't program, you can expect that once the taxes are in place to initiate the program, they will not only never go away, they will go up over time.
So... this broadband (which some seem to think is "free") will cost around $60/month per household, albeit hidden as a tax hike. And that will be in addition to any monthly connectivity charges, and you will pay it whether you are in range or not.
[blink] I'm a little nearsighted (20/40 and 20/80) but I can see that double star without even thinking about it. With correction, it's perfectly evident.
However, I'm one of those freaks with obscenely precise colour vision; I also see VERY well in the dark (and tend to see better by looking straight at something than by the "not quite at it" technique). I suspect the two abilities are related. -- Conversely my neighbour, while not per-se colourblind, has poor colour vision with some deficit in yellow, and poor distinction among reds; she also sees VERY poorly in the dark, even with full correction and no retinal issues. Again, I suspect the deficits are related.
I do think some of us freaks have colour ranges that aren't kosher. Frex, when I had a woodstove, I could tell how hot the black metal top was by sight, even tho it stayed black; I suspect I was seeing a tish into infrared. On the other end of the visible spectrum, I see "black lights" as painfully bright.
BTW apparently there is disagreement on whether Tetrachromacy is strictly a female thing; from Wikipedia: "Another study suggests that as many as 50% of women and 8% of men may have four photopigments. [cite: http://www.klab.caltech.edu/cns186/papers/Jameson01.pdf "It is also the case that an estimated 8% of males presumed to be color "normal" likely represent a four-photopigment retinal phenotype heterozygous carriers."]
She may also be sensing air currents with the fine hairs on her face and neck.
One of the ways you can readily spot a blind cat is that it will ALWAYS keep its whiskers stretched forward -- not to touch things with, but to sense micro-currents that surround objects, so as to avoid running into them. These cats can be good enough at it that their owners won't believe the cat is blind. I once had a very old cat who was both totally blind and stone-deaf, and he navigated entirely via this whisker-based "air sense" (and did very well that way for 6 years, til he got senile at age 18, and lost his ability to navigate.)
From TFA: ======== They include place cells, which fire when an animal passes a certain landmark, and head-direction cells, which track which way the face is pointing. But the new study also found strong evidence of what the scientists, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, called 'border cells,' which fire when an animal is close to a wall or boundary of some kind. ===== I suspect this is the same phenomenon as those 'border cells': When I was a kid, I could "feel" other people *as if they were touching me* as soon as they got within about 4 inches of my body, even if I couldn't see them. This was very consistent.
A lot of these "memories" don't seem important when you're young. It's later on that you start to feel their significance (or mourn their absence).
A while back someone dug up and sent me a whole bunch of routine paperwork from my late uncle, dating the early 1950s. (Some really demonstrate how much our society has changed -- frex, checks written in PENCIL, and with no name on them except for the signature.) Dull as it sounds, it was actually very interesting to experience these secondhand memories from before I was born.:)
Ha, I have to agree with that. It's a rare album that thrills me all the way through, and then it's usually someone nobody ever heard of... one suspects there's more incentive to be consistently good if your name recognition is still zilch!
As to the radio/MTV/etc. advertising engine, true, that's entirely the labels' thing. Tho some of the internet radio stations only play royalty-free music, which implies a lack of label interference with that artist's career. (Which in some cases, it IS, rather than promotion.)
Why are you assuming that old OSs will need future patches?? maybe all the serious holes have been found. And if not -- they're clearly not being exploited anyway, so what's the problem?
An OS doesn't get "more insecure by the day" any more than an old machine gets "slower by the day". In fact, there's a case to be made for using old OSs for internet boxen, simply because they're NOT under popular attack, or LACK the attack vectors present in modern OSs.
Once upon a time I test-drove Mandrake v7.2... when I got done tweaking the desktop and behaviours to be pleasant and useful, I was amused to discover that I'd unintentionally recreated a Win95 desktop!
(Despite that even my various WinBoxen don't much resemble each other!)
Interesting, but not available to download for those of us not using WinXP/Vista as our internet machines (hell if I know how you "validate" some other species of Windows, let alone linux or MacOS).
For which I give M$ a large raspberry, for discouraging techs who use some other OS from helping M$ customers who DO use current Windows. How is that good marketing?!!
Putting/home on a separate partition (or better yet, a different physical drive) is a very good idea, and I'll try that next time I mess with linux. Thanks!
Assuming, of course, that the next distro I try will let me keep the existing partition structure... the last time I tried Ubuntu and Mandriva, they both insisted on nuking everything first. For whatever reason, the installers lacked any option to keep an existing setup and create a dual boot.:/
And how long does it take you to locate, backup, and restore all of the client's DATA? Or don't you feel any responsibility toward preserving the main reason most people HAVE a computer in the first place?
How long does it take to reinstall all their apps, some of which may be complicated to reconfigure? (If *you* decided to wipe their machine, how is this not your responsibility?)
And that's why wipe and reinstall isn't as simple as most make it out to be -- at least, not for anyone but the tech doing it. Even if you don't take on any of the related tasks, you've condemned your client to doing so, which trust me, does not make them nearly as happy as finding that once you're done, everything works just like they're used to, and all their data is still in its expected places.
Reinstalls are against my religion. And I find it actually takes LESS time to beat Windows into submission and get rid of the problems (which are typically rather trivial, even if beyond average users' ken), than to reinstall it AND deal with all the subsequent "What happened to my [whatever]?" calls from the client, when stuff doesn't wind up back exactly how they're used to (and it never does, no matter how careful you are).
Besides, it saves me the bother of backing up and restoring all their data (and sometimes just LOCATING all their data!) -- since I regard preserving client data as my first responsibility during a repair or upgrade (but doing regular backups as the client's job, which in its simplest form I teach them to do as a regular CD burn of their My Documents directory).
As to the nominal topic, I'm the hardware guru and primary Q&A dude at the local PC user grope, which is presently almost entirely seniors. The most critical thing is KEEP IT SIMPLE. No more than ONE way to do anything (options confuse non-techies).
And be aware that non-techies WILL forget how to do anything that they don't do on a DAILY basis -- so try to make "occasional use" functions as self-documenting and self-evident as possible, using language they don't have to translate into tech-ese. That can be as simple as naming a document subdirectory "Already Backed Up" instead of "Archived".
Others above have made good points about a simple, reliable AV and firewall, and better yet a router, and safer choices of software (Mozilla family for browser, etc.) Once they've gotten wise to the usual internet scams, and have been taught that when in doubt, use the keyboard rather than the mouse, most people are pretty safe.
And do make sure everything is set to THEIR eyes, not yours. That will get rid of a lot of the confusion and "oops clicks" right there.
You'd be amazed at the level of tech-savvy older folks can reach, if only you give them an easy start that they can learn without stress.
There is that, but my point was that so far as what average consumers see, there's a huge disconnect between "free broadcast" and "pricey DVDs". Hence the perception of price gouging for DVDs.
Also... that broadcast content was already paid for by the corps the first time around. Why should DVD buyers have to pay the same amount for what is essentially "used content" ??
Not only themselves, but sometimes other individuals seen in a mirror, and will get the direction right as well (look over the correct shoulder toward the new arrival).
I've had dogs that did what amounts to slapstick. I had one who thought it was great fun to fling mud at people and make them yell! I've also seen some great "actors" -- had one who could peg a sucker the moment they hove in view, and would put on her "pathetic" act the instant they looked her way. Look away and she'd go all calculating instead. I don't think it's coincidence that she was a granddaughter of the mud-flinger:) And her son bangs on the wall when he wants attention!
[hat type="professional dog trainer" style="field trial retriever"]
Actually, the Guide Dogs want dogs without too much smarts, because for the blind person, they are really a sort of collision-detection system, NOT a GPS or personal robot. Hence the GDs don't want a dog that thinks too much.
As to the percentage of a breed still doing the job they were developed for, it varies a lot, from "almost all" to "almost none". For retrievers we have pretty good stats based on fieldtrial placements vs total numbers registered, and put vs hunting licenses, FT dogs are maybe 10% of all working retrievers. Which puts the major breeds' working usage at around 30% for Chesapeakes, 10% for Labs, and 1% for Goldens. (Much lower in metro areas, much higher in rural areas, but the ratios still hold -- tho in the midwest, working Chessies probably approach 100% of the breed, and they are one of the few breeds where nearly all show dogs still work in the field.)
Intelligence seems not to be a state, but rather a point where brain capacity STOPPED developing. For most working dogs, that's somewhere around the level of a bright 5 or 6 year old human -- they have all the thinking ability of a bright child, and can develop the same vocabulary -- and will do so just from being talked to like you would another person -- even my untrained kennel dogs have a pretty good vocab just from exposure, since I talk to them a lot. You do NOT have to "teach" them individual words per se. And dogs are a LOT more observant than kids of the same mental age, probably because on the whole, dogs have better vision than humans. (YOU try marking a bird that went down 400 yards away, and see if I'm not right about that!)
For cats and the purely pet breeds that have never had a real job, the point where they stop developing is more like a 2 year old human's level of comprehension and emotional development, and cats often don't make it THAT far. Also, such animals mature mentally much more slowly (if at all).
I've seen dogs do all sorts of amazing shit, including move furniture so they could climb up on something higher, and herding teeny tiny bugs for entertainment. I have one who can open any door that doesn't lock with a key. Not so amazing, tho, if you consider their mental development to be on a par with a bright 5-6YO human child, and tune your expectations accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly in homework these days REQUIRES M$ Office??
Seriously. What absolutely can't be done with paper and pencil, or at worst typewriter and paper? (Which in computer terms, is any text editor.)
If a kid's homework REQUIRES a specific software, then that homework is teaching the kid how to get answers out of that software, NOT about the nominal subject.
Even for the detractors ;)
Or uses his own forum as a place to effectively quarantine his detractors ;)
I never got regular over there (fact is, I'd forget it existed), but what discussions I did read/post in.... well, it's a shame they're not preserved elsewhere. If Bruce doesn't want to run a forum, that's his business, but it sure would be nice if he'd make the existing content available for someone else to carry on, and so that all those posts are not lost -- surely there were plenty that are worth preserving, that contain good info, etc...
Totally agree with you there...
As to what's really wrong with the Constitution... someone above says,
"Please point out where the Constitution restricts the ability of the federal government to spend money."
Ah, now I see... There's where the Framers fucked up -- they failed to restrict gov't spending to no more than gov't income, and also failed to restrict gov't spending to no more than a small fixed percentage of We The People's income.
Actually, I have to provide my own chamber pot -- we call the modern incarnation a "septic system" but it came out of my own pocket. All the gov't did was tell me how much money *I* had to spend on building it. (And then they taxed me on it too!)
And I have to fix my own road if I want it done right. If I call the county to fix the potholes, it winds up worse than before, to the point that I can't even drive on it.
Yeah, you missed the part where the Bill of Rights has been entirely redacted. :(
I sure hope the answer to how many he keeps is "none". Because if he keeps all of them, the tax hikes required to fund them are going to drive the last of big business overseas, and put small business in the poorhouse. And that means the people employed by those businesses will be out of work, yet someone's still got to pay the tax bill (I predict that a national sales tax will be implemented to do so, to the complete devastation of the poorer classes). How is that progress??
Works out to approx. $146/person, or around $700 per household. That $44B doesn't just fall from the sky; it comes out of the pockets of people like you and me.
However, that's just the initial cost. As a gov't program, you can expect that once the taxes are in place to initiate the program, they will not only never go away, they will go up over time.
So... this broadband (which some seem to think is "free") will cost around $60/month per household, albeit hidden as a tax hike. And that will be in addition to any monthly connectivity charges, and you will pay it whether you are in range or not.
TANSTAAFL.
[blink] I'm a little nearsighted (20/40 and 20/80) but I can see that double star without even thinking about it. With correction, it's perfectly evident.
However, I'm one of those freaks with obscenely precise colour vision; I also see VERY well in the dark (and tend to see better by looking straight at something than by the "not quite at it" technique). I suspect the two abilities are related. -- Conversely my neighbour, while not per-se colourblind, has poor colour vision with some deficit in yellow, and poor distinction among reds; she also sees VERY poorly in the dark, even with full correction and no retinal issues. Again, I suspect the deficits are related.
I do think some of us freaks have colour ranges that aren't kosher. Frex, when I had a woodstove, I could tell how hot the black metal top was by sight, even tho it stayed black; I suspect I was seeing a tish into infrared. On the other end of the visible spectrum, I see "black lights" as painfully bright.
BTW apparently there is disagreement on whether Tetrachromacy is strictly a female thing; from Wikipedia: "Another study suggests that as many as 50% of women and 8% of men may have four photopigments. [cite: http://www.klab.caltech.edu/cns186/papers/Jameson01.pdf "It is also the case that an estimated
8% of males presumed to be color "normal" likely
represent a four-photopigment retinal phenotype
heterozygous carriers."]
She may also be sensing air currents with the fine hairs on her face and neck.
One of the ways you can readily spot a blind cat is that it will ALWAYS keep its whiskers stretched forward -- not to touch things with, but to sense micro-currents that surround objects, so as to avoid running into them. These cats can be good enough at it that their owners won't believe the cat is blind. I once had a very old cat who was both totally blind and stone-deaf, and he navigated entirely via this whisker-based "air sense" (and did very well that way for 6 years, til he got senile at age 18, and lost his ability to navigate.)
And to eliminate the "sonar" factor -- earplugs.
From TFA:
========
They include place cells, which fire when an animal passes a certain landmark, and head-direction cells, which track which way the face is pointing. But the new study also found strong evidence of what the scientists, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, called 'border cells,' which fire when an animal is close to a wall or boundary of some kind.
=====
I suspect this is the same phenomenon as those 'border cells': When I was a kid, I could "feel" other people *as if they were touching me* as soon as they got within about 4 inches of my body, even if I couldn't see them. This was very consistent.
Wow. Most insightful thing I've read in a while.
A lot of these "memories" don't seem important when you're young. It's later on that you start to feel their significance (or mourn their absence).
A while back someone dug up and sent me a whole bunch of routine paperwork from my late uncle, dating the early 1950s. (Some really demonstrate how much our society has changed -- frex, checks written in PENCIL, and with no name on them except for the signature.) Dull as it sounds, it was actually very interesting to experience these secondhand memories from before I was born. :)
Ha, I have to agree with that. It's a rare album that thrills me all the way through, and then it's usually someone nobody ever heard of... one suspects there's more incentive to be consistently good if your name recognition is still zilch!
As to the radio/MTV/etc. advertising engine, true, that's entirely the labels' thing. Tho some of the internet radio stations only play royalty-free music, which implies a lack of label interference with that artist's career. (Which in some cases, it IS, rather than promotion.)
Also, a low-DPI or slow mouse setting, so exaggerated movements of the hand don't make the mouse wobble all over the screen.
And I have one shaky user who prefers a trackball, for that very reason.
Excellent advice, solves my problem with older folks' eyes and newer LCDs; thanks.
Why are you assuming that old OSs will need future patches?? maybe all the serious holes have been found. And if not -- they're clearly not being exploited anyway, so what's the problem?
An OS doesn't get "more insecure by the day" any more than an old machine gets "slower by the day".
In fact, there's a case to be made for using old OSs for internet boxen, simply because they're NOT under popular attack, or LACK the attack vectors present in modern OSs.
Once upon a time I test-drove Mandrake v7.2 ... when I got done tweaking the desktop and behaviours to be pleasant and useful, I was amused to discover that I'd unintentionally recreated a Win95 desktop!
(Despite that even my various WinBoxen don't much resemble each other!)
Interesting, but not available to download for those of us not using WinXP/Vista as our internet machines (hell if I know how you "validate" some other species of Windows, let alone linux or MacOS).
For which I give M$ a large raspberry, for discouraging techs who use some other OS from helping M$ customers who DO use current Windows. How is that good marketing?!!
Putting /home on a separate partition (or better yet, a different physical drive) is a very good idea, and I'll try that next time I mess with linux. Thanks!
Assuming, of course, that the next distro I try will let me keep the existing partition structure... the last time I tried Ubuntu and Mandriva, they both insisted on nuking everything first. For whatever reason, the installers lacked any option to keep an existing setup and create a dual boot. :/
And how long does it take you to locate, backup, and restore all of the client's DATA? Or don't you feel any responsibility toward preserving the main reason most people HAVE a computer in the first place?
How long does it take to reinstall all their apps, some of which may be complicated to reconfigure? (If *you* decided to wipe their machine, how is this not your responsibility?)
And that's why wipe and reinstall isn't as simple as most make it out to be -- at least, not for anyone but the tech doing it. Even if you don't take on any of the related tasks, you've condemned your client to doing so, which trust me, does not make them nearly as happy as finding that once you're done, everything works just like they're used to, and all their data is still in its expected places.
Reinstalls are against my religion. And I find it actually takes LESS time to beat Windows into submission and get rid of the problems (which are typically rather trivial, even if beyond average users' ken), than to reinstall it AND deal with all the subsequent "What happened to my [whatever]?" calls from the client, when stuff doesn't wind up back exactly how they're used to (and it never does, no matter how careful you are).
Besides, it saves me the bother of backing up and restoring all their data (and sometimes just LOCATING all their data!) -- since I regard preserving client data as my first responsibility during a repair or upgrade (but doing regular backups as the client's job, which in its simplest form I teach them to do as a regular CD burn of their My Documents directory).
As to the nominal topic, I'm the hardware guru and primary Q&A dude at the local PC user grope, which is presently almost entirely seniors. The most critical thing is KEEP IT SIMPLE. No more than ONE way to do anything (options confuse non-techies).
And be aware that non-techies WILL forget how to do anything that they don't do on a DAILY basis -- so try to make "occasional use" functions as self-documenting and self-evident as possible, using language they don't have to translate into tech-ese. That can be as simple as naming a document subdirectory "Already Backed Up" instead of "Archived".
Others above have made good points about a simple, reliable AV and firewall, and better yet a router, and safer choices of software (Mozilla family for browser, etc.) Once they've gotten wise to the usual internet scams, and have been taught that when in doubt, use the keyboard rather than the mouse, most people are pretty safe.
And do make sure everything is set to THEIR eyes, not yours. That will get rid of a lot of the confusion and "oops clicks" right there.
You'd be amazed at the level of tech-savvy older folks can reach, if only you give them an easy start that they can learn without stress.
There is that, but my point was that so far as what average consumers see, there's a huge disconnect between "free broadcast" and "pricey DVDs". Hence the perception of price gouging for DVDs.
Also... that broadcast content was already paid for by the corps the first time around. Why should DVD buyers have to pay the same amount for what is essentially "used content" ??
Not only themselves, but sometimes other individuals seen in a mirror, and will get the direction right as well (look over the correct shoulder toward the new arrival).
I've had dogs that did what amounts to slapstick. I had one who thought it was great fun to fling mud at people and make them yell! I've also seen some great "actors" -- had one who could peg a sucker the moment they hove in view, and would put on her "pathetic" act the instant they looked her way. Look away and she'd go all calculating instead. I don't think it's coincidence that she was a granddaughter of the mud-flinger :) And her son bangs on the wall when he wants attention!
[hat type="professional dog trainer" style="field trial retriever"]
Actually, the Guide Dogs want dogs without too much smarts, because for the blind person, they are really a sort of collision-detection system, NOT a GPS or personal robot. Hence the GDs don't want a dog that thinks too much.
As to the percentage of a breed still doing the job they were developed for, it varies a lot, from "almost all" to "almost none". For retrievers we have pretty good stats based on fieldtrial placements vs total numbers registered, and put vs hunting licenses, FT dogs are maybe 10% of all working retrievers. Which puts the major breeds' working usage at around 30% for Chesapeakes, 10% for Labs, and 1% for Goldens. (Much lower in metro areas, much higher in rural areas, but the ratios still hold -- tho in the midwest, working Chessies probably approach 100% of the breed, and they are one of the few breeds where nearly all show dogs still work in the field.)
Intelligence seems not to be a state, but rather a point where brain capacity STOPPED developing. For most working dogs, that's somewhere around the level of a bright 5 or 6 year old human -- they have all the thinking ability of a bright child, and can develop the same vocabulary -- and will do so just from being talked to like you would another person -- even my untrained kennel dogs have a pretty good vocab just from exposure, since I talk to them a lot. You do NOT have to "teach" them individual words per se. And dogs are a LOT more observant than kids of the same mental age, probably because on the whole, dogs have better vision than humans. (YOU try marking a bird that went down 400 yards away, and see if I'm not right about that!)
For cats and the purely pet breeds that have never had a real job, the point where they stop developing is more like a 2 year old human's level of comprehension and emotional development, and cats often don't make it THAT far. Also, such animals mature mentally much more slowly (if at all).
I've seen dogs do all sorts of amazing shit, including move furniture so they could climb up on something higher, and herding teeny tiny bugs for entertainment. I have one who can open any door that doesn't lock with a key. Not so amazing, tho, if you consider their mental development to be on a par with a bright 5-6YO human child, and tune your expectations accordingly.
[/hat]