Public schools serve several functions simultaneously, though not all functions can be optimized simultaneously.
Schools do these things, with varying success:
Produce a population that has at least a snowball's chance in hell of producing a workable government.
create a universal experience that will be the basis of the continued culture. (This has worked all too well in the US. Everybody still acts like they're in friggin' high school.)
Produce a well-trained workforce, in order to have a snowball's chance of competing globally.
Babysitting service.
Produce individuals who have a snowball's chance of being able to think for themselves. (See first item.)
Preparing some students, but not all students, for further education.
Some students will care about Shakespeare and will be enriched by the experience of studying classic literature, calculus, social sciences, etc, etc.
Other students will try to get jobs out of high school. Don't you think that Shakespeare is wasted on certain people? Some people need to know how to be WordProc monkeys, and some people need to fix cars.
Most people have no need whatsoever to learn about how a computer really works. That's like requiring kids in school to learn how a car engine works, how their microwave works, how their television works, etc. 'How a computer works' is completely irrelevant to about 99% of the population. As long as they can USE one, that's all that matters.
This is an excellent point - one that sometimes gets missed by/.ers. Some people just need to use the computer as a tool to get things done - simple communication tasks such as email and websurfing.
Using the car analogy:
Driver Ed - Computer literacy class
Vo Tech/Auto body Repair - Computer repair
Vo Tech/Auto Mechanic - Electrical Circuit design
OR -Programming/Application development
Many schools need to budget more rationally, this is true. My high school had some idiotic scheme to put at least one computer - no matter how antequated (Mac Classics and LCs being redeployed in '96, newer machines being put in the labs & library) - in every classroom. Nobody really knew why. We had a sufficient MacPPC lab, and most teachers would sign passes to either the library or the computer lab if the situation required. The lab was divided into a programming shop, a keyboarding/business computing shop, and an open shop where normal teachers could reserve the lab for their classes when they needed to do special projects. (The one open/swing lab sufficiently met the needs of our school.)
Why we needed more computers was beyond my comprehension. The ones in "normal" classrooms mostly just gathered dust, even the ones that weren't hopelessly outdated.
Yet, several classes were without suitable textbooks. My government/social studies classes needed books badly, but the math department was being nudged to buy more recent books despite the fact that high school level math hasn't changed in... forever!
The reason for the computers? Government subsidies and matching funds for technology investments. The school was given a large incentive to purchase additional computers. (And the Apple Educational discount didn't hurt either.)
If you're not a troll, you need to listen up, pal.
Correllation is not the same as causation. Take a friggin' stats/social model development course. Ever heard of a "spurious variable"???
The article demonstrates just this: that different types of activities in children produce different brain patterns. It is damn far from demonstrating that kids who play quake will shoot up their classrooms.
I suspect that much more interesting and compelling correlations could be drawn between economic well-being and crime than between crime and video games. (Crime up in early 90's, down recently... anybody else see this?) This theory (crime & economics), while it may be faulty/wrong, at least has the virtue of being testable over other periods of time and in cultures where video games are not as ubiquitous.
Apparently it needs to be said again... "Lies, Damn lies, and Statistics."
You've obviously never met anybody who really had ADD. If you had, you'd know it was real.
"For every kid who really needs Ritalin, you prescribe it to 500,000 kids who don't" -- Chef, South Park
True. Very true. Too true. But it doesn't minimize the needs of that 1 kid out of 500k. Every parent ought to get a second opinion from a respected specialist before giving their kids Ritalin. Ritalin has been proven to produce very different reactions (brain-thermo-whatever analysis... similar to that used in the article) in kids depending on whether they really have ADD/ADHD. If the case is mild, a good doctor might recommend an alternative treatment, like biofeedback therapy.
This totally falls into the "no shit" category. It doesn't take much to produce measurable differences in brain activity. Reading vs Math give different responses in brain activity, so comparisons w/ math and video games are pointless.
To make the conclusion follow validly from the research, they'd have to use kids whose parents refused to allow them to play video games, and compare them to those who played games for several years, since they're trying to make a developmental point.
Also their brain activities should be compared while performing similar tasks, and their success rate/competency/accuracy at those tasks should also be compared.
Methinks these guys slept through the "social modeling" and statistical analysis classes...
Re:XBox runs on Win2k
on
$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 1
Microsoft may introduce software for Windows XP that lets users play XBox games on a PC.
From the looks of the Xbox developer kit, I imagine that even if MS doesn't sanction use of Xbox games on "regular PC's", that somebody will figure out how to do it sooner or later.
From the developer's point of view, Xbox is good because it uses Win32 API's right? Can anyone say "bleem"???
A bleem-like for Xbox should be a piece of cake to produce, right?
Re:Did you expect any differently?
on
$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 1
Not only that, but SMB was the killer game for NES.
A lot of people bought NES because it came with SMB. The Mario (and Zelda) games are the big reason Nintendo can still be a player in the market. Without these games, nintendo is just another console anymore.
I really thought there should have been a resolution to the end of Brood War. I mean, how hard would it have been to come up with another expansion set?? Anybody else disappointed that the Kerrigan/Zerg brood came out on top?
Couldn't a virus/worm writer make the worm a lot more destructive if it was designed to exploit two different types of security holes on different systems? For instance, let's say Code Red-VII r00ts a Windows server. When Code Red-VII tries to replicate, it goes for similar exploits on Windows systems, but if it bumps into say, a Red Hat server running Apache, it tries to exploit something on THAT system, which in turn exploits other similar, and dissimilar systems...
Or maybe an Outlook Express virus is altered to also exploit something in Eudora (in the strange event that it actually finds a non Outlook Express user...)
I understand that somebody is unlikely to find two devastating exploits on dissimilar systems and manage to put out a worm/virus before some other idiot releases a virus for just one of those systems, but is something like this a possibility?
Universities seem to only clamp down on things like that if they affect legitimate network use, or if somebody threatens a lawsuit.
Napster was banned at those universities where bandwidth was already at a premium.
I recently graduated from the University of Rochester. We had a pretty healthy bandwidth situation, so they didn't care too much about napster.
They did do one thing that was sort of anal: A guy was shut down after he set up a search engine that allowed anyone on campus to search everybody else's Windows-shared files (usually mp3's and pr0n). His server had to scan everybody's computer once for open shares, and then on the second pass it would record all those openly shared files. The people who got it shut down were the ones with the firewalls... they didn't like the fact that their machines were scanned every day, even though any idiot could have done this by just browsing all the network shares manually. But this automated service was viewed as an invasion of privacy. (I'm sure the intellectual property issues didn't help him either.)
That's precisely what it is - "stealing" cable access by offering it to people other than the account holder. It's rather like college students in dorms or off-campus housing quietly setting up home networks off one cable line, instead of doing the honest thing and letting the ISP know what they're up to.
Bzzzzt. Wrong! Stealing cableTV is not the same as networking your own house.
Splicing Cable degrades the signal ever-so-slightly for everybody else in your area. When the cable is spliced too much it will make a difference in everybody's signal.
When you share your broadband 'net access, you only have 128k (or 512k or whatever...) to dole out. You're paying for X-kbits and dammit, you can do what you want... except violate the TOS.
Strangely enough, I noticed that XMMS in Red Hat 7 played almost all of my mp3s perfectly fine, but on one particular mp3 the tempo was noticably slower... (tempo slower but pitch was still correct). Winamp in W95 played the same file correctly.
Try playing that ogg file on somebody else's machine... Or switch players/operating systems/whatever. Just change something and try it out...
MS announces that it will include the new "My Ass" feature in Windows 2023. This will be in keeping with the "my" features and services, such as the "My documents" folder, the "my computer" metaphor, but it differs in that you can put all sorts of things in My Ass.
Bill Gates was quoted as having said, "My Ass makes a really neat sound when you put things in it." Things put in My Ass will eventually be expelled - so it's a good place to put things that aren't important, but just might be something you want to hang on to for a while: similar to a time-delayed self-emptying "recycle bin". If you download a lot of shareware but only get around to installing some of it, then forget what the hell it was in the first place, you could put it in My Ass.
"My Ass doesn't like it when things are in there too long, so it boots them out after a while."
There have been some problems with the My Ass feature. Gates said, "We're having a few problems with My Ass right now - it seems that there are only so many things you can put in My Ass before it becomes an issue."
Ford was trying to counteract negative press by shifting the blame to Firestone.
Gates holding a press conference about Code Red would only hurt his PR - it would burst the PR bubble he's been taking advantage of:"Computer worm" -vs- "Microsoft worm".
Plus, what else is MSFT supposed to do? A (partial?) patch is already out. Gates can't say "we're doing everything we can" because it would imply that he can do more, and that MSFT is at fault. It would only enhance the association of Code Red with MS.
Re:Why release before Mozilla?
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Netscape 6.1
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· Score: 1
It's not as though there haven't been software releases that were not worthy of an x.00 release number...
Despite being pre 1.0, Moz is (now) good enough to branch a Netscape production release. If there were no mozilla/netscape, there would only be 2 users instead of 7 users waiting for the next Netscape release.
Netcenter really suffered during the AOL acquisition. Stuff didn't work right for months.
Things at least work now, but they screwed up the email client. Before, it was a little slow to load, but a nice interface. Now it is significantly quicker, but they bailed out on a lot of the features (filtering!) that were in the old webmail.
I can't remember the last time I got one of those membership info emails... they mostly pertained to the crap they were changing (including my friggin' login name and email address!!! That was re-goddamn-diculous!)
I ended up keeping the account. I got a new IM screen name (good for "hiding out"), and the spam sent to the old email address (that I barely used anyway - my 3rd account at the time.) magically stopped when the old email became defunct. I'm even experimenting with the calendar thingie...
Re:notoriously buggy?
on
Netscape 6.1
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· Score: 1
4.78 was not as stable (win95) as I really wanted it to be. For me, it crashed at least as often as IE, probably more. And 4.76 (or 4.77 - forget which) wasn't exactly rock-steady on Red Hat 7 either.
I do like the mail client. I can't remember how many times my parents would call me at school and ask about some retarded problem in Outlook Express, giving me fits because I had never used the program at that point...
Sucky for newsgroups? Better than Outlook express, IMO. Not that that says much for N4.7x tho.
That sounds sweet, but I'll try to one-up you here:
Mirror-match (Sam Jackson vs. Sam Jackson), but you really don't know who wins it... all the characters assume, with some suspicion, that the "good" guy won - and then it comes back to bite them in the collective ass later on.
Slashdot Mirror
Some students will care about Shakespeare and will be enriched by the experience of studying classic literature, calculus, social sciences, etc, etc.
Other students will try to get jobs out of high school. Don't you think that Shakespeare is wasted on certain people? Some people need to know how to be WordProc monkeys, and some people need to fix cars.
This is an excellent point - one that sometimes gets missed by /.ers. Some people just need to use the computer as a tool to get things done - simple communication tasks such as email and websurfing.
Using the car analogy:
Driver Ed - Computer literacy class
Vo Tech/Auto body Repair - Computer repair
Vo Tech/Auto Mechanic - Electrical Circuit design
OR -Programming/Application development
Many schools need to budget more rationally, this is true. My high school had some idiotic scheme to put at least one computer - no matter how antequated (Mac Classics and LCs being redeployed in '96, newer machines being put in the labs & library) - in every classroom. Nobody really knew why. We had a sufficient MacPPC lab, and most teachers would sign passes to either the library or the computer lab if the situation required. The lab was divided into a programming shop, a keyboarding/business computing shop, and an open shop where normal teachers could reserve the lab for their classes when they needed to do special projects. (The one open/swing lab sufficiently met the needs of our school.)
Why we needed more computers was beyond my comprehension. The ones in "normal" classrooms mostly just gathered dust, even the ones that weren't hopelessly outdated.
Yet, several classes were without suitable textbooks. My government/social studies classes needed books badly, but the math department was being nudged to buy more recent books despite the fact that high school level math hasn't changed in... forever!
The reason for the computers? Government subsidies and matching funds for technology investments. The school was given a large incentive to purchase additional computers. (And the Apple Educational discount didn't hurt either.)
Correllation is not the same as causation. Take a friggin' stats/social model development course. Ever heard of a "spurious variable"???
The article demonstrates just this: that different types of activities in children produce different brain patterns. It is damn far from demonstrating that kids who play quake will shoot up their classrooms.
I suspect that much more interesting and compelling correlations could be drawn between economic well-being and crime than between crime and video games. (Crime up in early 90's, down recently... anybody else see this?) This theory (crime & economics), while it may be faulty/wrong, at least has the virtue of being testable over other periods of time and in cultures where video games are not as ubiquitous.
Apparently it needs to be said again... "Lies, Damn lies, and Statistics."
You've obviously never met anybody who really had ADD. If you had, you'd know it was real.
"For every kid who really needs Ritalin, you prescribe it to 500,000 kids who don't" -- Chef, South Park
True. Very true. Too true. But it doesn't minimize the needs of that 1 kid out of 500k. Every parent ought to get a second opinion from a respected specialist before giving their kids Ritalin. Ritalin has been proven to produce very different reactions (brain-thermo-whatever analysis... similar to that used in the article) in kids depending on whether they really have ADD/ADHD. If the case is mild, a good doctor might recommend an alternative treatment, like biofeedback therapy.
I think the problems of "computer gaming" and "promiscuous sex" are, by definition, affecting completely different groups of people. ;)
To make the conclusion follow validly from the research, they'd have to use kids whose parents refused to allow them to play video games, and compare them to those who played games for several years, since they're trying to make a developmental point.
Also their brain activities should be compared while performing similar tasks, and their success rate/competency/accuracy at those tasks should also be compared.
Methinks these guys slept through the "social modeling" and statistical analysis classes...
From the looks of the Xbox developer kit, I imagine that even if MS doesn't sanction use of Xbox games on "regular PC's", that somebody will figure out how to do it sooner or later.
From the developer's point of view, Xbox is good because it uses Win32 API's right? Can anyone say "bleem"???
A bleem-like for Xbox should be a piece of cake to produce, right?
A lot of people bought NES because it came with SMB. The Mario (and Zelda) games are the big reason Nintendo can still be a player in the market. Without these games, nintendo is just another console anymore.
I really thought there should have been a resolution to the end of Brood War. I mean, how hard would it have been to come up with another expansion set?? Anybody else disappointed that the Kerrigan/Zerg brood came out on top?
FYI: Hellfire wasn't released by Blizzard.
U of Rochester???
Methinks probably not...
Go Yellowjackets... or some crap like that. Don't get me wrong, I liked UR, but "major"... eh. I guess so, but it's a bit of a stretch.
The chances of anybody actually knowing about UR and NOT being from Upstate NY are somewhat lower than we might like.
I especially agree with this. Anything to help the geeks get some :)
Too bad showing off one's geekiness is a good way to reduce one's chances of getting any...
"Oh great! my computer is working. Oh look, an IM from my boyfriend. He'll be visiting almost every weekend. "
Not that this sort of thing ever detered anybody from helping out some hottie - hope springs eternal.
Or maybe an Outlook Express virus is altered to also exploit something in Eudora (in the strange event that it actually finds a non Outlook Express user...)
I understand that somebody is unlikely to find two devastating exploits on dissimilar systems and manage to put out a worm/virus before some other idiot releases a virus for just one of those systems, but is something like this a possibility?
Napster was banned at those universities where bandwidth was already at a premium.
I recently graduated from the University of Rochester. We had a pretty healthy bandwidth situation, so they didn't care too much about napster.
They did do one thing that was sort of anal: A guy was shut down after he set up a search engine that allowed anyone on campus to search everybody else's Windows-shared files (usually mp3's and pr0n). His server had to scan everybody's computer once for open shares, and then on the second pass it would record all those openly shared files. The people who got it shut down were the ones with the firewalls... they didn't like the fact that their machines were scanned every day, even though any idiot could have done this by just browsing all the network shares manually. But this automated service was viewed as an invasion of privacy. (I'm sure the intellectual property issues didn't help him either.)
Bzzzzt. Wrong! Stealing cableTV is not the same as networking your own house.
Splicing Cable degrades the signal ever-so-slightly for everybody else in your area. When the cable is spliced too much it will make a difference in everybody's signal.
When you share your broadband 'net access, you only have 128k (or 512k or whatever...) to dole out. You're paying for X-kbits and dammit, you can do what you want... except violate the TOS.
Huh huh - you said "pulled".
Try playing that ogg file on somebody else's machine... Or switch players/operating systems/whatever. Just change something and try it out...
Bill Gates was quoted as having said, "My Ass makes a really neat sound when you put things in it." Things put in My Ass will eventually be expelled - so it's a good place to put things that aren't important, but just might be something you want to hang on to for a while: similar to a time-delayed self-emptying "recycle bin". If you download a lot of shareware but only get around to installing some of it, then forget what the hell it was in the first place, you could put it in My Ass.
"My Ass doesn't like it when things are in there too long, so it boots them out after a while."
There have been some problems with the My Ass feature. Gates said, "We're having a few problems with My Ass right now - it seems that there are only so many things you can put in My Ass before it becomes an issue."
Gates holding a press conference about Code Red would only hurt his PR - it would burst the PR bubble he's been taking advantage of :"Computer worm" -vs- "Microsoft worm".
Plus, what else is MSFT supposed to do? A (partial?) patch is already out. Gates can't say "we're doing everything we can" because it would imply that he can do more, and that MSFT is at fault. It would only enhance the association of Code Red with MS.
Despite being pre 1.0, Moz is (now) good enough to branch a Netscape production release. If there were no mozilla/netscape, there would only be 2 users instead of 7 users waiting for the next Netscape release.
Things at least work now, but they screwed up the email client. Before, it was a little slow to load, but a nice interface. Now it is significantly quicker, but they bailed out on a lot of the features (filtering!) that were in the old webmail.
I can't remember the last time I got one of those membership info emails... they mostly pertained to the crap they were changing (including my friggin' login name and email address!!! That was re-goddamn-diculous!)
I ended up keeping the account. I got a new IM screen name (good for "hiding out"), and the spam sent to the old email address (that I barely used anyway - my 3rd account at the time.) magically stopped when the old email became defunct. I'm even experimenting with the calendar thingie...
I do like the mail client. I can't remember how many times my parents would call me at school and ask about some retarded problem in Outlook Express, giving me fits because I had never used the program at that point...
Sucky for newsgroups? Better than Outlook express, IMO. Not that that says much for N4.7x tho.
Mirror-match (Sam Jackson vs. Sam Jackson), but you really don't know who wins it... all the characters assume, with some suspicion, that the "good" guy won - and then it comes back to bite them in the collective ass later on.
I see somebody else was watching the E! True Hollywood story tonight... Andy Kaufman.