I wouldn't accept any that was handwritten, half that crap is ineligible.
Assuming that by "ineligible" you actually mean illegible, a simple policy here would be to give the student a crap mark for the first assignment, on the basis that s/he has not made sufficient effort to make his or her ideas understandable.
They'll get the message. There is no point in learning to write with a pen at all if nobody can read what you write. Communication should be possible without the requirement for a computer.
This isn't a bad introduction to university level studies where there are plenty of disciplines where pencil-and-paper assignments are appropriate and indeed preferable, so there's nothing to be ashamed of in not submitting typed work.
Up until very recently, I worked in an office that uses Wordperfect, and I have to say that it's worth the (small) hassle to stick with it.
I am one of the now ancient generation who learned word processing most thoroughly with WordPerfect 5.1.
That was a damn good program, and I wish the authors had really made an effort to maintain the standard. For a while I used the (7.x?) versions available in the late '90s, but they were really quite sucky efforts. The 5.x versions were amply powerful enough to do high-quality typesetting, while the later versions I tried seemed to have been placeholders for the legal profession.
This is all coloured, of course, by the fact that I haven't tried the current offerings under the marque since WordPerfect has more or less fallen off my radar. Current software with all its WYSIWYG bells and whistles might look cooler on the screen, but the flexibility and transparency of WordPerfect's interface was second to none for anything destined for print.
Wait, did I say RTFM - Apple doesn't HAVE FM's. The documentation is the worst I've seen since the printed assembly dumps of CP/M.
This is true. As an old UNIX hand, I was somewhat disappointed by this at first, but as with any OS, the forum postings tend to be more useful in any case.
So, when you discouvered your Mac had what you thought was a hardware failure, who talked you back from the ledge? Are you in therapy?
OK. I'm not a Mac fanboy, but I do use a MacBook (not Pro) among other platforms, and I briefly had serious issues with a newly-purchased (cheapie) Huawei E169 mobile broadband dongle (well, strictly speaking, fraudband but enough to meet requirements). The 10.5.6 update fixed the problem instantly.
FWIW, I have no idea why this worked, nor do I care, since I ran the update without bothering to look for any changelogs. Sometimes "quick and dirty" is good enough...
She was tiny then and lived for almost two years which is pretty long lived for an octopus.
Yeah, especially in any near proximity to myself. Octopus is probably my favourite seafood. But the bigger ones are usually much tastier than the babies.
But these critters are just about the only ones that bring on any pangs of guilt to myself as a (now) recreational diver. They are really quite intelligent and playful, and I find it much more of a wrench to kill them than I do for a fish.
Incidentally, for those unversed in this culinary delight: Octopus need no bashing or thrashing to tenderise them. A long, slow cooking or a very fast treatment on a hotplate will suffice, and they just melt in the mouth. Anything in between is guaranteed to produce something rubbery and not very nice.
For this home user (work is a different issue) I've got through 1 UPS in 8 years. I replaced it with a similar machine a couple of years ago, and so far so good. We typically get some 3 or 4 fairly serious power cuts in summer when the heat hits (Perth, Western Australia gets fairly warm from time to time), and everybody's air-conditioning takes out the grid. So I guess the small investment is worthwhile.
Since I started doing the bulk of my work from home on a laptop, leaving the desktop machines for more "heavy haulage" tasks, I have stopped running any computers off my UPS.
I now just use it to drive low-voltage things like modem/router, wireless, phones and suchlike. So far, not even the worst of the power cuts we've had have run the UPS down, so we get to keep the net connection and phone running (since we're on naked DSL) with no impact.
If something happens that's serious enough to knock out the ISP's end, we have mobile access if we need it.
Like how you ignored the part about Fundamentalist Christians burning people at the stake.
Mmmmmm. Well I suppose I might be burned at the stake for wondering (since I'm an old man with a long memory) why FORTRAN doesn't rate a mention.
It's are no longer trendy, but many of the routines we know and trust (think: the Boeing math library) were built on it.
In the same vein, would it be too much to ask where PL/1 fits in? Back when I was in my 20s, I used to find all sorts of serious syscall routines written in PL/1 on various mainframe systems whose manufacturers are now consigned to history. Anyone remember PRIMOS? GCOS (God's Chosen Operating System)? AOS/VS? For a long time, my whole career revolved around these now obscure operating systems, and it was fun - sort of like being a privateer, never really in the main stream of the industry.
So Opera can't be better than Firefox or any other browser on certain aspect for what reason?
I never said Opera was a crap browser. It isn't my first choice, but I am completely aware that it clearly works, and that it often has advantages over some of the current alternatives.
I am, however, troubled by the fanboyism that any mention of Opera generates, and I see no reason why I should not allude to this in a related post. This seems to be borne out by the fact that my oblique reference to Opera is apparently of more import than the general thrust of my post referring to the claims in the article.
Incidentally, has anyone actually tried out the "Password Manager Evaluator v2.0" link from the FA with any other browsers? The author(s) claim Opera comes closest to addressing their criteria, which automatically sent the needle of my bullshitometer climbing. I was about to run it with Firefox but stopped at stage 1 where it told me to clear my existing saved passwords, and I didn't want to do that.
Not that I save any of my high-value passwords at all, but I still manage to accumulate others that I would otherwise forget...
Before we see too much whining about broadband speeds in the UK, we might as well consider other parts of the developed world such as Australia, where despite a generally tech-aware mindset, speeds of only 256K are common in some areas, while other areas have no access at all.
From my own perspective of one who is primarily a city-dweller (with a nice fat DSL2+ connection at home) but who spends half of the week about 160km away from home, the situation is pretty bad. Until a year ago, the rural place only had satellite access at a nominal 512K which turned out to be more like 128K downstream only. Believe me, I have used Skype more or less successfully on a 56K dialup connection, but it is utterly impossible with satellite, since the upstream latency is a total show-stopper. Now we have 512K ADSL (luxury!) we consider ourselves fortunate.
But I refuse to whine. There are lots of places in Australia where you can't even make a phone-call, let alone play on the internet.
OK, what version of "cold start" do you have in mind?
Here: 1. Switch MacBook on. 2. Wait (and wait... and wait...) for the machine to boot up. 3. Click on the pretty Firefox icon in the dock and start stopwatch. 4. Ooh. Firefox is up and running before the hand got to 1 second.
Simple enough, and I don't think it gets colder than that. Maybe you have more extensions and whatnot than I do.
Nonsense. Many servers are dedicated ad servers, and if I don't want to hear from them, it is my right to tell my computer not to accept traffic from them. Furthermore, given the creepy nature of advertisers, I have no reason to suppose they won't ever be tempted to inject some sort of unsavoury or illegal material into their packets. Even if they do not directly sanction this, they certainly won't care, and it is just as certain that I have no redress against them other than to block their sites.
If advertisers don't like this situation, they would do well to remember that they brought it on themselves.
What's the difference between uninstalling Flash and being selective as to when it is used? You're not going to repeat that tired crap about theft again, are you?
Advertisers have arrogated to themselves the right to plaster their crap over every surface that we see in every waking moment, and for some reason society has allowed them to get away with it.
That doesn't mean we all have to accept it. I'm quite sure they would prefer you to blindly follow the rest of the herd of sheep, but if you really elect to make a conscious choice to be blind AND stupid, that's your call.
Just don't expect me to join in. I choose the websites I visit, and I have a list of those I don't want to hear from in a big hosts file. The rest I leave to adblock and flashblock. My choice.
Many would have you believe that. "If you're not looking at our ads you're stealing from us!"
That argument is specious in any case. The argument of theft only really holds up if you are depriving someone of something. If I take your wallet, I deprive you of its contents. The law (whether or not some of us care to accept it) also equates ripping a movie to theft, since you are presumed to be depriving someone of income to which he is entitled.
However, the advertising thing just doesn't hold up as simply.
You don't accept a disclaimer when you click on a link to accept any dreck the site owner cares to throw at you. In fact, by passing through junk without your permission, he is in reality, actually stealing your bandwidth for any meaningful value of the word "steal", since you don't get your bandwidth back.
Most of that time would be due to Firefox's glacial cold-start.
Ummm, glacial? What machine are you running it on? This is my slowest machine (a 2.16 Core 2 MacBook) and I just cold-started Firefox in much less than a second. (I couldn't time it.) My desktop Linux box is quite a lot more snappy. My only plugins are Adblock and Flashblock. That's all I need.
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I wouldn't accept any that was handwritten, half that crap is ineligible.
Assuming that by "ineligible" you actually mean illegible, a simple policy here would be to give the student a crap mark for the first assignment, on the basis that s/he has not made sufficient effort to make his or her ideas understandable.
They'll get the message. There is no point in learning to write with a pen at all if nobody can read what you write. Communication should be possible without the requirement for a computer.
This isn't a bad introduction to university level studies where there are plenty of disciplines where pencil-and-paper assignments are appropriate and indeed preferable, so there's nothing to be ashamed of in not submitting typed work.
Up until very recently, I worked in an office that uses Wordperfect, and I have to say that it's worth the (small) hassle to stick with it.
I am one of the now ancient generation who learned word processing most thoroughly with WordPerfect 5.1.
That was a damn good program, and I wish the authors had really made an effort to maintain the standard. For a while I used the (7.x?) versions available in the late '90s, but they were really quite sucky efforts. The 5.x versions were amply powerful enough to do high-quality typesetting, while the later versions I tried seemed to have been placeholders for the legal profession.
This is all coloured, of course, by the fact that I haven't tried the current offerings under the marque since WordPerfect has more or less fallen off my radar. Current software with all its WYSIWYG bells and whistles might look cooler on the screen, but the flexibility and transparency of WordPerfect's interface was second to none for anything destined for print.
Wait, did I say RTFM - Apple doesn't HAVE FM's. The documentation is the worst I've seen since the printed assembly dumps of CP/M.
This is true. As an old UNIX hand, I was somewhat disappointed by this at first, but as with any OS, the forum postings tend to be more useful in any case.
So, when you discouvered your Mac had what you thought was a hardware failure, who talked you back from the ledge? Are you in therapy?
OK. I'm not a Mac fanboy, but I do use a MacBook (not Pro) among other platforms, and I briefly had serious issues with a newly-purchased (cheapie) Huawei E169 mobile broadband dongle (well, strictly speaking, fraudband but enough to meet requirements). The 10.5.6 update fixed the problem instantly.
FWIW, I have no idea why this worked, nor do I care, since I ran the update without bothering to look for any changelogs. Sometimes "quick and dirty" is good enough...
I've seen smart and dumb cats, and smart and dumb dogs.
I've seen vastly more dumb humans than smart ones.
thanks for the enjoyable hart warming
Barbecued male deer? !relevant to occi, methinks...
She was tiny then and lived for almost two years which is pretty long lived for an octopus.
Yeah, especially in any near proximity to myself. Octopus is probably my favourite seafood. But the bigger ones are usually much tastier than the babies.
But these critters are just about the only ones that bring on any pangs of guilt to myself as a (now) recreational diver. They are really quite intelligent and playful, and I find it much more of a wrench to kill them than I do for a fish.
Incidentally, for those unversed in this culinary delight: Octopus need no bashing or thrashing to tenderise them. A long, slow cooking or a very fast treatment on a hotplate will suffice, and they just melt in the mouth. Anything in between is guaranteed to produce something rubbery and not very nice.
For this home user (work is a different issue) I've got through 1 UPS in 8 years. I replaced it with a similar machine a couple of years ago, and so far so good. We typically get some 3 or 4 fairly serious power cuts in summer when the heat hits (Perth, Western Australia gets fairly warm from time to time), and everybody's air-conditioning takes out the grid. So I guess the small investment is worthwhile.
Since I started doing the bulk of my work from home on a laptop, leaving the desktop machines for more "heavy haulage" tasks, I have stopped running any computers off my UPS.
I now just use it to drive low-voltage things like modem/router, wireless, phones and suchlike. So far, not even the worst of the power cuts we've had have run the UPS down, so we get to keep the net connection and phone running (since we're on naked DSL) with no impact.
If something happens that's serious enough to knock out the ISP's end, we have mobile access if we need it.
A bt f cre8v splng cn sv bth ink & papr.
...but use up a catastrophic number of brain cycles attempting to parse it.
Like how you ignored the part about Fundamentalist Christians burning people at the stake.
Mmmmmm. Well I suppose I might be burned at the stake for wondering (since I'm an old man with a long memory) why FORTRAN doesn't rate a mention.
It's are no longer trendy, but many of the routines we know and trust (think: the Boeing math library) were built on it.
In the same vein, would it be too much to ask where PL/1 fits in? Back when I was in my 20s, I used to find all sorts of serious syscall routines written in PL/1 on various mainframe systems whose manufacturers are now consigned to history. Anyone remember PRIMOS? GCOS (God's Chosen Operating System)? AOS/VS? For a long time, my whole career revolved around these now obscure operating systems, and it was fun - sort of like being a privateer, never really in the main stream of the industry.
So Opera can't be better than Firefox or any other browser on certain aspect for what reason?
I never said Opera was a crap browser. It isn't my first choice, but I am completely aware that it clearly works, and that it often has advantages over some of the current alternatives.
I am, however, troubled by the fanboyism that any mention of Opera generates, and I see no reason why I should not allude to this in a related post. This seems to be borne out by the fact that my oblique reference to Opera is apparently of more import than the general thrust of my post referring to the claims in the article.
Does your Linux or Windows have anything like that? No? Trolling failed, then, you Linux/Windows luser of ignoramus stance.
I have no idea about Windows, but there are several such applications available for Linux or any other unices.
For Gnome users, there is Gnome Keyring, and I believe the equivalent for KDE is KDE Wallet. I dare say there are others I haven't heard of.
Incidentally, has anyone actually tried out the "Password Manager Evaluator v2.0" link from the FA with any other browsers? The author(s) claim Opera comes closest to addressing their criteria, which automatically sent the needle of my bullshitometer climbing. I was about to run it with Firefox but stopped at stage 1 where it told me to clear my existing saved passwords, and I didn't want to do that.
Not that I save any of my high-value passwords at all, but I still manage to accumulate others that I would otherwise forget...
but it's not N1 wireless or gigabit Ethernet
Maybe I'm missing your point, but if you can afford a gigabit internet connection, you are a fortunate person.
But if you only need that speed over your LAN, you could just use a decent switch...
A bit of perspective here...
Before we see too much whining about broadband speeds in the UK, we might as well consider other parts of the developed world such as Australia, where despite a generally tech-aware mindset, speeds of only 256K are common in some areas, while other areas have no access at all.
From my own perspective of one who is primarily a city-dweller (with a nice fat DSL2+ connection at home) but who spends half of the week about 160km away from home, the situation is pretty bad. Until a year ago, the rural place only had satellite access at a nominal 512K which turned out to be more like 128K downstream only. Believe me, I have used Skype more or less successfully on a 56K dialup connection, but it is utterly impossible with satellite, since the upstream latency is a total show-stopper. Now we have 512K ADSL (luxury!) we consider ourselves fortunate.
But I refuse to whine. There are lots of places in Australia where you can't even make a phone-call, let alone play on the internet.
My suggestion is to just let him be a kid for a little while. You really don't want him getting that pasty complexion this early in life...
It is even more retarded not to read the original post, and then to disregard what I said there.
To reiterate, it's a 2.16GHz machine running OS X 10.5.5.
I think your "cold start" isn't.
OK, what version of "cold start" do you have in mind?
Here:
1. Switch MacBook on.
2. Wait (and wait... and wait...) for the machine to boot up.
3. Click on the pretty Firefox icon in the dock and start stopwatch.
4. Ooh. Firefox is up and running before the hand got to 1 second.
Simple enough, and I don't think it gets colder than that. Maybe you have more extensions and whatnot than I do.
The hosts file is inappropriate for adblocking.
Nonsense. Many servers are dedicated ad servers, and if I don't want to hear from them, it is my right to tell my computer not to accept traffic from them. Furthermore, given the creepy nature of advertisers, I have no reason to suppose they won't ever be tempted to inject some sort of unsavoury or illegal material into their packets. Even if they do not directly sanction this, they certainly won't care, and it is just as certain that I have no redress against them other than to block their sites.
If advertisers don't like this situation, they would do well to remember that they brought it on themselves.
What's the difference between uninstalling Flash and being selective as to when it is used? You're not going to repeat that tired crap about theft again, are you?
Just like not watching TV is stealing! ;-)
...and, like in those old Max Headroom shows, "20 minutes into the future", it'll be illegal to have an "OFF" button on your TV.
Advertisers have arrogated to themselves the right to plaster their crap over every surface that we see in every waking moment, and for some reason society has allowed them to get away with it.
That doesn't mean we all have to accept it. I'm quite sure they would prefer you to blindly follow the rest of the herd of sheep, but if you really elect to make a conscious choice to be blind AND stupid, that's your call.
Just don't expect me to join in. I choose the websites I visit, and I have a list of those I don't want to hear from in a big hosts file. The rest I leave to adblock and flashblock. My choice.
Many would have you believe that. "If you're not looking at our ads you're stealing from us!"
That argument is specious in any case. The argument of theft only really holds up if you are depriving someone of something. If I take your wallet, I deprive you of its contents. The law (whether or not some of us care to accept it) also equates ripping a movie to theft, since you are presumed to be depriving someone of income to which he is entitled.
However, the advertising thing just doesn't hold up as simply.
You don't accept a disclaimer when you click on a link to accept any dreck the site owner cares to throw at you. In fact, by passing through junk without your permission, he is in reality, actually stealing your bandwidth for any meaningful value of the word "steal", since you don't get your bandwidth back.
In any case, if one must run Wine, one might as well throw in the towel and just run Windows. Personally, I would rather just do without.
Most of that time would be due to Firefox's glacial cold-start.
Ummm, glacial? What machine are you running it on? This is my slowest machine (a 2.16 Core 2 MacBook) and I just cold-started Firefox in much less than a second. (I couldn't time it.) My desktop Linux box is quite a lot more snappy. My only plugins are Adblock and Flashblock. That's all I need.