That's how my school (OSU) teaches everything. Every assignment must compile on the solaris system in the lab, and be submitted as source.
Which I generally agree with but, but does seem to have a few pitfalls:
1) Computer graphics courses. The solaris system doesn't really do opengl too well, and all their lab machines that do are running windows, with no cygwin or mingC++ installed. So there's no real coherent development platform for computer graphics.
2) Every job I've had they expected me to already know Visual Studio inside and out. Now, it's just a program, I can kind of stumble my way through learning it, but it's a huge program and I always feel that since no one and no tutorial I ever found actually explained to me how it does anything, I'm making life much harder on myself than it needs to be.
The overall problem is that no matter what you teach, you don't have time to teach everything, so that leaves something that you'll be completely clueless about:(
Although I definitely agree that for starting out, making them get used to a command line (although a halfway decent editor that a least has a decent find button and keeps track of your tabs for you or something will be more of a headache saver than a crutch) and manually linking/loading (even better, get them used to making their own make files) will give them a better understanding when they do go to an IDE.
Having worked in the construction industry, I can say that the small independent company I worked for did the job twice as fast with twice the quality as any union shop in the area.
Any time we ended up accidentally with one person doing the work while two guys talked to him, someone would make a crack about a "union job" and we'd go find something to do.
The available margins are MUCH higher (for residential construction, at least) for small independent shops than they are for a unionized one, at least for the individual employees.
I worked with a high school student who had recently moved from Romania to the US. I found his impressions of the US school system very interesting.
The first thing he said was that school was a lot easier here. But he immediately followed with the fact that he didn't think that his old school taught him anything more, or more advanced. Just that they took a much more adversarial approach with the students.
He said that getting a C was expected, and that you could at any time be expected to stand up in front of the class and explain any part of the subject matter, and be admonished if you could not. Pop tests were a common occurance. He said that you studied like mad just to avoid looking like an idiot.
Whereas, in his American school, you had to slack off to get bad grades, and you never had a test without a week's notice. But although easier, the same material was covered in the same detail.
Just thought it was interesting. In the US, you really aren't forced to learn any discipline, it's up to you to decide to care about it, whereas that doesn't seem to be a real option in eastern countries.
My dad was in a management position, but it was for a non-profit with no money whatsoever, so he went years without his standard of living raises. Half of my childhood we were eligible for welfare, food stamps, cheap lunches at school, etc. We didn't use any of them. All it took was prioritizing - no cable, no eating out constantly, no name brand clothes, old reliable cars, etc. When I look at how many people in my current neighborhood are making 100k a year and are still in debt, it really sickens me.
Learn what your means are and live within them. What you actually need to live comfortably is much less than you probably think it is. And even on a low income, luxuries can exist! We still had a small plot of land (granted, out in the middle of nowhere) and presents every Christmas. It's all about saving for the few luxuries you care about and eliminating all the crap that sucks money out of your wallet.
Regardless, though, all the competition says is that the Chinese ACM team cares much more about it than the American team did, and worked harder for it. Good for them, I say, and it would be nice if the American team took it more seriously, but it says absolutely nothing about the general state of computer science programs in America.
That's like saying that because an American won an olympic medal in track and field that Americans are in better shape and run faster than the Chinese.
The job market seems to be fine here in Columbus, Ohio. I graduate from OSU this spring, and I've had three job offers (with a solid salary for around here) and more interviews that I had to turn down already. My fiancee, who will also graduate this spring in CSE, has had the same experience.
We're both solid programmers and/or computer scientists, but I don't think anyone talking in this forum is complaining about a lack of jobs for crappy graduates - although, perhaps, that *is* what this is really about. I don't care what the job market is, someone with the ability to succeed will, in something.
Now... whether this job I'm taking will still be around in 5 years, or if I should still be in it if I want a pay raise, that's an another story, and another part of why people aren't touching computer science.
How many companies are making billions off of this war? How many of them have direct relations and interests with members of the Bush cabinet or republican leadership?
They won't rebuild the local brick factories, but instead ship in american made bricks! Almost all of the reconstruction contracts are going to American companies. They even worked to bypass international law specifically designed to prevent the pillaging of other countries by forcing them to sign long-term contracts with the companies of the invading state.
I won't even attempt to argue against the fact that Saddam was a bad person, who should not have been in power. But when you consider how many other leaders in the world there are that are similarly evil, why would we choose this one to destroy? What reasons did we have for invading Iraq instead of, say, North Korea? Or Iran? Or possibly intervening in Rwanda? Since when does the US have any sort of international juristiction to invade a country to implant democracy? The most we had done anywhere else was landing troops to support an existing democratic government (Korea, Vietnam, etc), not to remove someone from power.
Don't get me wrong, removing Saddam is a good thing. But that doesn't mean there weren't a lot of other, less happy reasons for invading. And this isn't the sort of situation where we can just fix everything by removing a bad government. There is now a power vacuum in Iraq that will cause even more stability and danger for the average Iraqi than having a bad government did. For the moment we are filling that vacuum - but already there are people who want us to leave both in Iraq (I mean, would you stand still for a foreign occupation of the US?) and at home. Unless we have given them the political and economic stability necessary to KEEP a democratic government and not just fall to the next military demagogue, all we've done is kill a lot of people and made a few rich American business owners richer. And THAT is not a good cause.
Especially when you consider that Saddam had been spending the last ten years either actually secretly building weapons or doing his best to make it seem as though he was.
The threat of having biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons and a small arsenal of missiles that could reach Isreal made him much more of a threat, and gave him much more political bargaining power than he would have otherwise had. Why the heck else would anyone pay attention to him after large portions of his supposedly powerful army (one of the largest in the world at the time of the gulf war) was crushed during Desert Storm.
So I think that it's entirely plausible that he did manage to send enough evidence of WMD's to fool a significant portion of our intelligence.
Now... do I think that the whole WMD argument was complete BS rationalization even if it was true, and that the whole reason we were invading was an intersection of both right-wing moral rhetoric, Bush & Company's personal vendetta against Iraq, and the fact that the evil empire happened to be sitting on a giant pool of oil that the administration's friends are even now exploiting? Of course, but then anyone watching from the beginning could tell that.
Arguing whether he did or didn't lie about the WMD's is pointless when you consider that in all likelihood their existence was only a sham justification for a war of corporate conquest and personal satisfaction.
I'm really curious what major research has been done in usability in the last, say, ten years. Almost every study or "law" I've read dated back to when they designed the orignal mac.
Of course, you'd be hard pressed to find a sample group for it. 99% of people will be faster with "whatever is most like windows" whether it's better or not.
Whereas I can't stand how much space everyone else wastes on extra menu bars.
The complaint isn't really about the single menu bar, I think, it's whether the app/child document paradigm of desktop use is easier or not. IE, should every word processor document spawn its own copy of the application with a full interface or not.
I finally understood that it wasn't just developers being lazy when I had to write a couple basic dialogs in a vbscript application for work. There are no other options. You can say whether you want ok, yes/no/cancel, and a few other possible variations, but that's it. You can't actually change the wording.
I'm not sure to what degree this occurs in their other API's and languages, but I wouldn't be surprised if in order to change the name of the icons you had to create your own custom form instead of just passing the new names as arguments, like every sane system I've used does.
Everyone patronize your local dollar theatres! Even if they aren't actually a dollar anymore (the one here is $2 for an evening show) it's still cheaper than that crazy surround sound system at home that people seem to claim is the norm any more. I don't know where you live, but *I've* never been over to someone's house that has one.
I've seen it happen without a female present, although its very possible that the mice had known a female at some point before their purchase.
My mother is a schoolteacher, and likes to have animals in the classroom to teach the kids about caring for living things and seeing that real mice are more interesting than Mickey Mouse. She got two males as babies, and within a few weeks the dominant one had completely ripped apart the other's face.
I always wonder how the little first graders react to that.
You're right, I used a bit too much hyperbole in that.
The way I look on interspecies relations with non-sentient beings is very strictly animalistic. The mice would probably kill me if they had a chance, as they care about surviving. It is contrary to evolutionary survival of humanity to put the well being of mice ahead of our own.
I tend to argue the "mice are evil" just because experience so directly refutes the "cuteness" anthropomorphism of many animal rights activists.
I've got a bunch of friends in various biology majors. Although they are all animal lovers (one wants to go to school to be a vet when he graduates), they have all worked in the labs doing a lot of experiments on mice. And they all agree, that the more time you spend around the things the less you feel that they are cute little animals that we shouldn't be experimenting on.
They are cruel, cannibalistic, disgusting animals. They will breed constantly and eat their own children, or perhaps just nibble off half of an ear and leave them to live. Anyone who's kept mice as pets know that having more than one only really works out with two females - a mixed pair will breed a million babies (and then eat them) and with two males one will eventually kill the other over territory.
So, yes, while I think it should be done in as painless of a manner as possible (and to actual justifiable scientific benefit), I think that killing a few of them to save human lives is completely worth it.
Of course, I'm sure anyone looking at humanity from a far enough vantage point would feel the same about us. Doesn't make them wrong, though, from that viewpoint.
I understand this. But,...I've been sixty for a few months...
I can understand the complaint about running out of end game content that you find interesting. However, this is a game, and every other game I've played ended eventually, too. I mean, they've been adding content, but you can only add so much before the expansion.
I still don't see how the fact that all there is left to the game is grinding MC means that you're left with no choice but to buy gold. No, it means that you've finished the game. That may be sad and all, but it happens to every game in existence. Buying gold to give yourself a purple hat doesn't get you any more interesting content to do - it just means you're wearing a purple hat while you're doing your mind-numbing MC runs.
Am I the only one who plays WoW that doesn't get the whole "I must grind for hours and have a bajillion gold pieces to buy every awesome item in the game" mentality?
I'm level 60. When I want to play, I either go
a) Kill things or players that are challenging for fun. b) Complete quests that sound interesting (or maybe have a neat item). or c) Grab a couple guildmates and run an instance, which for the most part is fun and challenging, and possibly gets me some loot.
None of these require that I buy gold, grind endlessly, or have uber items.
What does require grinding endlessly? Deciding that I *must* have the awesome staff of awesomeness that is a.0001% drop off of a giant owlbear's second cousin. I don't understand how having the best item is such a requirement for the fun of the game, because it's only SPECIFIC personal requirements for items that necessitate grinding or lots of cash. I've got my epic mount - I paid for it with herbs that I collect as I do the other things I find interesting, a couple drops (while I was doing other things, again), and finding good deals on the auction house.
My character has solid gear for someone whose guild doesn't run the 40-man instances, and I haven't been playing long enough for running one of the high level 5-man instances to be boring.
There are plenty of things to do that don't require grinding in any MMO that I have played for more than a month. It's only when people decide that the point of their playing is to get X weapon, which requires a lot of effort. I don't see why people can't be happy with just the good stuff they get incidentally while do other things that are, you know, actually fun. I mean, if you've been playing the game for months and months and already HAVE all that stuff... then why not just buy another game and move on (or just grind it, since you've obviously been playing this game too much anyway). There's NO reason a new character needs to buy gold or levels - the game's more fun before you max out your level anyway:P
Everyone think about what elementary school machines are actually used for, and what will actually be different on windows vs linux.
Teachers: Web - firefox/ie, whatever, no difference. Email - They probably use webmail, so no difference. Grades (usually just in one big ol' spreadsheet per class unless your school actually has a competent tech guy) - our school was still doing it in works 3.0 or something, so switching to gnumeric or the OpenOffice.org equivalent won't really matter. Lesson Plans - This is one that might actually be a toughie for adoption. My mom's school has a special lesson-plan maker program that the teachers are accustomed to using, and which probably doesn't export all their old lesson plans nicely to just doing it in OpenOffice or something. I know they had problems moving to OS X because the version they had couldn't print from classic. Word Processing - They're probably using an archaic version of Word anyway, and OpenOffice so blatantly copies the Word interface (and everything wrong with it, rant rant) that once you convince them they can learn it, it should be ok.
The biggest problem with switching teachers is that, in general, elementary school teachers are some of the most tech-backward people you can find. They may have a PC at home that they understand BASIC things about, but they have no idea how to apply any of those lessons to what's at school if it's different. I saw one woman get stuck for 30 minutes because she couldn't figure out how to insert her floppy drive into the external drive on the new mac at school instead of having a slot on the computer itself. They don't like change, and so you'll want to set things up as easily and as similar to windows as possible to them. Clear off all the default krap that KDE installs and give them a simple list of things they'll want to do on the desktop. Hell, relable OpenOffice writer to Word and you'll probably have things a lot easier. Just like when I install Firefox for someone I always just replace the link on their "Internet" icon.
However, teachers don't spend much time on the computer - they're too busy teaching. Get those few things running fine for them and they won't notice the difference too much until something's broken.
School secretaries: Standard secretary stuff. They might actually use a real email client. They will likely be more tech-savvy than the teachers, but only somewhat. The biggest thing to remember is that they are always overworked, so you want to make sure that you can get everything they need working and working WITHOUT more hassles than they used to deal with if you want to get them behind you. Set up a test system with all their stuff, then spend some time with them using it but having the option of their old one to work out everything they need differently.
The biggest issue with using something no one knows is that they will have problems troubleshooting or changing the little things that they would know how to do in windows. Like how to install a new printer, or install a new package. You've got to find some way around those problems by doing it for them or having a simplified user guide for things they're likely to do. Or you can just leave them alone, and have a multi-OS environment. At my mom's school, the teachers all run eMacs but the secretary has a PC (at her own request, I think, because it's what she knows).
Kids:
First of all, despite what every random jerk at the capitol wants to believe, kids younger than 7 or so can't do jack that's actually useful or very educational on a computer. The real usefulness of a computer to education is in the web, in wikipedia and google scholar or dictionary.com or whatever, as well as a word processor. And to make use of that, you kindof have to know how to read. So, for older kids, as long as OpenOffice reads their word files from home successfully, you have no problems. They probably have a different version of word at home (or, gasp, wordperfect. You don't know how many times I was called in to hel
Note that since that fiasco they have complied with almost every term requested by the Konqueror developers, setting up a cvs visible external to apple and working with the KDE developers to get them security clearance to see the apple proprietary stuff.
Just because they were slow in doing it because they were busy getting a project to market doesn't make them evil, since they did make a significant turnaround in this space. if you're going to criticise them (rightly) for following the bare minimum initially, you can at least mention that they have improved significantly since then.
The company I worked for had an activex page for their testing lab that would let you reimage the machine.
Yes, you heard that. You completely swapped out your version of Windows FROM A WEB PAGE, with default IE settings on some versions of windows. And this was a capability that was supposed to be there, with the correct security settings.
Even since I saw that there's no one who can convince me that ActiveX is a good idea from a security standpoint. Even if that is turned off by default (as it is on newer windows versions)... how many users go clicking on things they don't understand?
Why can't they make two apps the use the same rendering core - one that only runs the internet, and one for these fancy scripting own-my-box purposes?
It would be nice if someone combined the scale of WoW with some of the advantages of tabletop gaming.
I mean, have a full time staff of the sort of people who work at the renn fairs actually playing the major NPCs and monsters.
Imagine that if your raid got to the lower depths of Molten core and instead of a scripted encounter there were actual players behind the monsters.
NWN has a DM mode you can do, but I haven't heard of anything like this applied on an MMO scale. I can just see a lot of room for a more real experience.
Heck, even make a it a tiered system where valued members of the community can enter the lower npc ranks with different functions in return for a waive of the monthly fee.
I just see all of the great player-created worlds that blend almost seamlessly in some MUDs I've played, and I can't help wondering what neat things you could do to match those with a modern MMO.
Sorry, then-current PCs. When it was actually new, not after Moto completely stalled on it.
And as someone who used to game on a G3 300, and read every benchmark and test he could find, it was my experience that it ran about as pfast as a PII 350. Which was what was current when I bought the machine.
And since there were 604e's at 300 mhz before that, and teh 604e was actually faster clock/clock than G3... that would make it faster than PII's at the time. Which it was, by every benchmark (third party, not apple) I found when i was looking into buying a computer then.
It was a helluva a lot more expensive, but it was darned fast.
But these sorts of projects are what the guy actually cares about.
After he made his initial fortune (in medical devices) he started up an organization called FIRST, designed to get more smart kids interested in engineering, and to help our culture value problem solving more than drama. Since then the organization has grown to include thousands of teams, tens of thousands of high schoolers in countries all around the world.
I've been working with one of those teams for three years, and every year Kamen stands up and gives a speech, not about how much fun we're going to have building robots, but about his vision for what we can do to solve these sort of engineering problems, to bring clean water to those who need it, etc. He's done a lot of good work, aside from his kind of whacky human transport device, and for all that his speeches are about as depressing and boring as you can get, it's very clear that this is where his heart is. He's put a ton of money and effort into getting people into engineering so that some day if he can't solve these sorts of problem someone will.
And for as bored as I am every time I have to sit through him talking about it, I can admire that. This is about things a lot more important than a goofy looking scooter.
One of the reasons that netflicks is so popular is its HUGE selection. I can see a bunch of advantages for Blockbuster to be able to match that selection.
No idea what their current deal with the MPAA is, though. I think there's something special with new releases, at least, where they don't actually keep as many copies as they have the first month. Not sure if they just sell them in store or if they have something worked out with distributors for it.
In any case, though, blockbuster is a huge chain. Even if they could only rent out as many digital copies as they own DVD's, you could steal rentals from one store (or just a big warehouse somewhere) to use them somewhere else. As long as there aren't more than X copies of Dude Where's My Car in circulation at any one time... meh, the MPAA would still find some way to sue them.
Still would be nice to have more companies bridge the online world and the normal one they're used to.
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That's how my school (OSU) teaches everything. Every assignment must compile on the solaris system in the lab, and be submitted as source.
:(
Which I generally agree with but, but does seem to have a few pitfalls:
1) Computer graphics courses. The solaris system doesn't really do opengl too well, and all their lab machines that do are running windows, with no cygwin or mingC++ installed. So there's no real coherent development platform for computer graphics.
2) Every job I've had they expected me to already know Visual Studio inside and out. Now, it's just a program, I can kind of stumble my way through learning it, but it's a huge program and I always feel that since no one and no tutorial I ever found actually explained to me how it does anything, I'm making life much harder on myself than it needs to be.
The overall problem is that no matter what you teach, you don't have time to teach everything, so that leaves something that you'll be completely clueless about
Although I definitely agree that for starting out, making them get used to a command line (although a halfway decent editor that a least has a decent find button and keeps track of your tabs for you or something will be more of a headache saver than a crutch) and manually linking/loading (even better, get them used to making their own make files) will give them a better understanding when they do go to an IDE.
Having worked in the construction industry, I can say that the small independent company I worked for did the job twice as fast with twice the quality as any union shop in the area.
Any time we ended up accidentally with one person doing the work while two guys talked to him, someone would make a crack about a "union job" and we'd go find something to do.
The available margins are MUCH higher (for residential construction, at least) for small independent shops than they are for a unionized one, at least for the individual employees.
I worked with a high school student who had recently moved from Romania to the US. I found his impressions of the US school system very interesting.
The first thing he said was that school was a lot easier here. But he immediately followed with the fact that he didn't think that his old school taught him anything more, or more advanced. Just that they took a much more adversarial approach with the students.
He said that getting a C was expected, and that you could at any time be expected to stand up in front of the class and explain any part of the subject matter, and be admonished if you could not. Pop tests were a common occurance. He said that you studied like mad just to avoid looking like an idiot.
Whereas, in his American school, you had to slack off to get bad grades, and you never had a test without a week's notice. But although easier, the same material was covered in the same detail.
Just thought it was interesting. In the US, you really aren't forced to learn any discipline, it's up to you to decide to care about it, whereas that doesn't seem to be a real option in eastern countries.
My dad was in a management position, but it was for a non-profit with no money whatsoever, so he went years without his standard of living raises. Half of my childhood we were eligible for welfare, food stamps, cheap lunches at school, etc. We didn't use any of them. All it took was prioritizing - no cable, no eating out constantly, no name brand clothes, old reliable cars, etc. When I look at how many people in my current neighborhood are making 100k a year and are still in debt, it really sickens me.
Learn what your means are and live within them. What you actually need to live comfortably is much less than you probably think it is. And even on a low income, luxuries can exist! We still had a small plot of land (granted, out in the middle of nowhere) and presents every Christmas. It's all about saving for the few luxuries you care about and eliminating all the crap that sucks money out of your wallet.
Regardless, though, all the competition says is that the Chinese ACM team cares much more about it than the American team did, and worked harder for it. Good for them, I say, and it would be nice if the American team took it more seriously, but it says absolutely nothing about the general state of computer science programs in America.
That's like saying that because an American won an olympic medal in track and field that Americans are in better shape and run faster than the Chinese.
The job market seems to be fine here in Columbus, Ohio. I graduate from OSU this spring, and I've had three job offers (with a solid salary for around here) and more interviews that I had to turn down already. My fiancee, who will also graduate this spring in CSE, has had the same experience.
We're both solid programmers and/or computer scientists, but I don't think anyone talking in this forum is complaining about a lack of jobs for crappy graduates - although, perhaps, that *is* what this is really about. I don't care what the job market is, someone with the ability to succeed will, in something.
Now... whether this job I'm taking will still be around in 5 years, or if I should still be in it if I want a pay raise, that's an another story, and another part of why people aren't touching computer science.
How many companies are making billions off of this war? How many of them have direct relations and interests with members of the Bush cabinet or republican leadership?
They won't rebuild the local brick factories, but instead ship in american made bricks! Almost all of the reconstruction contracts are going to American companies. They even worked to bypass international law specifically designed to prevent the pillaging of other countries by forcing them to sign long-term contracts with the companies of the invading state.
I won't even attempt to argue against the fact that Saddam was a bad person, who should not have been in power. But when you consider how many other leaders in the world there are that are similarly evil, why would we choose this one to destroy? What reasons did we have for invading Iraq instead of, say, North Korea? Or Iran? Or possibly intervening in Rwanda? Since when does the US have any sort of international juristiction to invade a country to implant democracy? The most we had done anywhere else was landing troops to support an existing democratic government (Korea, Vietnam, etc), not to remove someone from power.
Don't get me wrong, removing Saddam is a good thing. But that doesn't mean there weren't a lot of other, less happy reasons for invading. And this isn't the sort of situation where we can just fix everything by removing a bad government. There is now a power vacuum in Iraq that will cause even more stability and danger for the average Iraqi than having a bad government did. For the moment we are filling that vacuum - but already there are people who want us to leave both in Iraq (I mean, would you stand still for a foreign occupation of the US?) and at home. Unless we have given them the political and economic stability necessary to KEEP a democratic government and not just fall to the next military demagogue, all we've done is kill a lot of people and made a few rich American business owners richer. And THAT is not a good cause.
Especially when you consider that Saddam had been spending the last ten years either actually secretly building weapons or doing his best to make it seem as though he was.
The threat of having biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons and a small arsenal of missiles that could reach Isreal made him much more of a threat, and gave him much more political bargaining power than he would have otherwise had. Why the heck else would anyone pay attention to him after large portions of his supposedly powerful army (one of the largest in the world at the time of the gulf war) was crushed during Desert Storm.
So I think that it's entirely plausible that he did manage to send enough evidence of WMD's to fool a significant portion of our intelligence.
Now... do I think that the whole WMD argument was complete BS rationalization even if it was true, and that the whole reason we were invading was an intersection of both right-wing moral rhetoric, Bush & Company's personal vendetta against Iraq, and the fact that the evil empire happened to be sitting on a giant pool of oil that the administration's friends are even now exploiting? Of course, but then anyone watching from the beginning could tell that.
Arguing whether he did or didn't lie about the WMD's is pointless when you consider that in all likelihood their existence was only a sham justification for a war of corporate conquest and personal satisfaction.
I'm really curious what major research has been done in usability in the last, say, ten years. Almost every study or "law" I've read dated back to when they designed the orignal mac.
Of course, you'd be hard pressed to find a sample group for it. 99% of people will be faster with "whatever is most like windows" whether it's better or not.
Whereas I can't stand how much space everyone else wastes on extra menu bars.
The complaint isn't really about the single menu bar, I think, it's whether the app/child document paradigm of desktop use is easier or not. IE, should every word processor document spawn its own copy of the application with a full interface or not.
I call this Microsoft's fault.
I finally understood that it wasn't just developers being lazy when I had to write a couple basic dialogs in a vbscript application for work. There are no other options. You can say whether you want ok, yes/no/cancel, and a few other possible variations, but that's it. You can't actually change the wording.
I'm not sure to what degree this occurs in their other API's and languages, but I wouldn't be surprised if in order to change the name of the icons you had to create your own custom form instead of just passing the new names as arguments, like every sane system I've used does.
Everyone patronize your local dollar theatres! Even if they aren't actually a dollar anymore (the one here is $2 for an evening show) it's still cheaper than that crazy surround sound system at home that people seem to claim is the norm any more. I don't know where you live, but *I've* never been over to someone's house that has one.
I've seen it happen without a female present, although its very possible that the mice had known a female at some point before their purchase.
My mother is a schoolteacher, and likes to have animals in the classroom to teach the kids about caring for living things and seeing that real mice are more interesting than Mickey Mouse. She got two males as babies, and within a few weeks the dominant one had completely ripped apart the other's face.
I always wonder how the little first graders react to that.
You're right, I used a bit too much hyperbole in that.
The way I look on interspecies relations with non-sentient beings is very strictly animalistic. The mice would probably kill me if they had a chance, as they care about surviving. It is contrary to evolutionary survival of humanity to put the well being of mice ahead of our own.
I tend to argue the "mice are evil" just because experience so directly refutes the "cuteness" anthropomorphism of many animal rights activists.
I've got a bunch of friends in various biology majors. Although they are all animal lovers (one wants to go to school to be a vet when he graduates), they have all worked in the labs doing a lot of experiments on mice. And they all agree, that the more time you spend around the things the less you feel that they are cute little animals that we shouldn't be experimenting on.
They are cruel, cannibalistic, disgusting animals. They will breed constantly and eat their own children, or perhaps just nibble off half of an ear and leave them to live. Anyone who's kept mice as pets know that having more than one only really works out with two females - a mixed pair will breed a million babies (and then eat them) and with two males one will eventually kill the other over territory.
So, yes, while I think it should be done in as painless of a manner as possible (and to actual justifiable scientific benefit), I think that killing a few of them to save human lives is completely worth it.
Of course, I'm sure anyone looking at humanity from a far enough vantage point would feel the same about us. Doesn't make them wrong, though, from that viewpoint.
I understand this. But,...I've been sixty for a few months...
I can understand the complaint about running out of end game content that you find interesting. However, this is a game, and every other game I've played ended eventually, too. I mean, they've been adding content, but you can only add so much before the expansion.
I still don't see how the fact that all there is left to the game is grinding MC means that you're left with no choice but to buy gold. No, it means that you've finished the game. That may be sad and all, but it happens to every game in existence. Buying gold to give yourself a purple hat doesn't get you any more interesting content to do - it just means you're wearing a purple hat while you're doing your mind-numbing MC runs.
Gold buyers are like the people who think you need Air Jordans to have fun playing basketball.
Am I the only one who plays WoW that doesn't get the whole "I must grind for hours and have a bajillion gold pieces to buy every awesome item in the game" mentality?
.0001% drop off of a giant owlbear's second cousin. I don't understand how having the best item is such a requirement for the fun of the game, because it's only SPECIFIC personal requirements for items that necessitate grinding or lots of cash. I've got my epic mount - I paid for it with herbs that I collect as I do the other things I find interesting, a couple drops (while I was doing other things, again), and finding good deals on the auction house.
:P
I'm level 60. When I want to play, I either go
a) Kill things or players that are challenging for fun.
b) Complete quests that sound interesting (or maybe have a neat item).
or
c) Grab a couple guildmates and run an instance, which for the most part is fun and challenging, and possibly gets me some loot.
None of these require that I buy gold, grind endlessly, or have uber items.
What does require grinding endlessly? Deciding that I *must* have the awesome staff of awesomeness that is a
My character has solid gear for someone whose guild doesn't run the 40-man instances, and I haven't been playing long enough for running one of the high level 5-man instances to be boring.
There are plenty of things to do that don't require grinding in any MMO that I have played for more than a month. It's only when people decide that the point of their playing is to get X weapon, which requires a lot of effort. I don't see why people can't be happy with just the good stuff they get incidentally while do other things that are, you know, actually fun. I mean, if you've been playing the game for months and months and already HAVE all that stuff... then why not just buy another game and move on (or just grind it, since you've obviously been playing this game too much anyway). There's NO reason a new character needs to buy gold or levels - the game's more fun before you max out your level anyway
Everyone think about what elementary school machines are actually used for, and what will actually be different on windows vs linux.
Teachers:
Web - firefox/ie, whatever, no difference.
Email - They probably use webmail, so no difference.
Grades (usually just in one big ol' spreadsheet per class unless your school actually has a competent tech guy) - our school was still doing it in works 3.0 or something, so switching to gnumeric or the OpenOffice.org equivalent won't really matter.
Lesson Plans - This is one that might actually be a toughie for adoption. My mom's school has a special lesson-plan maker program that the teachers are accustomed to using, and which probably doesn't export all their old lesson plans nicely to just doing it in OpenOffice or something. I know they had problems moving to OS X because the version they had couldn't print from classic.
Word Processing - They're probably using an archaic version of Word anyway, and OpenOffice so blatantly copies the Word interface (and everything wrong with it, rant rant) that once you convince them they can learn it, it should be ok.
The biggest problem with switching teachers is that, in general, elementary school teachers are some of the most tech-backward people you can find. They may have a PC at home that they understand BASIC things about, but they have no idea how to apply any of those lessons to what's at school if it's different. I saw one woman get stuck for 30 minutes because she couldn't figure out how to insert her floppy drive into the external drive on the new mac at school instead of having a slot on the computer itself. They don't like change, and so you'll want to set things up as easily and as similar to windows as possible to them. Clear off all the default krap that KDE installs and give them a simple list of things they'll want to do on the desktop. Hell, relable OpenOffice writer to Word and you'll probably have things a lot easier. Just like when I install Firefox for someone I always just replace the link on their "Internet" icon.
However, teachers don't spend much time on the computer - they're too busy teaching. Get those few things running fine for them and they won't notice the difference too much until something's broken.
School secretaries:
Standard secretary stuff. They might actually use a real email client. They will likely be more tech-savvy than the teachers, but only somewhat. The biggest thing to remember is that they are always overworked, so you want to make sure that you can get everything they need working and working WITHOUT more hassles than they used to deal with if you want to get them behind you. Set up a test system with all their stuff, then spend some time with them using it but having the option of their old one to work out everything they need differently.
The biggest issue with using something no one knows is that they will have problems troubleshooting or changing the little things that they would know how to do in windows. Like how to install a new printer, or install a new package. You've got to find some way around those problems by doing it for them or having a simplified user guide for things they're likely to do. Or you can just leave them alone, and have a multi-OS environment. At my mom's school, the teachers all run eMacs but the secretary has a PC (at her own request, I think, because it's what she knows).
Kids:
First of all, despite what every random jerk at the capitol wants to believe, kids younger than 7 or so can't do jack that's actually useful or very educational on a computer. The real usefulness of a computer to education is in the web, in wikipedia and google scholar or dictionary.com or whatever, as well as a word processor. And to make use of that, you kindof have to know how to read. So, for older kids, as long as OpenOffice reads their word files from home successfully, you have no problems. They probably have a different version of word at home (or, gasp, wordperfect. You don't know how many times I was called in to hel
Note that since that fiasco they have complied with almost every term requested by the Konqueror developers, setting up a cvs visible external to apple and working with the KDE developers to get them security clearance to see the apple proprietary stuff.
Just because they were slow in doing it because they were busy getting a project to market doesn't make them evil, since they did make a significant turnaround in this space. if you're going to criticise them (rightly) for following the bare minimum initially, you can at least mention that they have improved significantly since then.
The company I worked for had an activex page for their testing lab that would let you reimage the machine.
Yes, you heard that. You completely swapped out your version of Windows FROM A WEB PAGE, with default IE settings on some versions of windows. And this was a capability that was supposed to be there, with the correct security settings.
Even since I saw that there's no one who can convince me that ActiveX is a good idea from a security standpoint. Even if that is turned off by default (as it is on newer windows versions)... how many users go clicking on things they don't understand?
Why can't they make two apps the use the same rendering core - one that only runs the internet, and one for these fancy scripting own-my-box purposes?
It would be nice if someone combined the scale of WoW with some of the advantages of tabletop gaming.
I mean, have a full time staff of the sort of people who work at the renn fairs actually playing the major NPCs and monsters.
Imagine that if your raid got to the lower depths of Molten core and instead of a scripted encounter there were actual players behind the monsters.
NWN has a DM mode you can do, but I haven't heard of anything like this applied on an MMO scale. I can just see a lot of room for a more real experience.
Heck, even make a it a tiered system where valued members of the community can enter the lower npc ranks with different functions in return for a waive of the monthly fee.
I just see all of the great player-created worlds that blend almost seamlessly in some MUDs I've played, and I can't help wondering what neat things you could do to match those with a modern MMO.
Sorry, then-current PCs. When it was actually new, not after Moto completely stalled on it.
And as someone who used to game on a G3 300, and read every benchmark and test he could find, it was my experience that it ran about as pfast as a PII 350. Which was what was current when I bought the machine.
And since there were 604e's at 300 mhz before that, and teh 604e was actually faster clock/clock than G3... that would make it faster than PII's at the time. Which it was, by every benchmark (third party, not apple) I found when i was looking into buying a computer then.
It was a helluva a lot more expensive, but it was darned fast.
But these sorts of projects are what the guy actually cares about.
After he made his initial fortune (in medical devices) he started up an organization called FIRST, designed to get more smart kids interested in engineering, and to help our culture value problem solving more than drama. Since then the organization has grown to include thousands of teams, tens of thousands of high schoolers in countries all around the world.
I've been working with one of those teams for three years, and every year Kamen stands up and gives a speech, not about how much fun we're going to have building robots, but about his vision for what we can do to solve these sort of engineering problems, to bring clean water to those who need it, etc. He's done a lot of good work, aside from his kind of whacky human transport device, and for all that his speeches are about as depressing and boring as you can get, it's very clear that this is where his heart is. He's put a ton of money and effort into getting people into engineering so that some day if he can't solve these sorts of problem someone will.
And for as bored as I am every time I have to sit through him talking about it, I can admire that. This is about things a lot more important than a goofy looking scooter.
Yep. I didn't say it was likely :-/
One of the reasons that netflicks is so popular is its HUGE selection. I can see a bunch of advantages for Blockbuster to be able to match that selection.
No idea what their current deal with the MPAA is, though. I think there's something special with new releases, at least, where they don't actually keep as many copies as they have the first month. Not sure if they just sell them in store or if they have something worked out with distributors for it.
In any case, though, blockbuster is a huge chain. Even if they could only rent out as many digital copies as they own DVD's, you could steal rentals from one store (or just a big warehouse somewhere) to use them somewhere else. As long as there aren't more than X copies of Dude Where's My Car in circulation at any one time... meh, the MPAA would still find some way to sue them.
Still would be nice to have more companies bridge the online world and the normal one they're used to.