Kids who don't like reading fall into one of two categories. Firstly, they aren't good at it, so it is really hard for them to understand what they are reading, so they can't enjoy it. Secondly, they are reading books that the don't find interesting. Finding books that are interesting are key to making people want to read. I did very well in school, however, I wasn't the kind of kid who read a lot of books, even skipped reading a few of the required books because they just didn't interest me at all. I think we should move away from having 1 book that all the kids on the class have to read, and just focus on getting kids to read something. I think the paying kids to read books was ultimately successful because they didn't restrain which books the kids could read. Read a book, get $2. That's simple. And the students are going to find the books that are most enjoyable for them to read. Oh, and if they find stuff they like to read, and read a lot, then their skills wil improve, and the first problem will be gone. Saying you don't like reading is like saying you don't like watching TV, or listening to music. It's not that you don't like it, it's that you don't like specific kinds of content you are being forced to read/watch/listen to.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I had a conversation with my dad about software patents, and he says it's the same in his industry (fertilizer and seed treatments). The same thing that happen in the software industry, such as broad patents that cover everything, and patenting stuff that has been done for the past 10 years, shows up in other industries too. I don't think there's anything specific about the software industry when it comes to bad patents. I think they probably exist in all industries. If you look at the number of patents being generated and the number of truly new technologies coming out, I would have to say that I don't think any industry is safe.
I'm still waiting for the next batch of Console to come around with no disc slot. Everything gets downloaded over the internet. Possible some proprietary media that works via flash memory. No input ports, not expansion ports, just wireless controllers, and downloadable games. Kind of like the PSP GO, but a full fledged console. It's the only way to make it so that you can't pirate games. I'm not sure if it would fly, but if the big 3 all did it, you wouldn't have much of a choice, except to not play.
But that's the big problem isn't it. Why does it cost $50 million to create a game. It costs $50 million for a movie because some actors demand $20 million just to be in the movie. It's not like games programmers are asking for such large salaries. I've had more fun playing independant games on Wii Ware then I have playing some of the full on commercial games. Also, I think they take away a lot of the risk if they just made more $1 million games, and sold them for $10 a piece then to make a $50 million game and try to sell it for $60.
But you don't have to fill it up with music. There's also video. Start downloading iTunes movie rentals, and you could fill the thing up for $50. Also there's a lot of other stuff you can put on there for free, like podcasts and photos you own. Also, I don't get why anybody has the 30+GB ipod. I got an old 4GB Nano, and it has way more than enough space. You don't have to bring every song you own with you. That's a nice thing to be able to do, but not necessary.
Well, you can't count them like that, because MSIE had a huge market shared, so it really isn't fair to give it a weight of 1. You would most likely be giving IE a weight of 90, Firefox 5, and 5 distributed to everything else.
The patent for GIF expired in 2003-2004, depending on where you live. However, because many browsers lacked good support, it wasn't used until that same time, or maybe a couple years before. So you had a small window of a few years where PNG was supported on most browsers, and GIF patents still existed. Also, nobody ever got sued for using GIF on their website. So it basically solved something that wasn't an issue. I really don't think that anybody would have used PNG at all, if it didn't offer some benefits (apart from lack of patents) over GIF.
My point is, is that it is getting easier to sell with each passing privacy problem that people encounter the the centralized social networks. Many people have accounts on many social networks anyway (twitter, facebook, myspace). It would only be necessary that you get people to sign up on the new distributed network, and once they see the advantages, get them to use it as their primary service. You'd have to have some centralized data for the people who just weren't interested in holding their own data. But for those who were interested in holding their own data, it would be a big plus.
Wouldn't it make more sense to develop a system where people could host their own information on their own servers (or their ISP) who they trust? It wouldn't be that difficult to design a set of protocols for social networking services running on many different web hosts to communicate and share information in a much more private manner, such that it can only be seen between friends. It would also help to spread out the load quite a bit, and by distributing the information, make it much harder to profit from selling the data. There's probably enough bandwidth and space in a single, $10, shared hosting plan support 100 facebook users. So for 10 cents a month, you could host your social network information with someone you trust, and not have to worry as much about them selling it all. And at least we wouldn't have to worry about somebody owning all of the data. Seems like a big problem to tackle, getting everyone to sign on, but with all the problems with privacy on MySpace and Facebook, I think that a lot of people are just waiting for a better solution.
I live in Canada, and it seem that we are kind of like the US in this regard. At least from what I'm reading. We have electronic money transfers, and we can pay credit card, utility and almost anything else on our PCs at home. However cheques still exist. Most businesses accept them as a form of payment, especially the ones I mentioned above (utilities, credit card, basically anybody who mails you a bill). I think a lot of it is due to the older generation just not catching on to the new way of doing things. One odd thing is that it seems that the ones least likely to deal with money transfers (at least in my experience) is landlords. Even large corporate ones that own many buildings. They require you to pay by cheque. I'm not sure why this is. You would think it would be easier to just automatically withdraw the money from your account each month, rather than process thousands of cheques, but they don't. So, at least in Canada, and I'm pretty sure the US is the same, we can do wire transfers, and many of us never use cheques at all. However, there is a large population of people who do everything by cheque, and refuse to change their ways.
I a programmer, so naturally, I spend all day looking at the computer. My eyes don't get tired looking at an LCD all day long. I really don't get it either. I've ready plenty of books on my laptop. No problems there either. Oh, and I use a PC, so I don't think it's the font thing.
Which leads to some good advice. If at all possible, pick a language for which a good debugger is available. Python debugging works pretty well in Eclipse. From the list of languages, it seems that all of them have good debuggers and IDE's available (apart from pascal, it may or may not, I'm not familiar with it). Teach the students to learn to use the debugger early. Don't even mention stuff like printf debugging. It will just harm them for life.
We've called a couple times, and sometimes they say take the kid to the family doctor. Other times it was the emergency room. A doctors visit costs a lot less than a trip to the emergency room, and can be scheduled, and requires less waiting around, and doesn't clog up the emergency room with something that really isn't an emergency. Anything that keeps non-emergencies out of the emergency room is a good thing.
Ontario (in Canada) has a hotline you can call to get help. It's staffed by registered nurses, not doctors. However it works pretty well, because the point of it is really to tell you if you should just to direct you to the next point of care. Be it the emergency room, walk-in clinic, family physician, or just a little bed rest. Nurses are perfect qualified to at least direct you to where you should be going after hearing the symptoms, and it's a lot cheaper than having doctors on the phone. I think the main point of it was to keep people from going to the emergency room simply because they had a cold. Which happens way more often then it should.
I very much agree with this. By the time you get to college, it isn't the teacher's responsibility to ensure that you are paying attention. The professor is supposed to present the material in a way that gets the point across. If you don't want to listen, that is your own problem. In my day, laptops weren't so popular. Probably about 1 in 20 people had a laptop. We still had tons of other things to not pay attention with. Be it Tetris on the TI-86, or just doodling with a pen and paper, or doing your assignment for some other class that is due in 3 hours. If the student doesn't want to pay attention, they won't. They are adults. They should be at least responsible enough to do what needs to be done to learn the material. That doesn't always include going to class and listening to the professor. With the quality of some professors, you could learn more my specifically not going to class.
In my highschool we all used WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Corel Draw/PhotoPaint, and FileMaker Pro. Does that mean nobody from my highschool is capable of using MS Word, Excel, Photoship, or Access? No it doesn't. Because in my day, they taught people how to use computers in general. How to look for stuff in the menus, and told us that we should read the help files if we got stuck. I guess there are quite a bit of people who can't operate a computer if something moves. But those kind of people would probably be screwed anyway. Look at the differences from Windows XP to Windows Vista/7. Look at all the changes in Office 2007. These people get lost every upgrade anyway. Switching to a whole new OS with a whole new suite of applications wouldn't be any more difficult on them. They forget things from day to day, even within the same application.
But if your life and/or job depends on running photoshop, maybe you could just shell out and buy Windows. Why would you even want to put yourself through the pain of using a VM or Crossover. Just use windows. If it's your jobs, you should probably have a whole computer dedicated to only running photoshop. If you need Linux for some other task, just have a separate computer. Crossover is a nice thing if you're just running games or a couple simple Windows apps. But when it's part of your job, what exactly is the problem of running Windows. The cost of Windows is extremely low compared to all the other software you have to run.
I would have to say, that the cost of off the shelf software has very little to do with the cost of running a hospital. A copy of MS Office professional costs $400 on Amazon. Windows 7 Ultimate costs $300. That's nothing compared to the cost of the actual people working in the hospital. Or if you compare it to the cost of medical supplies. They probably spend more on latex gloves per year than they spend on off the shelf software like Windows and Office. Most of the expenses are specialty machines, tools and software.
Another variation I've heard on that is telling the user that there might be dust in their connection. So they should unplug the connection, blow on the plug and then plug it back in. It's a good way of getting the user to ensure the thing is plugged in, without directly asking them if they checked to see if it is plugged in.
Exactly. My original Nintendo didn't take any time at all to boot up. Even all the major consoles boot up in a few seconds. When you don't have to explore the system for new hardware and you can just load a preconfigured image into memory, things go a lot faster. I think there should be ROM chips you can flash, and you only have to reflash them if you have a hardware change.
I don't know what all the fuss is about. Really my code (apart from Slashdot not showing tabs) should be easily read by any programmer. I think that using a for loop to loop over my array of values is quite straighforward, and you can tell what it's doing without thinking about it. If a simple loop with 8 lines in it is too unmaintainable, then we really need some better programmers. Also, in both your queries, you still haven't added your parameter values to your command object. You'v only created the SQL statement. Creating the SQL statement can be done with an easy join statement. Adding the paramter values to the command, not so much. You could do a list comprehension, but I didn't want to get into a lot of syntactic sugar that wouldn't be supported in many languages. A for loop is probably the simplest and most readable code and should be readily understtood and maintained even by the least experienced coders.
Slashdot Mirror
Kids who don't like reading fall into one of two categories. Firstly, they aren't good at it, so it is really hard for them to understand what they are reading, so they can't enjoy it. Secondly, they are reading books that the don't find interesting. Finding books that are interesting are key to making people want to read. I did very well in school, however, I wasn't the kind of kid who read a lot of books, even skipped reading a few of the required books because they just didn't interest me at all. I think we should move away from having 1 book that all the kids on the class have to read, and just focus on getting kids to read something. I think the paying kids to read books was ultimately successful because they didn't restrain which books the kids could read. Read a book, get $2. That's simple. And the students are going to find the books that are most enjoyable for them to read. Oh, and if they find stuff they like to read, and read a lot, then their skills wil improve, and the first problem will be gone. Saying you don't like reading is like saying you don't like watching TV, or listening to music. It's not that you don't like it, it's that you don't like specific kinds of content you are being forced to read/watch/listen to.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I had a conversation with my dad about software patents, and he says it's the same in his industry (fertilizer and seed treatments). The same thing that happen in the software industry, such as broad patents that cover everything, and patenting stuff that has been done for the past 10 years, shows up in other industries too. I don't think there's anything specific about the software industry when it comes to bad patents. I think they probably exist in all industries. If you look at the number of patents being generated and the number of truly new technologies coming out, I would have to say that I don't think any industry is safe.
I'm still waiting for the next batch of Console to come around with no disc slot. Everything gets downloaded over the internet. Possible some proprietary media that works via flash memory. No input ports, not expansion ports, just wireless controllers, and downloadable games. Kind of like the PSP GO, but a full fledged console. It's the only way to make it so that you can't pirate games. I'm not sure if it would fly, but if the big 3 all did it, you wouldn't have much of a choice, except to not play.
But that's the big problem isn't it. Why does it cost $50 million to create a game. It costs $50 million for a movie because some actors demand $20 million just to be in the movie. It's not like games programmers are asking for such large salaries. I've had more fun playing independant games on Wii Ware then I have playing some of the full on commercial games. Also, I think they take away a lot of the risk if they just made more $1 million games, and sold them for $10 a piece then to make a $50 million game and try to sell it for $60.
But you don't have to fill it up with music. There's also video. Start downloading iTunes movie rentals, and you could fill the thing up for $50. Also there's a lot of other stuff you can put on there for free, like podcasts and photos you own. Also, I don't get why anybody has the 30+GB ipod. I got an old 4GB Nano, and it has way more than enough space. You don't have to bring every song you own with you. That's a nice thing to be able to do, but not necessary.
Well, you can't count them like that, because MSIE had a huge market shared, so it really isn't fair to give it a weight of 1. You would most likely be giving IE a weight of 90, Firefox 5, and 5 distributed to everything else.
The patent for GIF expired in 2003-2004, depending on where you live. However, because many browsers lacked good support, it wasn't used until that same time, or maybe a couple years before. So you had a small window of a few years where PNG was supported on most browsers, and GIF patents still existed. Also, nobody ever got sued for using GIF on their website. So it basically solved something that wasn't an issue. I really don't think that anybody would have used PNG at all, if it didn't offer some benefits (apart from lack of patents) over GIF.
PNG was added because it supported alpha level transparency, and 24 bit color, in a non-lossy image format. Patent free was just an extra bonus.
My point is, is that it is getting easier to sell with each passing privacy problem that people encounter the the centralized social networks. Many people have accounts on many social networks anyway (twitter, facebook, myspace). It would only be necessary that you get people to sign up on the new distributed network, and once they see the advantages, get them to use it as their primary service. You'd have to have some centralized data for the people who just weren't interested in holding their own data. But for those who were interested in holding their own data, it would be a big plus.
Wouldn't it make more sense to develop a system where people could host their own information on their own servers (or their ISP) who they trust? It wouldn't be that difficult to design a set of protocols for social networking services running on many different web hosts to communicate and share information in a much more private manner, such that it can only be seen between friends. It would also help to spread out the load quite a bit, and by distributing the information, make it much harder to profit from selling the data. There's probably enough bandwidth and space in a single, $10, shared hosting plan support 100 facebook users. So for 10 cents a month, you could host your social network information with someone you trust, and not have to worry as much about them selling it all. And at least we wouldn't have to worry about somebody owning all of the data. Seems like a big problem to tackle, getting everyone to sign on, but with all the problems with privacy on MySpace and Facebook, I think that a lot of people are just waiting for a better solution.
I live in Canada, and it seem that we are kind of like the US in this regard. At least from what I'm reading. We have electronic money transfers, and we can pay credit card, utility and almost anything else on our PCs at home. However cheques still exist. Most businesses accept them as a form of payment, especially the ones I mentioned above (utilities, credit card, basically anybody who mails you a bill). I think a lot of it is due to the older generation just not catching on to the new way of doing things. One odd thing is that it seems that the ones least likely to deal with money transfers (at least in my experience) is landlords. Even large corporate ones that own many buildings. They require you to pay by cheque. I'm not sure why this is. You would think it would be easier to just automatically withdraw the money from your account each month, rather than process thousands of cheques, but they don't. So, at least in Canada, and I'm pretty sure the US is the same, we can do wire transfers, and many of us never use cheques at all. However, there is a large population of people who do everything by cheque, and refuse to change their ways.
I a programmer, so naturally, I spend all day looking at the computer. My eyes don't get tired looking at an LCD all day long. I really don't get it either. I've ready plenty of books on my laptop. No problems there either. Oh, and I use a PC, so I don't think it's the font thing.
Which leads to some good advice. If at all possible, pick a language for which a good debugger is available. Python debugging works pretty well in Eclipse. From the list of languages, it seems that all of them have good debuggers and IDE's available (apart from pascal, it may or may not, I'm not familiar with it). Teach the students to learn to use the debugger early. Don't even mention stuff like printf debugging. It will just harm them for life.
We've called a couple times, and sometimes they say take the kid to the family doctor. Other times it was the emergency room. A doctors visit costs a lot less than a trip to the emergency room, and can be scheduled, and requires less waiting around, and doesn't clog up the emergency room with something that really isn't an emergency. Anything that keeps non-emergencies out of the emergency room is a good thing.
Ontario (in Canada) has a hotline you can call to get help. It's staffed by registered nurses, not doctors. However it works pretty well, because the point of it is really to tell you if you should just to direct you to the next point of care. Be it the emergency room, walk-in clinic, family physician, or just a little bed rest. Nurses are perfect qualified to at least direct you to where you should be going after hearing the symptoms, and it's a lot cheaper than having doctors on the phone. I think the main point of it was to keep people from going to the emergency room simply because they had a cold. Which happens way more often then it should.
I very much agree with this. By the time you get to college, it isn't the teacher's responsibility to ensure that you are paying attention. The professor is supposed to present the material in a way that gets the point across. If you don't want to listen, that is your own problem. In my day, laptops weren't so popular. Probably about 1 in 20 people had a laptop. We still had tons of other things to not pay attention with. Be it Tetris on the TI-86, or just doodling with a pen and paper, or doing your assignment for some other class that is due in 3 hours. If the student doesn't want to pay attention, they won't. They are adults. They should be at least responsible enough to do what needs to be done to learn the material. That doesn't always include going to class and listening to the professor. With the quality of some professors, you could learn more my specifically not going to class.
Can we at least get Apple to stop trying to shove safari down my throat every time I upgrade iTunes?
In my highschool we all used WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Corel Draw/PhotoPaint, and FileMaker Pro. Does that mean nobody from my highschool is capable of using MS Word, Excel, Photoship, or Access? No it doesn't. Because in my day, they taught people how to use computers in general. How to look for stuff in the menus, and told us that we should read the help files if we got stuck. I guess there are quite a bit of people who can't operate a computer if something moves. But those kind of people would probably be screwed anyway. Look at the differences from Windows XP to Windows Vista/7. Look at all the changes in Office 2007. These people get lost every upgrade anyway. Switching to a whole new OS with a whole new suite of applications wouldn't be any more difficult on them. They forget things from day to day, even within the same application.
But if your life and/or job depends on running photoshop, maybe you could just shell out and buy Windows. Why would you even want to put yourself through the pain of using a VM or Crossover. Just use windows. If it's your jobs, you should probably have a whole computer dedicated to only running photoshop. If you need Linux for some other task, just have a separate computer. Crossover is a nice thing if you're just running games or a couple simple Windows apps. But when it's part of your job, what exactly is the problem of running Windows. The cost of Windows is extremely low compared to all the other software you have to run.
I would have to say, that the cost of off the shelf software has very little to do with the cost of running a hospital. A copy of MS Office professional costs $400 on Amazon. Windows 7 Ultimate costs $300. That's nothing compared to the cost of the actual people working in the hospital. Or if you compare it to the cost of medical supplies. They probably spend more on latex gloves per year than they spend on off the shelf software like Windows and Office. Most of the expenses are specialty machines, tools and software.
I think that Walowitz's phone is the best demonstration of speech recognition.
Another variation I've heard on that is telling the user that there might be dust in their connection. So they should unplug the connection, blow on the plug and then plug it back in. It's a good way of getting the user to ensure the thing is plugged in, without directly asking them if they checked to see if it is plugged in.
Exactly. My original Nintendo didn't take any time at all to boot up. Even all the major consoles boot up in a few seconds. When you don't have to explore the system for new hardware and you can just load a preconfigured image into memory, things go a lot faster. I think there should be ROM chips you can flash, and you only have to reflash them if you have a hardware change.
You could probably write an emulator for the hardware a lot easier than you could rewrite all the software that runs on this thing
I don't know what all the fuss is about. Really my code (apart from Slashdot not showing tabs) should be easily read by any programmer. I think that using a for loop to loop over my array of values is quite straighforward, and you can tell what it's doing without thinking about it. If a simple loop with 8 lines in it is too unmaintainable, then we really need some better programmers. Also, in both your queries, you still haven't added your parameter values to your command object. You'v only created the SQL statement. Creating the SQL statement can be done with an easy join statement. Adding the paramter values to the command, not so much. You could do a list comprehension, but I didn't want to get into a lot of syntactic sugar that wouldn't be supported in many languages. A for loop is probably the simplest and most readable code and should be readily understtood and maintained even by the least experienced coders.