That's a case of bad policies, rather then technology being inherently a bad thing.
Teachers should be allowed to produce material that is relevant to their class, in which case technology has a lot of potential to provide a class with a more interesting lesson.
In the UK most schools are now using "interactive whiteboards" which combine a projector with a touch sensitive whiteboard that digitises anything written on it. While that just seems like a nice gimick to most people, it actually allows the teacher to spend more time teaching, since they can write up what they want on the board before they get to a lesson, and display it like a slide show, instead of having to write everything individually, and then annotate it as the lesson goes on.
Firstly, that's not really the case in quite a lot of areas these days. college and then university seem to be the default option for most kids, who don't get to hear about the alternatives at all.
And I don't see how it would be a bad thing if it wasn't. Some people just don't have a need for college, for example one of my friends qualified as a brick layer out of school by doing an apprenticeship, and is much happier then if he'd been forced to spend two years learning subjects he had no use for, and then having to find a job without any useful qualifications.
I'm a software developer, and dropped out of college after a year or so, because it bored me silly. I'd much rather learn something through doing it, instead of being lectured on irrelevant subjects - because lets face it, as a business application developer, why do I need to know how a CPU works at the transistor level. All I need to know is that it does.
There should be much more promotion of alternative routes into work, because for a lot of people, that's all university will ever be, and the people who really want to go and learn the deep theory can go and do that at university.
I also like the idea of equipping cars with wireless stuff like this. The owner reports it missing, the car starts reporting its location to the cops and they can nab the perps.
They already do. Most traffic police cars in the UK now have a device that can home in on a stolen vehicle that's transmitting it's location, allowing them to track it down again.
The question isn't whether it's possible, the question is whether you know how to write the software to do it, or happen to know somebody who'd be interested in doing it.
Not your fault, since that's just how the mobile network names seem to be.
It has however given me some insight into what people must feel like when our floor full of developers, sysadmins, and network engineers goes to the pub on a Friday night.
Supreme Commander does a similar thing if running on a multi-core system, putting rendering, physics, and AI players on different cores.
As a lot of people have said already, it'll be the games industry that makes use of this sort of thing first, since they have a lot of things that can be easily run in parallel.
Personally I think it's an interesting idea, but full use won't be made of multiple cores until developers learn to think in terms of parallel processes, instead of the largely procedural model we're using now.
Americans always surprise me... instead of wishing for a working public health service, you wish for books and whatever medical supplies you think you might possibly need to be available.
I know it's off-topic, but the thought of people doing as much as they can to avoid seeing a medical professional because it's too expensive scares me.
There is an amount of energy required to travel between points in the solar system.
That isn't the same as the cost of that energy. I'm not expecting warp drive, but there is potential for massively cheaper energy production. Fusion still stands a (slim) chance of working, and solar power could make a lot of sense if panels that can produce enough energy can be created.
I'm willing to accept that going to space isn't going to be as cheap as sticking around on Earth, but at some point it may become cheaper then the alternatives available.
I'm not a rocket scientist, so I don't know enough about the technology to give you a roadmap as to how we'll get there, but I'm not going to sit back and say "we can't do it now, so we'll never be able to do it".
If everyone took that approach to things, we'd still be stuck in the stone age talking about how it's impossible to create heat with some sticks and dry leaves.
Certainly with current technology it's not going to be profitable, but who knows what equipment we're going to have in the next twenty or thirty years?
The point is that large amounts of markup in the wild is invalid. That's not going to change any time soon, so browsers have to know what to do about it.
If you want to know when you've made a mistake, run your markup through a validator (http://validator.w3.org) which will tell you exactly what is and isn't correct.
Sadly in most cases you'll then have to break it again to make things work in IE, but that's just the way it is when it comes to web development at the moment.
If they call your bluff, let the geeks eat 'em alive with technical questions
That's always good fun - we had a sales call from a company trying to sell some "job scheduling" software to us, and by the end of the call there were fifteen people listening in on the speakerphone, throwing questions for the sales guy to the person doing the talking.
"Is that cron compatiable?" "What about at jobs, we have some of those as well?"
Sadly I was on holiday the day we scheduled them to come in "for a chat" about their product. Would have loved to see the look on their sales guy's face.
I would agree, but they HAVE to shoot for Acid 3 compatibility for the next release or browser nerds will be up in arms and it will be a huge PR problem.
It'll only be a PR problem in the small circle of "browser nerds", everyone else will just get on with their lives, having realised there's more to life then what score your favourite browser gets in the Acid 3 test.
It may be wrong, but I only discovered xkcd 6 months ago, when I started my current job and was suddenly surronded by bona-fide geeks, rather then dayjob web developers and designers.
When I had one on loan for a short while I pulled the hard drive just to see how accessible it was
Remind me never to lend you anything... I have a feeling you might hand it back to me, along with a bag of "spare" screws that were left over after you put it back together again.
If you can cope with the limitation of having your drives in USB enclosures, the Linksys NSLU2 can make an excellent NAS appliance.
You can reflash it with assorted flavours of Linux, it's got very low power consumption, and the only noise it's going to make is when the disks spin up.
You clearly don't live in London, where it seems the more expensive a place is, the more popular it is.
I have no idea why that's the case (people hoping to spot a celebrity maybe), but it's usually quite a good way of working out which places you can afford to have a drink at, and which ones are likely to charge you £10 for a glass of water.
It's a bit off topic, but the curses version of btlaunchmany is great for that sort of thing - give it a directory to watch, and it'll automatically start downloading any torrent files you put in it, giving you a curses GUI to show how things are going.
I'd much rather have well designed static levels, then a bunch of identical blocks stuck together in slightly different orders.
I wouldn't have even minded so much if the above ground levels had been better designed - I live in London, and work around the area the begining of the game is meant to be based in, and they did an awful job of recreating it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a case of bad policies, rather then technology being inherently a bad thing.
Teachers should be allowed to produce material that is relevant to their class, in which case technology has a lot of potential to provide a class with a more interesting lesson.
In the UK most schools are now using "interactive whiteboards" which combine a projector with a touch sensitive whiteboard that digitises anything written on it. While that just seems like a nice gimick to most people, it actually allows the teacher to spend more time teaching, since they can write up what they want on the board before they get to a lesson, and display it like a slide show, instead of having to write everything individually, and then annotate it as the lesson goes on.
Firstly, that's not really the case in quite a lot of areas these days. college and then university seem to be the default option for most kids, who don't get to hear about the alternatives at all.
And I don't see how it would be a bad thing if it wasn't. Some people just don't have a need for college, for example one of my friends qualified as a brick layer out of school by doing an apprenticeship, and is much happier then if he'd been forced to spend two years learning subjects he had no use for, and then having to find a job without any useful qualifications.
I'm a software developer, and dropped out of college after a year or so, because it bored me silly. I'd much rather learn something through doing it, instead of being lectured on irrelevant subjects - because lets face it, as a business application developer, why do I need to know how a CPU works at the transistor level. All I need to know is that it does.
There should be much more promotion of alternative routes into work, because for a lot of people, that's all university will ever be, and the people who really want to go and learn the deep theory can go and do that at university.
It's where you pop up a window on someones computer, and persuade them to watch some porn by claiming to be their bank.
They already do. Most traffic police cars in the UK now have a device that can home in on a stolen vehicle that's transmitting it's location, allowing them to track it down again.
If you want a camera, buy a camera.
I'm getting really sick of the fetish for everyone taking their photos with shitty cameras built into mobile phones.
Isn't the whole point? It's Open Source.
The question isn't whether it's possible, the question is whether you know how to write the software to do it, or happen to know somebody who'd be interested in doing it.
Wow... my head is exploding with acronyms.
Not your fault, since that's just how the mobile network names seem to be.
It has however given me some insight into what people must feel like when our floor full of developers, sysadmins, and network engineers goes to the pub on a Friday night.
Ladies and gentlemen, start your bittorrent clients!
Supreme Commander does a similar thing if running on a multi-core system, putting rendering, physics, and AI players on different cores.
As a lot of people have said already, it'll be the games industry that makes use of this sort of thing first, since they have a lot of things that can be easily run in parallel.
Personally I think it's an interesting idea, but full use won't be made of multiple cores until developers learn to think in terms of parallel processes, instead of the largely procedural model we're using now.
Americans always surprise me... instead of wishing for a working public health service, you wish for books and whatever medical supplies you think you might possibly need to be available.
I know it's off-topic, but the thought of people doing as much as they can to avoid seeing a medical professional because it's too expensive scares me.
There is an amount of energy required to travel between points in the solar system.
That isn't the same as the cost of that energy. I'm not expecting warp drive, but there is potential for massively cheaper energy production. Fusion still stands a (slim) chance of working, and solar power could make a lot of sense if panels that can produce enough energy can be created.
I'm willing to accept that going to space isn't going to be as cheap as sticking around on Earth, but at some point it may become cheaper then the alternatives available.
I'm not a rocket scientist, so I don't know enough about the technology to give you a roadmap as to how we'll get there, but I'm not going to sit back and say "we can't do it now, so we'll never be able to do it".
If everyone took that approach to things, we'd still be stuck in the stone age talking about how it's impossible to create heat with some sticks and dry leaves.
Why will space "never be profitable"?
Certainly with current technology it's not going to be profitable, but who knows what equipment we're going to have in the next twenty or thirty years?
The point is that large amounts of markup in the wild is invalid. That's not going to change any time soon, so browsers have to know what to do about it.
If you want to know when you've made a mistake, run your markup through a validator (http://validator.w3.org) which will tell you exactly what is and isn't correct.
Sadly in most cases you'll then have to break it again to make things work in IE, but that's just the way it is when it comes to web development at the moment.
That's always good fun - we had a sales call from a company trying to sell some "job scheduling" software to us, and by the end of the call there were fifteen people listening in on the speakerphone, throwing questions for the sales guy to the person doing the talking.
"Is that cron compatiable?"
"What about at jobs, we have some of those as well?"
Sadly I was on holiday the day we scheduled them to come in "for a chat" about their product. Would have loved to see the look on their sales guy's face.
You could use British Rail, but it'll cost you as much to get to Manchester as it does to get you into space.
It'll only be a PR problem in the small circle of "browser nerds", everyone else will just get on with their lives, having realised there's more to life then what score your favourite browser gets in the Acid 3 test.
It may be wrong, but I only discovered xkcd 6 months ago, when I started my current job and was suddenly surronded by bona-fide geeks, rather then dayjob web developers and designers.
So does a Christmas tree, but I wouldn't use one to store my data on.
One of the first things I did when I bought my MacBook was to double the RAM, and replace the hard disk with a 250Gb one.
And yes, that was because of the horrendous premiums they charge on their hardware upgrades.
Remind me never to lend you anything... I have a feeling you might hand it back to me, along with a bag of "spare" screws that were left over after you put it back together again.
If you can cope with the limitation of having your drives in USB enclosures, the Linksys NSLU2 can make an excellent NAS appliance.
You can reflash it with assorted flavours of Linux, it's got very low power consumption, and the only noise it's going to make is when the disks spin up.
You clearly don't live in London, where it seems the more expensive a place is, the more popular it is.
I have no idea why that's the case (people hoping to spot a celebrity maybe), but it's usually quite a good way of working out which places you can afford to have a drink at, and which ones are likely to charge you £10 for a glass of water.
It's a bit off topic, but the curses version of btlaunchmany is great for that sort of thing - give it a directory to watch, and it'll automatically start downloading any torrent files you put in it, giving you a curses GUI to show how things are going.
You forgot selling pirated videos. Remember, BitTorrent supports terroists - always make sure you buy genuine DVDs.
I'd much rather have well designed static levels, then a bunch of identical blocks stuck together in slightly different orders.
I wouldn't have even minded so much if the above ground levels had been better designed - I live in London, and work around the area the begining of the game is meant to be based in, and they did an awful job of recreating it.