My first PC-compatible was a Zenith 386sx. It had a 40MB drive that I upgraded to a 120MB drive...lots of space! Before that I was a TRS-80 die-hard since the late 70's.
In 1994 I bought a Gateway 2000 Pentium 90 with a 540MB drive. At the time, it was the largest hard drive you could get without having to install a special driver or get a BIOS update to cross he boundary in disk size.
Is what she wants legal? I don't know. Is her taking of your notes out of your bag legal? Probably not. I don't know.
However, that she asks the question in the first place means that she doesn't want her students to learn. She just wants them to pass tests and graduate. She is not a teacher.
The purpose of teaching is to pass information from one generation to the next, hoping the next generation turns the information into new knowledge. People don't have perfect recall. They need notes and books to retain information. If the teacher doesn't want you to keep your notes then she is paranoid about cheating, and doesn't care if you learn anything or not. If I were a student, I would refuse and force her to take it to the dean, then to the police if necessary.
Except they don't. The LED's themselves might last forever, but the circuit boards they're attached to don't. I have seem many traffic lights in the middle of summer have missing sections of lights, and others where sections flicker on and off like there's a loose connection. They look like pies with a wedge missing. Soon the light is replaced and it looks whole again...until the cycle repeats all over again.
Not only that, but people should stop using this as a crutch in general. The journey is worth the effort, even knowing that you can never reach the end. This is why I agreed with Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter and disagreed with The Emporer's New Mind by Penrose.
One of Penrose's conclusions was that any attempt at artificial intelligence is necessarily incomplete, so it won't be possible, while Hofstadter said that it is possible to successively approximate something intelligent, and we can learn a LOT about ourselves in the attempts, and that in itself is worth it.
At least that is one of the many things I got from the two books.
One word....FIRST.
NASA puts up a lot of money for high schools to start a FIRST team. And the people who participate are the same kind of people NASA needs in the future.
The next thing the robots who survive will learn is how not to be gullible. This is only if the experimenters built in hardware and/or software that either allows robots to observe other robots, or allows dying robots to signal to others that they ate poison at position X before they die. This will allow other robots to not eat the poison, and learn that the one robot deceived them.
The next thing these robots will learn is how to beat the crap out of the robot who deceived them. Then the robots will go into an existential quandary until they figure out who they are to believe. Researchers will think that these robots are broken because they have ceased to move when given an order and will be tempted to reset the robots and start over.
This is exactly false. Here is my experience. About 20 years ago I had a very heated argument with someone who claimed that vinyl played through a tube amplifier was so much better than a CD played through an expensive discreet (transistor) amplifier. I said "prove it"...so he did. He played Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" on his turntable. It sounded great. He then played a clean CD on his CD player, and it sounded very harsh, with very crisp high-ends. I was trying to discount it, but indeed the vinyl *DID* sound better. So the next thing I did was a little research (I searched Usenet and the university library...Google was a few years off yet).
I learned the reason why the CD sounded like crap. The exact same master used on the vinyl was used to make the CD. Frequency response on vinyl is not flat like it is on a CD, and so masters are mixed with the high frequencies amp'ed up for vinyl. If you use the same master on the CD, it is going to sound horrible. That is why "Digitally Remastered" was a big deal. In effect, they went from "AAD" to "ADD" (but not really) with the original studio tapes. The resulting CD's sounded fantastic. Unfortunately I was not able to do a retest with a good CD. Today "DDD" is common, and a complete remix is needed to create the vinyl..the opposite of what they used to have to do.
-- "Oh man, this isn't happening, it only THINKS it's happening!" -- "Do you believe in the Users?"..."Yeah, of course. I mean, if I don't have a User, then who wrote me?" -- "They better be there. I don't want to bust out of here and find nothing but a bunch of cold circuits waiting for me." -- "Those of you who continue to profess the belief in the Users, will get the standard, substandard training which will result in your eventual elimination. Those of you who renounce this superstitious and hysterical belief will be eligible to join the warrior elite of the MCP." -- "You can remove men like Alan and me from this system, but we helped create it. And our spirit lives on in every program we design for this computer."..."Walter, it's getting late and I've got better things to do than to have religious discussions with you."
Or Animaniacs..."And still the universe extends to a place that never ends which is maybe just inside a little jar!"
So we may be a VR program. Who says the computer running this simulation is digital? It could be an analog computer that can simulate our current laws of physics to infinite precision. So even if they guy's right, there's nothing new here.
After one year, WHY is it still so hard to find a Wii if it's still in such a tight race with the other consoles? I can find the others any day of the week, but unless I have a posse out looking for one, I can't get one.
But don't pay that price...I found one like this at OfficeMax for $40 about 3 years ago. It's about $50 now, when it's on sale.
When I put mine together, I turned the legs 90 degrees so I could move the desk aside when not being used and it wouldn't fall over (being braced by the chair bottom).
As it was explained to me when I asked about signing just such a NC agreement...
1. In a right-to-work state, they cannot keep you from working any gainful employment. And in order to get gainful employment, you need to have expertise in the field, which you also needed to get the job you're in.
2. This company was probably burned by an employee quitting and directly competing with an idea they got from that company, using "trade secrets" they learned while there. They can word a better NC agreement that doesn't restrict you so much. The one post I read about agreeing to pull out of common bids for a year is a good example.
3. Many companies have learned to work around NC agreements, by hiring you "provisionally", and assigning you good work that doesn't involve deep proprietary information for the period you're bound to.
So while it's largely unenforceable anyway, companies know how to work around the gray areas. So if you want to work at your current company, sign it or keep putting the company off like the other post on using the bureaucracy against itself. If you think you can find another job quickly, simply refuse to sign and dare them to fire you (it costs a lot of money to find a replacement). If you think you'll be competing against them *directly* in the future, then refuse to sign it, or sign it and be aware that you'll have to take more than the NC period to start competing. If you think you will be working in a similar field that doesn't directly compete (a HUGE employment pool, relatively), then sign it, or delay (this is the path I took), and let them worry about enforcing it later.
One caveat is that I didn't have to tell them every time I had an inventive bowel movement.
I had the idea which I haven't acted on yet, to go to Toys-R-Us, buy every toy hammer they have, and go to the nearest Comcast office and either hand out these hammers to customers going in to give to their customer service rep as a token of what the woman did, or just dump all the hammers in their lobby and leave as a more pointed protest. This would be a way to protest in a way that they could understand. If enough people did this, they'd have too many hammers to deal with.
When someone asks if you have insurance, you say YES! Then go to your renter's/home insurance agent and give them the FULL story. If they behave anything like the auto insurance industry, they will use all their legal muscle to recover costs.
Imagine a headline saying "Dell sued for exploding battery insurance company payments" for all those users who called their insurance companies.
OK. If I'm a farmer, minding my own business, and I harvest my corn, keeping a few ears for seeds next year, and next year I get sued for stealing genetically engineered corn seeds whose pollen blew in from a neighboring farm the year before, did I do something illegal?
At first, the answer was "yes", but recently some courts have decided to wake up and answer "no".
Actually, it's comparing Apples to LEMONS. Vista is the worst....OS....EVER.
When it takes 90 minutes to connect to a wireless router and mount a share drive, something is very wrong.
1. I just had to intuitively know that typing "cmd" in the SEARCH bar will get me a DOS prompt...there is no Start->Run by default. 2. There is no easy way to find the MAC address of the network cards through the GUI. See (1) about doing it in a DOS box. 3. The GUI has no idea of a tree for opening windows...it uses a graph. I tried to find the manual config for the wireless, and kept going in circles through links. I found the manual config eventually, but I don't know how to get back to it. 4. Connecting to a Buffalo LinkStation network share requires EDITING THE REGISTRY to make it work. Googling eventually found the answer, that Vista uses NTLMv3 while the world uses NTLMv2, and it's not compatible. Changing the registry so Vista uses v2 made it work.
Then after that I found...
5. It's easy to clean up the drive, just like in XP, but Vista allows you to remove the hibernate files...far too easily. This wouldn't be a big problem, except... 6. There is no GUI for rebuilding the hibernate file! Hibernate is now hidden in "Sleep". The only way to get the hibernate file back is to open a DOS window (see (1)) and run a command. Oh, and you have to run "cmd" as an administrator...even if you think your user account *is* an administrator (I suppose this is a Good Thing(tm).) 7. Much installed software cannot be removed. The new laptop came with MS Works on it. I wanted it gone, but the "Program..." icon in the control panel didn't offer an "uninstall" button. So Works is wasting space on the drive.
If any other company came out with software like this, it would be made irrelevant very quickly. Just ask WordPerfect (trying to shoehorn DOS shortcuts into a GUI-based system).
Yes, but believing this to be FUD, I wanted an independent source. Interesting that now that I *HAVE* RTFA, everything I said before still stands. Even the part about the conspiracy theory.
Independent corroberation. Try it sometime. It will be easier to pick out articles based on marketing (look up the bacteria Casei Immunitas), or somebody who just needs attention, or who needs to be published to keep his job.
This is all FUD. According to Wikipedia, and the links it provides, HFCS comes in three "flavors": 90% fructose, 55% fructose, and 42% fructose. The HFCS in sodas are 55% fructose. Previously, sodas were sweetened with sugar, which has 50% fructose. So you are only ingesting about 5% more fructose now than you were before. Hardly a big difference.
HFCS *IS NOT* to blame for obesity. Sitting in front of the TV all day is...watching mind-numbing shows, playing video games, even reading slashdot all day. While doing this, your body becomes bored and craves bad food, maybe even good food. So you eat...and eat. And you eat too much. and you gain weight. And you look for scapegoats...and you find HFCS. And you put blinders on and latch onto any scaremongering, and believe it to be true. Enter the conspiracy theories.
If you want to blame something, blame yourself. Eat less, exercise more. The answer is simple, but accomplishing it is not. Just do it.
In college I took classes in Science, Technology and Society. Basically, it was a critical thinking class. One thing I learned there is the true definition of science vs. technology. Science is discovery, engineering is building. While the pyramid builders needed good geometric skills, they didn't need to know the math behind the levers, pulleys, rollers, sand piles, etc. they just needed to know that if you have a long enough lever, you can push on one end with 3 people, and a really heavy rock will move. When it moves you can put roller logs under it and move it better. If you then take this rock, laying flat, and roll it up on a pile of sand in a column, then "drain" the sand from the bottom, the rock will "fall" vertically into place. No math there...just experience.
If you want to get insight into just HOW LONG the lever has to be to lift the stone, and WHY it has to be that long, you need the mathematics to DISCOVER these insights. You're not building anything...that's science. Once you discover that the length of the lever needs to be X feet long (cubits, arm lengths, whatever), then you can tell the engineers that their levers are twice as long as they need to be, and if you use a shorter one at least X feet long you can still do the work without so many of them breaking from the force. The engineer doesn't care WHY, just that it works.
A computer engineer just wants to get something that works. A scientist can tell the engineer which algorithms work better (heap vs. stack vs. hash table vs. whatever). The engineer needs the RESULTS of the scientist to build things better. The engineer can tell the scientist what doesn't work, and the scientist can figure out why.
When I first read the headline, I thought "Hmmm...did somebody find a neat trick to do with all those laptop, phone charger, and LAN switch power supplies?"
Then I thought "Oh, the Transformers MOVIE. Duh. It should have said that."
I think an article about the first would have been more interesting.
The single most irritating word that everybody uses that didn't start until email and other electronic communications started is "loose" when they obviously mean "lose"!
"If I remove the leashes from my dogs, I am going to loose them."
So, which meaning did I intend? Are they going to run away so that I never see them again (lose), or will the be free to roam (loose)?
It's become so bad I've seen it in newspapers and in printed words on television. When I see it in a book, then I'll know English as a language is doomed.
Slashdot Mirror
My first PC-compatible was a Zenith 386sx. It had a 40MB drive that I upgraded to a 120MB drive...lots of space! Before that I was a TRS-80 die-hard since the late 70's.
In 1994 I bought a Gateway 2000 Pentium 90 with a 540MB drive. At the time, it was the largest hard drive you could get without having to install a special driver or get a BIOS update to cross he boundary in disk size.
Is what she wants legal? I don't know.
Is her taking of your notes out of your bag legal? Probably not. I don't know.
However, that she asks the question in the first place means that she doesn't want her students to learn. She just wants them to pass tests and graduate. She is not a teacher.
The purpose of teaching is to pass information from one generation to the next, hoping the next generation turns the information into new knowledge. People don't have perfect recall. They need notes and books to retain information. If the teacher doesn't want you to keep your notes then she is paranoid about cheating, and doesn't care if you learn anything or not. If I were a student, I would refuse and force her to take it to the dean, then to the police if necessary.
So call now and get yours! We can't do this all day.
Except they don't. The LED's themselves might last forever, but the circuit boards they're attached to don't. I have seem many traffic lights in the middle of summer have missing sections of lights, and others where sections flicker on and off like there's a loose connection. They look like pies with a wedge missing. Soon the light is replaced and it looks whole again...until the cycle repeats all over again.
That *is* one of the corollaries I took away from the two books as well.
Not only that, but people should stop using this as a crutch in general. The journey is worth the effort, even knowing that you can never reach the end. This is why I agreed with Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter and disagreed with The Emporer's New Mind by Penrose.
One of Penrose's conclusions was that any attempt at artificial intelligence is necessarily incomplete, so it won't be possible, while Hofstadter said that it is possible to successively approximate something intelligent, and we can learn a LOT about ourselves in the attempts, and that in itself is worth it.
At least that is one of the many things I got from the two books.
One word....FIRST. NASA puts up a lot of money for high schools to start a FIRST team. And the people who participate are the same kind of people NASA needs in the future.
The next thing the robots who survive will learn is how not to be gullible. This is only if the experimenters built in hardware and/or software that either allows robots to observe other robots, or allows dying robots to signal to others that they ate poison at position X before they die. This will allow other robots to not eat the poison, and learn that the one robot deceived them.
The next thing these robots will learn is how to beat the crap out of the robot who deceived them. Then the robots will go into an existential quandary until they figure out who they are to believe. Researchers will think that these robots are broken because they have ceased to move when given an order and will be tempted to reset the robots and start over.
So, am I joking? Am I wrong? Did I RTFA?
This is exactly false. Here is my experience. About 20 years ago I had a very heated argument with someone who claimed that vinyl played through a tube amplifier was so much better than a CD played through an expensive discreet (transistor) amplifier. I said "prove it"...so he did. He played Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" on his turntable. It sounded great. He then played a clean CD on his CD player, and it sounded very harsh, with very crisp high-ends. I was trying to discount it, but indeed the vinyl *DID* sound better. So the next thing I did was a little research (I searched Usenet and the university library...Google was a few years off yet).
I learned the reason why the CD sounded like crap. The exact same master used on the vinyl was used to make the CD. Frequency response on vinyl is not flat like it is on a CD, and so masters are mixed with the high frequencies amp'ed up for vinyl. If you use the same master on the CD, it is going to sound horrible. That is why "Digitally Remastered" was a big deal. In effect, they went from "AAD" to "ADD" (but not really) with the original studio tapes. The resulting CD's sounded fantastic. Unfortunately I was not able to do a retest with a good CD. Today "DDD" is common, and a complete remix is needed to create the vinyl..the opposite of what they used to have to do.
I would, but I just can't fit all those pieces together neatly. I'll stick with coffyons.
-- "Oh man, this isn't happening, it only THINKS it's happening!"
-- "Do you believe in the Users?"..."Yeah, of course. I mean, if I don't have a User, then who wrote me?"
-- "They better be there. I don't want to bust out of here and find nothing but a bunch of cold circuits waiting for me."
-- "Those of you who continue to profess the belief in the Users, will get the standard, substandard training which will result in your eventual elimination. Those of you who renounce this superstitious and hysterical belief will be eligible to join the warrior elite of the MCP."
-- "You can remove men like Alan and me from this system, but we helped create it. And our spirit lives on in every program we design for this computer."..."Walter, it's getting late and I've got better things to do than to have religious discussions with you."
Or Animaniacs..."And still the universe extends to a place that never ends which is maybe just inside a little jar!"
So we may be a VR program. Who says the computer running this simulation is digital? It could be an analog computer that can simulate our current laws of physics to infinite precision. So even if they guy's right, there's nothing new here.
I would agree with you, except....a year is hardly "immediately".
After one year, WHY is it still so hard to find a Wii if it's still in such a tight race with the other consoles? I can find the others any day of the week, but unless I have a posse out looking for one, I can't get one.
Get one of these:
http://www.sitincomfort.com/dellaptopdes.html
But don't pay that price...I found one like this at OfficeMax for $40 about 3 years ago. It's about $50 now, when it's on sale.
When I put mine together, I turned the legs 90 degrees so I could move the desk aside when not being used and it wouldn't fall over (being braced by the chair bottom).
It works great for me. YMMV.
As it was explained to me when I asked about signing just such a NC agreement...
1. In a right-to-work state, they cannot keep you from working any gainful employment. And in order to get gainful employment, you need to have expertise in the field, which you also needed to get the job you're in.
2. This company was probably burned by an employee quitting and directly competing with an idea they got from that company, using "trade secrets" they learned while there. They can word a better NC agreement that doesn't restrict you so much. The one post I read about agreeing to pull out of common bids for a year is a good example.
3. Many companies have learned to work around NC agreements, by hiring you "provisionally", and assigning you good work that doesn't involve deep proprietary information for the period you're bound to.
So while it's largely unenforceable anyway, companies know how to work around the gray areas. So if you want to work at your current company, sign it or keep putting the company off like the other post on using the bureaucracy against itself. If you think you can find another job quickly, simply refuse to sign and dare them to fire you (it costs a lot of money to find a replacement). If you think you'll be competing against them *directly* in the future, then refuse to sign it, or sign it and be aware that you'll have to take more than the NC period to start competing. If you think you will be working in a similar field that doesn't directly compete (a HUGE employment pool, relatively), then sign it, or delay (this is the path I took), and let them worry about enforcing it later.
One caveat is that I didn't have to tell them every time I had an inventive bowel movement.
YMMV, IANAL, etc.
I had the idea which I haven't acted on yet, to go to Toys-R-Us, buy every toy hammer they have, and go to the nearest Comcast office and either hand out these hammers to customers going in to give to their customer service rep as a token of what the woman did, or just dump all the hammers in their lobby and leave as a more pointed protest. This would be a way to protest in a way that they could understand. If enough people did this, they'd have too many hammers to deal with.
The sad thing is, I know one of the guys who reviewed one of these products. He had nothing but positive things to say about the product.
When someone asks if you have insurance, you say YES! Then go to your renter's/home insurance agent and give them the FULL story. If they behave anything like the auto insurance industry, they will use all their legal muscle to recover costs.
Imagine a headline saying "Dell sued for exploding battery insurance company payments" for all those users who called their insurance companies.
OK. If I'm a farmer, minding my own business, and I harvest my corn, keeping a few ears for seeds next year, and next year I get sued for stealing genetically engineered corn seeds whose pollen blew in from a neighboring farm the year before, did I do something illegal?
At first, the answer was "yes", but recently some courts have decided to wake up and answer "no".
Actually, it's comparing Apples to LEMONS. Vista is the worst....OS....EVER.
When it takes 90 minutes to connect to a wireless router and mount a share drive, something is very wrong.
1. I just had to intuitively know that typing "cmd" in the SEARCH bar will get me a DOS prompt...there is no Start->Run by default.
2. There is no easy way to find the MAC address of the network cards through the GUI. See (1) about doing it in a DOS box.
3. The GUI has no idea of a tree for opening windows...it uses a graph. I tried to find the manual config for the wireless, and kept going in circles through links. I found the manual config eventually, but I don't know how to get back to it.
4. Connecting to a Buffalo LinkStation network share requires EDITING THE REGISTRY to make it work. Googling eventually found the answer, that Vista uses NTLMv3 while the world uses NTLMv2, and it's not compatible. Changing the registry so Vista uses v2 made it work.
Then after that I found...
5. It's easy to clean up the drive, just like in XP, but Vista allows you to remove the hibernate files...far too easily. This wouldn't be a big problem, except...
6. There is no GUI for rebuilding the hibernate file! Hibernate is now hidden in "Sleep". The only way to get the hibernate file back is to open a DOS window (see (1)) and run a command. Oh, and you have to run "cmd" as an administrator...even if you think your user account *is* an administrator (I suppose this is a Good Thing(tm).)
7. Much installed software cannot be removed. The new laptop came with MS Works on it. I wanted it gone, but the "Program..." icon in the control panel didn't offer an "uninstall" button. So Works is wasting space on the drive.
If any other company came out with software like this, it would be made irrelevant very quickly. Just ask WordPerfect (trying to shoehorn DOS shortcuts into a GUI-based system).
I have to stop here before I punch something.
Yes, but believing this to be FUD, I wanted an independent source. Interesting that now that I *HAVE* RTFA, everything I said before still stands. Even the part about the conspiracy theory.
Independent corroberation. Try it sometime. It will be easier to pick out articles based on marketing (look up the bacteria Casei Immunitas), or somebody who just needs attention, or who needs to be published to keep his job.
This is all FUD. According to Wikipedia, and the links it provides, HFCS comes in three "flavors": 90% fructose, 55% fructose, and 42% fructose. The HFCS in sodas are 55% fructose. Previously, sodas were sweetened with sugar, which has 50% fructose. So you are only ingesting about 5% more fructose now than you were before. Hardly a big difference.
HFCS *IS NOT* to blame for obesity. Sitting in front of the TV all day is...watching mind-numbing shows, playing video games, even reading slashdot all day. While doing this, your body becomes bored and craves bad food, maybe even good food. So you eat...and eat. And you eat too much. and you gain weight. And you look for scapegoats...and you find HFCS. And you put blinders on and latch onto any scaremongering, and believe it to be true. Enter the conspiracy theories.
If you want to blame something, blame yourself. Eat less, exercise more. The answer is simple, but accomplishing it is not. Just do it.
Comp. Sci. - Math = Comp. Engineering
In college I took classes in Science, Technology and Society. Basically, it was a critical thinking class. One thing I learned there is the true definition of science vs. technology. Science is discovery, engineering is building. While the pyramid builders needed good geometric skills, they didn't need to know the math behind the levers, pulleys, rollers, sand piles, etc. they just needed to know that if you have a long enough lever, you can push on one end with 3 people, and a really heavy rock will move. When it moves you can put roller logs under it and move it better. If you then take this rock, laying flat, and roll it up on a pile of sand in a column, then "drain" the sand from the bottom, the rock will "fall" vertically into place. No math there...just experience.
If you want to get insight into just HOW LONG the lever has to be to lift the stone, and WHY it has to be that long, you need the mathematics to DISCOVER these insights. You're not building anything...that's science. Once you discover that the length of the lever needs to be X feet long (cubits, arm lengths, whatever), then you can tell the engineers that their levers are twice as long as they need to be, and if you use a shorter one at least X feet long you can still do the work without so many of them breaking from the force. The engineer doesn't care WHY, just that it works.
A computer engineer just wants to get something that works. A scientist can tell the engineer which algorithms work better (heap vs. stack vs. hash table vs. whatever). The engineer needs the RESULTS of the scientist to build things better. The engineer can tell the scientist what doesn't work, and the scientist can figure out why.
When I first read the headline, I thought "Hmmm...did somebody find a neat trick to do with all those laptop, phone charger, and LAN switch power supplies?"
Then I thought "Oh, the Transformers MOVIE. Duh. It should have said that."
I think an article about the first would have been more interesting.
The single most irritating word that everybody uses that didn't start until email and other electronic communications started is "loose" when they obviously mean "lose"!
"If I remove the leashes from my dogs, I am going to loose them."
So, which meaning did I intend? Are they going to run away so that I never see them again (lose), or will the be free to roam (loose)?
It's become so bad I've seen it in newspapers and in printed words on television. When I see it in a book, then I'll know English as a language is doomed.