Ever played Unreal Tournament? It would be satisfying to have the announcer shout out the moderator categories, ie instead of "Dominating!", "Godlike" or "Multi-kill!", a well-crafted response on Slashdot would be rewarded with cries of "Fascinating!" or "Thought-provoking!"
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Agreed. Windows XP gobbles up about 110 megabytes of RAM when it's just booted, without any background images, screensavers, system tray apps running etc.
Dropping the fancy XP theme frees up about 5 megs of RAM, but if your system only has 128 or 256 megs of RAM you don't have a lot of room to load apps.
What about the holographic arcade game Sega produced about a decade ago? It was called Time Traveller or something, and used a cylindrical screen reflect the light giving the illusion of having the FMV actors standing in front of you.
I wonder if this basic technology could be further exploited...
I thought about using some kind of gas which would be suspended in a chamber. You'd need 2 lasers (X and Y axis) which would shine into the gas and light it up. Voila! 3d display which you could walk around, probably on par with the one in Star Wars.
Just wait until the might of the sex industry gets behind this, you'll soon be able to have 3-dimensional mammary glands in yer face... without actually having to take her out on a date, buy her lunch, CONVERSE WITH HER, that kind of thing.
FREEPORT, Me., March 4 -- Attendance is up. Detentions are down. Just six months after Maine began a controversial program to provide laptop computers to every seventh grader in the state, educators are impressed by how quickly students and teachers have adapted to laptop technology.
In a language arts class at Freeport Middle School, for example, muted howls could be heard recently as students researched projects related to Arctic stories, including "The Call of the Wild" by Jack London. Following Internet tracks created by their teacher, Janice Murphy, some students, inspired by the story, were researching wolves.
"Look," said Doug Hoover, 13, double-clicking on a wolf site. "Here's a picture of the sound waves the wolf makes when it howls."
Here and at the 239 middle schools around the state, students, teachers and parents say they are finding unexpected benefits.
No one seems more surprised by the early success of the program than Angus King, the state's former governor. When he announced the plan in the summer of 2000, motivated by a $50 million budget surplus and a pressing need to attract new business to Maine, Mr. King was stunned by the vehemence of objections.
The statewide effort, the first of its kind in the nation, "was more controversial than abortion, gay rights or even clear cutting," Mr. King said. "People hated it. They thought it was extravagant; they thought the kids wouldn't take care of the computers."
An early opponent was Chellie Pingree, then the State Senate majority leader and soon to be the president of Common Cause, a government watchdog group based in Washington. "It was about the allocation of resources," Ms. Pingree said. "We were struggling with construction issues: schools needed to be built; there were leaky roofs and not enough books."
Though she now sees the program as a success, others still say it is misguided.
"The state was flush at the time the laptop program was inaugurated, when it should have been providing for the rainy day that we're living with today," said Sumner Lipton, a lawyer in Augusta and a former state legislator. "There's a certain degree of irony in giving all the seventh graders laptops in a day when we're talking about cutting state employees back to four-day work weeks."
Before the program began, legislators trimmed its cost and scope. Envisioned as a $50 million effort that would let seventh graders take the computers with them through graduation, the plan was limited to seventh and eighth graders.
Laptops will follow their users to eighth grade next year, while seventh graders will get new iBooks, for a total of 33,000. When students leave the eighth grade, they will turn them in.
The cost of the four-year program is $37.5 million, which includes leasing the laptops, installing wireless ports throughout schools so students are always connected to the Internet and training teachers. It translates to about $300 per user a year, said Tony Sprague, project manager of the laptop program, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative.
To bolster the program, Mr. King sought support from beyond the state government. The author Stephen King (who is not related to Angus King) toured the Freeport school and offered to teach an online writing course. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $1 million for more teacher training. The technology giant EDS pledged $400 million in software for Maine schools, the biggest gift the state has ever received.
Educators say that problems have been minimal, with little breakage, theft or loss. The rewards, teachers say, have been impressive.
"These laptops are changing the way learning happens and the way teaching happens," said Chris Toy, principal of Freeport Middle School. Such a transformation, Mr. Toy said, can happen only when each student has a computer. "We don't have a pencil lab or put eight pencils in the middle of the room and have kids take turns using them, Computers are tools, and when every child in every school has one, it levels the playing field."
Though an estimated 90 percent of the homes in Freeport, near Portland, have computers, the laptops go home with the students at night. "We needed to make sure that level playing field is extended to the home," Mr. Toy said. "Now, no one's computer is better or faster."
That sense of equality is felt keenly in the state's poor and remote schools. At the tiny elementary school in Pembroke, about 240 miles northeast of Portland in Washington County in the Down East region, children and teachers seem to be using the laptops as effectively as those in more affluent areas, the principal, Paula Smith, said. Washington County is the state's poorest, and Ms. Smith estimated that perhaps 35 percent of her students had a computer at home.
As at other schools, she said, seventh graders seem more focused and less mischievous. Last year, Ms. Smith said she handed out about 30 detentions to Pembroke's seventh and eighth graders. This year, there have been two.
Parents also welcome the program.
"When the plan was announced, a lot of people thought the money should have been put into buildings," said Alison Bennie, the mother of a seventh grader in Topsham, next to Brunswick near Portland. "My husband and I both work at Bowdoin College, and we see the rate of students bringing their own computers to campus. It's virtually 100 percent. So the sooner kids learn the language, the more adept they will be at computers in high school and beyond."
Ms. Bennie's point is critical. By some measures, Maine's public schools are considered quite good: the National Center for Education Statistics ranks Maine as having one of the highest high school graduation rates in the country. But when it comes to students going on to college, Maine ranks low in the region. And in term of Ph.D.s earned in the state, Maine ranks dead last among states and Puerto Rico, according to a recent report from the National Science Foundation.
Improved college attendance five years from now would be a measure of the program's success, but for now, educators are collecting all the information they can and are awaiting year-end test scores. In other parts of the country, smaller programs have had a significant effect: In Henrico County, Va., where 24,000 students in grades 6 through 12, have laptops, test scores have risen and dropout rates have fallen.
But many Maine educators worry less about how success will be measured than about what will happen when they tell ninth graders in 2004 to surrender their iBooks.
"Because I see their skills building, the biggest concern is what will happen when they enter high school and lose their laptops," said Diane Parent, the principal of the middle school in Caribou, more than 300 miles northeast of Portland in remote Aroostock County.
Teachers are crossing their fingers that schools will be able to secure funds to ensure that laptops stay with students through high school, as they do in Henrico County, Va.
We say "hoover the carpet" instead of "vacuum the carpet". We refer to a public address system as a tannoy as in "I'll just tannoy the staff to let them know" and we often refer to ballpoint pens as "biros".
All the dictionary is trying to do is document and describe what the word means. Imagine if I said to you "I'm just going to YARRIC the goldfish" and you didn't know what it meant. Now, perhaps YARRIC is a name for the food the fish eats, or perhaps it's a chemical which helps keeps the fish's scales shiny... what Google's [tm] lawyers are doing is saying "You can't tell them what it means! It has to be a secret! Let them work it out!"
The Google team are a great bunch of coders, thinkers and implementers, but their legal department wants shooting. They already remove content when pressured, now they're trying to control the damn English language!
That reminds me. Had an email from a friend who couldn't play Red Alert 2 on his PC. It worked in his friends, but he kept getting a strange error message about a temp file.
In the end he had to get his mate to clone the CD so he could play the game - turns out his CD drive couldnt' read the copy protection properly and it was refusing to load.
Why is it that sometimes buying software causes you more hassle than getting a warez version? Doesn't seem right to me...
We already suffer from information overload as it is. Why bother to save the hundred million Geoshities webpages anyway? What's the point of keeping all the data when it's boring and irrelevant?
Plus not all the data can be saved anyway... sites such the Internet Movie Database, Amazon.com, and even Multimap are database-driven. Even assuming you get access to the underlying database you still need to preserve the code which gets used to generate the pages. And for what purpose?
Add to that the problem of accessibility. If the data isn't laid out in an easy-to-browse fashion then it's as good as dead anyway. I prefer to browse a library by topic, not searching for keywords and hoping a nice book pops out.
I installed Autocad 2000i on a computer a couple of years ago. Anyway, the user managed to completely screw up his computer in such a way that we had to reformat and reinstall Windows 2000 (even FDISK was used). When the OS was reinstalled we tried installing Autocad but the software informed us that our 30-day trial period had ended and we must contact Autodesk to register. So... where was the info written to?
But that's not all. Recently The Register ran a story which talked about how a stolen tablet PC had been traced over the net. The security software installed on this notebook (Computrace) supposedly "involves a tamper resistant agent that resides on the hard disk of PCs. Even formatting a drive will not erase this agent."
Now, I for one doubt those claims (Partition Magic would surely be able to zap the software, and the software wouldn't run if Linux was installed etc) but if it is true then who knows what else could be written to inaccessible (by the user at least) parts of the hard-disk?
It gets worse. The Computrace software creates a backdoor in your system which allows Computrace (and anyone else who figures out how to use it) to silently delete files from your drive). It also uses cloaking software which "is silent and invisible and will not be detected by looking at the disk directory or running a utility that examines RAM."
Claims are also made that it can worm its way through firewalls. Big claims indeed (perhaps too big without some clarification... the devil's in the details) but if this software is sold to the public by a private firm, what the heck could Government departments install on our computers to track what we do?
I don't personally use the machines, I'm just the lowly IT admin who supports them. When we had Windows 95 and 98 machines I was kept very busy maintaining them, but since we've had XP our problems have been few and far between.
I can only speak for myself - I don't doubt that many people DO have nightmares with XP, I'm just saying that (so far) we've been lucky.
I guess I'm sceptical of the "Macs never crash and are easier to use" line because of my own (very limited experience) of OS 8.6
If I recall correctly, Mac users used to trot this one out on a daily basis as "proof" that their Mac was faster than a Pentium III.
The reason it was faster was that the G3 had more on-chip cache, which suited the benchmark, and said absolutely NOTHING about the rest of the system.
A computer is as fast as its bottleneck... when evaluating performance it's best to see as many REAL WORLD benchmarks as possible. No use having a 12ghz processor if you still use 33mhz memory.
The main reason why macs are so dominant in publishing and art is becasue of the old (true) cliche - it just works.
It's funny you should say that... the last 5 or 6 graphics PCs in our office have all come with Windows XP. We installed Photoshop, Illustrator, Pagemaker, hooked them up to our Samba server, network printers, scanners etc and... they just worked!
In fact, they have done for over a year now with virtually no problems at all.
And they have a right-mouse button and a scroll wheel!
Slashdot Mirror
Just an idea...
Kinda like alien steganography? I hope the NSA knows about this!
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
I always thought that "settee at home" was a reference to armchair astronomers.
Dropping the fancy XP theme frees up about 5 megs of RAM, but if your system only has 128 or 256 megs of RAM you don't have a lot of room to load apps.
Not if you depend on Redhat ^_^
I wonder if this basic technology could be further exploited...
I thought about using some kind of gas which would be suspended in a chamber. You'd need 2 lasers (X and Y axis) which would shine into the gas and light it up. Voila! 3d display which you could walk around, probably on par with the one in Star Wars.
Just wait until the might of the sex industry gets behind this, you'll soon be able to have 3-dimensional mammary glands in yer face... without actually having to take her out on a date, buy her lunch, CONVERSE WITH HER, that kind of thing.
Every geek's dream, basically...
For those of you who don't want to register:
FREEPORT, Me., March 4 -- Attendance is up. Detentions are down. Just six months after Maine began a controversial program to provide laptop computers to every seventh grader in the state, educators are impressed by how quickly students and teachers have adapted to laptop technology.
In a language arts class at Freeport Middle School, for example, muted howls could be heard recently as students researched projects related to Arctic stories, including "The Call of the Wild" by Jack London. Following Internet tracks created by their teacher, Janice Murphy, some students, inspired by the story, were researching wolves.
"Look," said Doug Hoover, 13, double-clicking on a wolf site. "Here's a picture of the sound waves the wolf makes when it howls."
Here and at the 239 middle schools around the state, students, teachers and parents say they are finding unexpected benefits.
No one seems more surprised by the early success of the program than Angus King, the state's former governor. When he announced the plan in the summer of 2000, motivated by a $50 million budget surplus and a pressing need to attract new business to Maine, Mr. King was stunned by the vehemence of objections.
The statewide effort, the first of its kind in the nation, "was more controversial than abortion, gay rights or even clear cutting," Mr. King said. "People hated it. They thought it was extravagant; they thought the kids wouldn't take care of the computers."
An early opponent was Chellie Pingree, then the State Senate majority leader and soon to be the president of Common Cause, a government watchdog group based in Washington. "It was about the allocation of resources," Ms. Pingree said. "We were struggling with construction issues: schools needed to be built; there were leaky roofs and not enough books."
Though she now sees the program as a success, others still say it is misguided.
"The state was flush at the time the laptop program was inaugurated, when it should have been providing for the rainy day that we're living with today," said Sumner Lipton, a lawyer in Augusta and a former state legislator. "There's a certain degree of irony in giving all the seventh graders laptops in a day when we're talking about cutting state employees back to four-day work weeks."
Before the program began, legislators trimmed its cost and scope. Envisioned as a $50 million effort that would let seventh graders take the computers with them through graduation, the plan was limited to seventh and eighth graders.
Laptops will follow their users to eighth grade next year, while seventh graders will get new iBooks, for a total of 33,000. When students leave the eighth grade, they will turn them in.
The cost of the four-year program is $37.5 million, which includes leasing the laptops, installing wireless ports throughout schools so students are always connected to the Internet and training teachers. It translates to about $300 per user a year, said Tony Sprague, project manager of the laptop program, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative.
To bolster the program, Mr. King sought support from beyond the state government. The author Stephen King (who is not related to Angus King) toured the Freeport school and offered to teach an online writing course. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $1 million for more teacher training. The technology giant EDS pledged $400 million in software for Maine schools, the biggest gift the state has ever received.
Educators say that problems have been minimal, with little breakage, theft or loss. The rewards, teachers say, have been impressive.
"These laptops are changing the way learning happens and the way teaching happens," said Chris Toy, principal of Freeport Middle School. Such a transformation, Mr. Toy said, can happen only when each student has a computer. "We don't have a pencil lab or put eight pencils in the middle of the room and have kids take turns using them, Computers are tools, and when every child in every school has one, it levels the playing field."
Though an estimated 90 percent of the homes in Freeport, near Portland, have computers, the laptops go home with the students at night. "We needed to make sure that level playing field is extended to the home," Mr. Toy said. "Now, no one's computer is better or faster."
That sense of equality is felt keenly in the state's poor and remote schools. At the tiny elementary school in Pembroke, about 240 miles northeast of Portland in Washington County in the Down East region, children and teachers seem to be using the laptops as effectively as those in more affluent areas, the principal, Paula Smith, said. Washington County is the state's poorest, and Ms. Smith estimated that perhaps 35 percent of her students had a computer at home.
As at other schools, she said, seventh graders seem more focused and less mischievous. Last year, Ms. Smith said she handed out about 30 detentions to Pembroke's seventh and eighth graders. This year, there have been two.
Parents also welcome the program.
"When the plan was announced, a lot of people thought the money should have been put into buildings," said Alison Bennie, the mother of a seventh grader in Topsham, next to Brunswick near Portland. "My husband and I both work at Bowdoin College, and we see the rate of students bringing their own computers to campus. It's virtually 100 percent. So the sooner kids learn the language, the more adept they will be at computers in high school and beyond."
Ms. Bennie's point is critical. By some measures, Maine's public schools are considered quite good: the National Center for Education Statistics ranks Maine as having one of the highest high school graduation rates in the country. But when it comes to students going on to college, Maine ranks low in the region. And in term of Ph.D.s earned in the state, Maine ranks dead last among states and Puerto Rico, according to a recent report from the National Science Foundation.
Improved college attendance five years from now would be a measure of the program's success, but for now, educators are collecting all the information they can and are awaiting year-end test scores. In other parts of the country, smaller programs have had a significant effect: In Henrico County, Va., where 24,000 students in grades 6 through 12, have laptops, test scores have risen and dropout rates have fallen.
But many Maine educators worry less about how success will be measured than about what will happen when they tell ninth graders in 2004 to surrender their iBooks.
"Because I see their skills building, the biggest concern is what will happen when they enter high school and lose their laptops," said Diane Parent, the principal of the middle school in Caribou, more than 300 miles northeast of Portland in remote Aroostock County.
Teachers are crossing their fingers that schools will be able to secure funds to ensure that laptops stay with students through high school, as they do in Henrico County, Va.
Sorry, it was a UK pound sign. Looks fine on my screen...
"If you were planning to spend more than £150,000 in one go would you like:
- Someone from Microsoft to spend 2 hours at your company to offer advice
- A Microsoft partner to spend 2 hours at your company to offer advice"
For £150,000 I'd want Bill Gates to spend 2 hours here making coffee and preparing sandwiches!
Interestingly, one of the questions was "Will you consider using Open Office in the next 12 months?"
At £300+ a go for MS Office I'd say YES.
I thank you.
All the dictionary is trying to do is document and describe what the word means. Imagine if I said to you "I'm just going to YARRIC the goldfish" and you didn't know what it meant. Now, perhaps YARRIC is a name for the food the fish eats, or perhaps it's a chemical which helps keeps the fish's scales shiny... what Google's [tm] lawyers are doing is saying "You can't tell them what it means! It has to be a secret! Let them work it out!"
The Google team are a great bunch of coders, thinkers and implementers, but their legal department wants shooting. They already remove content when pressured, now they're trying to control the damn English language!
In the end he had to get his mate to clone the CD so he could play the game - turns out his CD drive couldnt' read the copy protection properly and it was refusing to load.
Why is it that sometimes buying software causes you more hassle than getting a warez version? Doesn't seem right to me...
Plus not all the data can be saved anyway... sites such the Internet Movie Database, Amazon.com, and even Multimap are database-driven. Even assuming you get access to the underlying database you still need to preserve the code which gets used to generate the pages. And for what purpose?
Add to that the problem of accessibility. If the data isn't laid out in an easy-to-browse fashion then it's as good as dead anyway. I prefer to browse a library by topic, not searching for keywords and hoping a nice book pops out.
But that's not all. Recently The Register ran a story which talked about how a stolen tablet PC had been traced over the net. The security software installed on this notebook (Computrace) supposedly "involves a tamper resistant agent that resides on the hard disk of PCs. Even formatting a drive will not erase this agent."
Now, I for one doubt those claims (Partition Magic would surely be able to zap the software, and the software wouldn't run if Linux was installed etc) but if it is true then who knows what else could be written to inaccessible (by the user at least) parts of the hard-disk?
It gets worse. The Computrace software creates a backdoor in your system which allows Computrace (and anyone else who figures out how to use it) to silently delete files from your drive). It also uses cloaking software which "is silent and invisible and will not be detected by looking at the disk directory or running a utility that examines RAM."
Claims are also made that it can worm its way through firewalls. Big claims indeed (perhaps too big without some clarification... the devil's in the details) but if this software is sold to the public by a private firm, what the heck could Government departments install on our computers to track what we do?
Does it tell you how to move every zig?
For those who want the article all on one page.
Don't you need drivers for USB graphics tablets, scanners, digital cameras etc on the Mac?
Yep, I know what you're getting at.
I can only speak for myself - I don't doubt that many people DO have nightmares with XP, I'm just saying that (so far) we've been lucky.
I guess I'm sceptical of the "Macs never crash and are easier to use" line because of my own (very limited experience) of OS 8.6
cache bribes? How much did Intel give them, 64K or more?
The reason it was faster was that the G3 had more on-chip cache, which suited the benchmark, and said absolutely NOTHING about the rest of the system.
A computer is as fast as its bottleneck... when evaluating performance it's best to see as many REAL WORLD benchmarks as possible. No use having a 12ghz processor if you still use 33mhz memory.
It's funny you should say that... the last 5 or 6 graphics PCs in our office have all come with Windows XP. We installed Photoshop, Illustrator, Pagemaker, hooked them up to our Samba server, network printers, scanners etc and... they just worked!
In fact, they have done for over a year now with virtually no problems at all.
And they have a right-mouse button and a scroll wheel!