Thank you for saying what truely needed to be said!
I have been trying to bring a similar message to others: it can be difficult at times (especially here, if the mod points fall wrong.) It brings me great joy to see someone who understands speak those words here!
Thank you!
Mars
P.S. (I may also guess that you practice AP or something similar, since you understand that children are to be trusted. But this is likely not the best forum for that particular topic.)
I don't believe that this plan has the merits you believe it does. It attempts to force the current education system while completely ignoring issues with the teaching style an curriculum in use. It is an attempt to improve an already broken system by forcing more of the same down teacher's and student's throats.
Merit pay for teachers:
- 50% based on classroom performance improvement over the year. The second test of the kids should take place months before summer break, to prevent the pure teach-the-test problem.
- 30% based on school performance improvement over the year (to encourage sharing of lesson plans and cooperation). May be further subdivided into improvement relative to other schools in district, state, or nationwide. Lack of cooperation is one of the whining complaints always given as a reason for not having merit pay, and this is an easy solution.
- 20% based on parent and student feedback. This needs to be on a curve, probably within the district, since there will always be that percentage of crazy parents that dislike any teacher their kids have or who are upset when their kids don't always get the undeserved A.
By tieing a teacher's rewards directly to some arbitrary measure of success you will see two things: teachers will work to that arbitrary measure of success (teach to the test), at the cost of the children's broader education (since the teacher's careers depend on it). Teachers will start to do the minimal amount of work to achieve that reward. These are both natural human reactions to an external motivating factor (money), versus an internal motivating factor (the love to teach). You extinguish the flame in the teacher's heart. There is a wealth of research on this topic, and it is a proven scientific fact; it is also entirely ignored by mainstream media.
For administrators:
- Replace the portion based classroom improvement with relative ratio of money under their control to money that makes it to the classroom, relative to other schools in the district/state/nation. Until you start measuring and negatively impacting administrator pay for a lack of efficiency, the current bloated eduocracy will continue to burn money inefficiently.
There are three problems with this idea.
It uses an external rewards system on administrators, with all of the problems stated above.
It assumes that the current system is inefficient in the context of current business practice (which it may be, as schools are increasingly run as businesses), and also assumes that fixing the issues (inefficient allocation of funds) involves a more frevored application of said business practices ('It's not working so we need to do MORE of the same!').
It uses a relative (no-normative) test to measure the success of schools. The only thing that non-normative tests accurately measure is the average family income of the students in that district who took the test. Guess where this leaves already disadvantaged districts? These districts could see a ten-fold improvement in education, narrowing the gap to 0.5% of the top schools in the country, and they would still get no funding.
Other things:
- Stop this crazy extra long summer break thing. Yes, kids need a break to be kids. No, it doesn't have to be three months long, with the resultant loss of retention.
This assumes that bad information retention in students is due to an extra long break between sessions. Instead it could be because you are not teaching interesting topics. Instead most education has shifted towards a fact-based curriculum (you aren't actually teaching students anything, except to be a sponge for facts).
You should all read Alfie Kohn
on
Improving Education?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
These are just two books from a vast library that shows alternatives to society's choice for education. Suffice to say that I do not believe society has always chosen wisely.
But it goes deeper than that. Read The Natural Child if you are a parent and wish to make a real difference.
I agree that society is probably taking this approach because it is the cheapest way to educate students that they know of . But instead of individualised attention we could go to a Montessori method or something similar (it was mentioned elsewhere in this thread.) IIRC that method requires the same number of teachers, but has multiple grades in each class. Same resources, different structure, [supposedly] better system.
Perhaps looking back a few thousand years will provide some insight into a better system. We used to grow up, learn, and play in multi-age groups up until a few hundred years ago, so doesn't common sense say that we would learn better in such a mixed environment instead of our modern "single age group per class" system?
Perhaps you have not been exposed to an alternative education system, and thus can not see the problems with the system that society has you parcipating in.
Student-lead home schooling is just one such system. If you love programming, then teach subjects relevant to programming and computer science. To teach history one finds subjects in history that interest the student, and then the student and educator build the curriculum from there. The student is motivated because they are learning what genuinely interests them, with no limits on how far the student is allowed to advance. Such systems do work, and they work very well. There is a good reason why home-schooled students are preferred by university admission programs.
I also think it would be interesting to see just what a return to multi-grade one room schooling could do for society. There have been studies performed that show huge improvements in education for students in these systems.
My own peeve is that the majority of society believes that a factory approach to education is what works best. Individualised education seems to be plain common sense to me; babies develop at different rates, but somehow they are all exactly the same, with the same motivations (good grades) at five years old? How counterintuitive is that? What is worse, the children are not actually motivated by grades, so that external motivation has to be pressed into them by the system. Sad.
So my answer to the question of whether society wants DVD region coding, a monopolistic Microsoft, and sweatshop labor would be a resounding yes. If social consensus was against such actions, then there would be no way that a corporation embracing such acts could survive.
I don't believe that this argument takes into account corporations supporting corporations. Arguably the corporations doing the most evil are either supported by a monopoly (SBC) or supported by having aggregated a number of corporations under them (Nestle), thus shielding them from negative public reaction to their actions. In the case of Nestle, one may boycott the parent company, but to have any visible effect on their cash-flow one must boycott dozens upon dozens of other brands and companies that Nestle owns. This is a huge undertaking for the consumer and, if the company's holdings or corportate clients are diverse enough, it may even prove impossible; in dealing with other companies they will be indirectly dealing with Nestle.
Its much like Wal-Mart. People can complain all they want about Wal-Mart killing off local competition but until they put their money where their mouth is (and I mean collectively, not just a few anti-Wal-Mart groups) then Wal-Mart is (in effect) operating under society's demands, doing precisely what society says it should do.
Agreed. There must be public consensus and a wish to punish a corporation before one can even begin to consider the problem I stated above.
Thanks for sparking a genuinely interesting debate.
The term refers to users that fall into the gap between mainstream and earlier adopters and visionaries. For example, I believe that non-Linux-freak MythTV users fall into this category. Also see Crossing the Chasm for a better description of this technology gap that Linux may finally be crossing.
I've been thinking the exact same thing recently. The problem is that I don't know how to advertise my skills to find small jobs similar to those you are taking on.
Do you have any advice or insight into your situation? For example, are you leveraging years of past experience and/or a large network of contacts?. Or are you in a very technologically progressive region (depends on the local industry; eg. manufacturing blue-collar towns lag at least 5 years behind the mainstream)
Re:Excellent criticism of EQ2 written by an EQ MVP
on
Everquest 2 Launches
·
· Score: 1
I am glad to hear that they have been trying to remedy a number of the problems that Lark posted. For their sake I hope there is a lot of improvement.
Still, reading the thread really made me wonder, exactly who where they thinking of when designing this game? The players? The developers? The socialites? The achievers?
It sounds like it has so many 'conveniences' for players that the fantasy atmosphere may be eroded. I always thought of North Karana in the original EQ as a giant subway station; trains every 15 minutes, day and night, pick up some goods from the vendors while you pass through...
For example, why don't they try to be creative about the teleports to the moon? Why not have them only take place when the moon is directly overhead or some similar predictable celestial event? Why not make the ground shake? A pillar of light maybe? Animals fleeing in terror? Something?! Add some sense of wonder to the thing!
I didn't expect much from EQ2 after seeing the stagnation of EQ1. Maybe we have to go back to the drawing board. Grow the concepts founded in MUD(MOO,MUSH) into new games at a simpler level. Start over.
Excellent criticism of EQ2 written by an EQ MVP
on
Everquest 2 Launches
·
· Score: 4, Informative
A friend of mine sent me this excellent criticism of EverQuest 2 written by an EverQuest MVP Beta Tester. The thread is long but the writer is well spoken and she goes into great depth about all aspects of game play, their strengths, and their [numerous, critical] flaws:
BTW don't foget, WinCE shares absolutely zero code with other versions of Windows.
Sorry, but this statement is straight up false. The WinCE kernel is based off of the Windows NT 4.0 kernel. Also, WinCE shares the architecture of Windows 2000.
Microsoft ripped out a large part of the OS functionality and replaced other parts. Most of the API is the exact same as Win2K, but a lot of function calls with eleven arguments under Win2K require to you pass nine of them as NULL or zero under WinCE.
Just imagine the security situation this chainsaw OS surgery has created. Think bluesnarfing is fun now? Try it when you can hijack the entire entertainment and navigation system of that expensive SUV that just cut you off!
Proof that the article's author is an idiot can be found in these two sentences:
To produce bio-fuel or bio-plastics, made from maize or sugar, say, rather than petroleum, you don't need a GM "feedstock", but why not? The exhaust is not going to spray out deadly footloose Frankengenes (or any genes at all).
The problem is not the genetic residue present in the final product. The problem is contaminating natural crops with unknown and unaccounted for genetic mutations you f**king fool!
The current systems do not support the production of safe drugs with well-know side-effects, and people expect corporations to produce a safe genetic mutant being?
I was thinking about this the other day, and was wondering if this is a huge gap in the Windows user interaction model.
Think about how you input info using windows. You click on a few locations using the mouse, perhaps use some keyboard input, click some more. The output from these inputs is arbitrary: it may result in anything from a 'File/Save' dialog to a custom error dialog box. There is no linear path for inputting commands, or for mapping inputs to results.
Compare this to the command line. You enter a few distinct atomic commands, and view the results in the same medium. You then enter more commands, refining your actions. The key here is that you already have a linear model for input that produces well defined expected results, all in a common medium that is conceptually simple, visible to the user, and easily processed by machines. Extending this model to accept voice input or output is trivial.
How is one supposed to quantify basic tasks and turn them into equivelant voice commands without a baseline framework or paradigm to extend from? How do you automate, simplify, or extend existing tasks without a common input or output medium? GUIs provide no such medium or framework; that same framework is at the heart of the command line interface!
Perhaps this is why we never saw voice recognition technology take off on Windows. It's blinking impossible to script actions for an arbitrary task, let alone process the arbitrary results!
On a similar note we may see voice recognition on Linux take off like a rocket. Anybody can add voice recognition to perform almost any command because the actions are all scriptable throught the CLI already. If you can type it, you can get your computer to do it when you say 'computer, foo!'
Mars
P.S. It would be greatly appreciated if someone could please clarify my point. It's buried in there somewhere...
Just tried out the Live Bookmarks feature in 1.0PR. I don't know who came up with this idea, but I think they missed some basic usability testing before including this feature. Here are just a few observations from a half-day of use:
Biggest problem of all, after loading up just two of my feeds I noticed that only about 1/4 of a headline is visible in the bookmark side-bar. If I expand the bar enough to see the whole headline I only have a quarter screen left for content. Moving the bookmark bar to the bottom wouldn't help that much, as I could only see a handfull of headlines at a time. Putting the folders in the Bookmarks toolbar doesn't help because the headlines are truncated to 50 or so characters, with no tooltip to view the complete headline when I roll over them.
If I have multiple feeds for one site how do I group them together? (C-Net and The Register both have about 10 feeds)
How do I tell which headlines are new? Or which headlines I have read?
Where do I set the update interval for my Live Bookmarks? Or the amount of time to retain an article? Or how many articles to show in the list?
How do I create a blogroll? Export my OPML file?
Why doesn't the RSS button include the option to subscribe to a feed using my default RSS Reader? Not everyone uses the Firefox RSS reader, and I think it is a poor option to force on the user.
Why doesn't the RSS button indicate the source of a feed? When I am on the Security sub-page of C-Net will hitting the RSS button subscribe me to the RSS feed just for C-Net Security, or for the aggregated C-Net feed?
What about article summaries?
How are the addition of article comments and/or updates handled or indicated?
The final nail in the coffin for me is that it actually slows down my feed reading by several thousand orders of magnitude compared to my normal reader (SharpReader). The user does not have the ability to take in an overview of all the feed data. What if I have 2000 unread articles in 50 feeds? How does the Live Bookmark scheme handle that?
If you are an RSS freak stuck using Windows and haven't tried out SharpReader, I would highly recommend it. It is simple (read: no chrome), powerful, and it works. I also find that it handles bulk feed reading better than any other aggregator out there. I'm just waiting for the GTK# version or a good wxAnything version to come out so I can use it on Linux. As for Live Bookmarks, I am sad to say that it is the first feature for Firefox where I feel that it should have been left on the drawing table.
In the case of the PRA proposal, proponents have difficultly explaining why this concept is better. PRA ensures there is NO relief with respect to network overhead, even if messages are rejected. PRA ignores the primary motivation for which identity is being spoofed, being a means to avoid accreditation filtering, the RFC 2821 MAIL FROM. If accreditation is allowed to become more effective with CSV, this oversight is significant. A rather weakly supported claim is this will end phising. Support for PRA checks overlooks the identity significant to the user, and that many techniques still exist to allow phising, some without the need to publish DNS records by the entity committing the fraud.
There is also a potential for network instability caused by early termination of a series of DNS queries, that both allow accumulation of outstanding UDP traffic and necessitate the resending of the messages. A serious flaw made far worse with PRA. As PRA has been isolated, envision rejection of both the Submitter and PRA draft. Take the BATV draft of Dave Crocker and add a mode using an address based technique to include the SPF record sets. This would allow Forwarding and List Servers for the most part to continue working, without the use of Submitter. (EzMLM may be an exception for signatures, but would still work with the SPF mode.)
Submitter and PRA should be rejected as being highly disruptive. Combine SPF with BATV. Submitter and PRA fail to provide the most basic goal of the MARID charter. That is to authenticate (and authorize) the MTA domain (responsible for policy as implied with DNS), as compared to CSV that ignores filtering objectives of messages, but accomplishes the basic goal of the charter.
-Doug
Just a little contrast for those who read only one level deep.
This is just stupid! Google does not define the context of your search. When I search for 'AXA', maybe I am not looking for your stupid company. Maybe I was looking for the name of my favorite stock quote, or my favorite hemorrhoid cream!
They have no claim to 'AXA' any more than Microsoft has claim to the word 'Windows' when used outside of the specific context that applies to their software.
The money goes to the recording industry (I think) and everyone is fairly content with the deal. (besides, it's only a few bucks and it seems fair enough to me. Yeah, i know, majority of the people use the CDs for legit purposes, blah blah blah).
The levies are collected by the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC), which is responsible for distributing the money to organizations representing record companies, producers, and others who own the rights to copyrighted material. Since the regime was established in December 1999, the CPCC has collected over $54 million in levies. According to an article in the Globe and Mail on February 26, 2003, only $6.8 million has been dispersed to copyright holders to date.
The amount distributed to artists is even lower. Last I heard it was on the order of 0.23 cents for each dollar collected. Not to mention that the levy is probably unconstitutional.
WASTE's predecessors may offer an alternative
on
Saving the Net
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· Score: 1
I think that networks that build on the concept of WASTE may offer the revival of BBS-like communities. It has the potential to tie together the community members in a similar fashion to BBS. With a BBS, you have to have a friend with the number. With a WASTE network, you have to have a friend with the public key.
But I think that WASTE would have to adopt a more server-centric role to foster the community of a BBS. You would have a central server, offering a bulletin board, doors, and file sharing. It would be pretty cool to be able to set up your own little community for you and your friends just by running a server on your home system. Sure, you can do that now by setting up phpBB with a dyDNS account, but for some reason I see the WASTE concept being easier to advertise and implement (the privacy aspect helps as well). The community could be private or public, and I believe that the community that would grow from such a network could resemble the BBSes of old in a way. Not a replacement, but an alternative.
My.02 CDN cents. Hope they were worth the mod points =)
It's a damn good book and it may help you answer your questions.
I have the same problem. People tell me to stop analysing things all the time. This book shed light on their views, and helped me to understand my own.
Now we know that the US was desperately looking for support in the UN security council for it's war resolution. As a result, many of the officials were informed that they may have been 'observed' by the US government, so that the government might devise a strategy that would make their resolution more appealing to those undecided security council members.
Wouldn't those officials like to know that for the last 2 months the United States Government has had exclusive access to their email correspondence?
Also, notice how there hasn't been any information given out with regards to detecting a break-in using this exploit. One might say there is no point due to the fact that the exploit was not observed in the wild. However, I'm sure that if a method of detection was discovered and applied then some governments and organizations might find some interesting server activity in the previous two months.
Mars
Even if a high quality software is produced I don't think there is a good chance it will be adopted by the masses.
Take my favorite editing program, EditPlus. It was recommended by a friend and I found it to be perfect for what it is supposed to do: edit files. It beats the crap out of Notepad and Kate for KDE is just a broken reflection in comparison. But nobody has heard of the program and no one uses it.
If there is a Linux equivalent I haven't heard of it and I don't think there is any way I could. Currently there is no way that the highest quality software can be brought to the market. If users could go and easily try out and aquire different programs for their regular tasks then I'm sure the quality of software would appear to increase dramatically.
Unfortunately we are stuck with the defaults and the status quo (notepad.exe).
ICQ was an exception to this theory, great software when it came out, sadly useless now. Trillian is a case for the theory, better (I think) than ICQ, but not that many people seem to have heard of it or use it.
I see the resurgence of the floppy disk, the demand for the USB dime drives, the flash memory cards!
As white lists and circles of trust emerge as the way to communicate in the future, we will often find ourselves needing to communicate with a friend from an unfamiliar location, one without our identifying marks [PGP key].
In steps the long forgotten floppy disk to save the day! A miraculous device that can hold all of our private keys and their corresponding identities, ready to be used from any location that is not your own PC, so that your friends might know it is in fact you sending that email.
Think of a floppy disk holding your personalities and private encryption keys as an unofficial digital ID card.
You go to the campus computer center, pick a terminal, pop in your disk, use the keys on it to send out your emails, remove the disk and walk away without a worry. Stuck using a co-worker's computer for a very urgent message? Use the disk! Without it you would be up a creek without a paddle, risking your email getting sent to their junk box, to hopefully be picked out of the 1000 spam mails it resides with.
The real irony? A lot of computers don't work well with floppy drives anymore, and it seems (to me at least) that most applications are turning away from architectures supporting removable media, in the assumption that the system is networked anyways so why would you have to tote information around on a floppy disk?
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for saying what truely needed to be said!
I have been trying to bring a similar message to others: it can be difficult at times (especially here, if the mod points fall wrong.) It brings me great joy to see someone who understands speak those words here!
Thank you!
Mars
P.S. (I may also guess that you practice AP or something similar, since you understand that children are to be trusted. But this is likely not the best forum for that particular topic.)
I don't believe that this plan has the merits you believe it does. It attempts to force the current education system while completely ignoring issues with the teaching style an curriculum in use. It is an attempt to improve an already broken system by forcing more of the same down teacher's and student's throats.
Start with The Schools Our Children Deserve : Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards", and Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. After you have read these you will be much better prepared to speak of improving our children's education.
These are just two books from a vast library that shows alternatives to society's choice for education. Suffice to say that I do not believe society has always chosen wisely.
But it goes deeper than that. Read The Natural Child if you are a parent and wish to make a real difference.
I agree that society is probably taking this approach because it is the cheapest way to educate students that they know of . But instead of individualised attention we could go to a Montessori method or something similar (it was mentioned elsewhere in this thread.) IIRC that method requires the same number of teachers, but has multiple grades in each class. Same resources, different structure, [supposedly] better system.
Perhaps looking back a few thousand years will provide some insight into a better system. We used to grow up, learn, and play in multi-age groups up until a few hundred years ago, so doesn't common sense say that we would learn better in such a mixed environment instead of our modern "single age group per class" system?
Perhaps you have not been exposed to an alternative education system, and thus can not see the problems with the system that society has you parcipating in.
Student-lead home schooling is just one such system. If you love programming, then teach subjects relevant to programming and computer science. To teach history one finds subjects in history that interest the student, and then the student and educator build the curriculum from there. The student is motivated because they are learning what genuinely interests them, with no limits on how far the student is allowed to advance. Such systems do work, and they work very well. There is a good reason why home-schooled students are preferred by university admission programs.
I also think it would be interesting to see just what a return to multi-grade one room schooling could do for society. There have been studies performed that show huge improvements in education for students in these systems.
My own peeve is that the majority of society believes that a factory approach to education is what works best. Individualised education seems to be plain common sense to me; babies develop at different rates, but somehow they are all exactly the same, with the same motivations (good grades) at five years old? How counterintuitive is that? What is worse, the children are not actually motivated by grades, so that external motivation has to be pressed into them by the system. Sad.
I have an argument or two to contribute
I don't believe that this argument takes into account corporations supporting corporations. Arguably the corporations doing the most evil are either supported by a monopoly (SBC) or supported by having aggregated a number of corporations under them (Nestle), thus shielding them from negative public reaction to their actions. In the case of Nestle, one may boycott the parent company, but to have any visible effect on their cash-flow one must boycott dozens upon dozens of other brands and companies that Nestle owns. This is a huge undertaking for the consumer and, if the company's holdings or corportate clients are diverse enough, it may even prove impossible; in dealing with other companies they will be indirectly dealing with Nestle.
Agreed. There must be public consensus and a wish to punish a corporation before one can even begin to consider the problem I stated above.
Thanks for sparking a genuinely interesting debate.
I first saw the term "Freak Mainstream" in The Reg: Desktop Linux cracks Freak Mainstream
The term refers to users that fall into the gap between mainstream and earlier adopters and visionaries. For example, I believe that non-Linux-freak MythTV users fall into this category. Also see Crossing the Chasm for a better description of this technology gap that Linux may finally be crossing.
Mars
I've been thinking the exact same thing recently. The problem is that I don't know how to advertise my skills to find small jobs similar to those you are taking on.
Do you have any advice or insight into your situation? For example, are you leveraging years of past experience and/or a large network of contacts?. Or are you in a very technologically progressive region (depends on the local industry; eg. manufacturing blue-collar towns lag at least 5 years behind the mainstream)
I am glad to hear that they have been trying to remedy a number of the problems that Lark posted. For their sake I hope there is a lot of improvement.
Still, reading the thread really made me wonder, exactly who where they thinking of when designing this game? The players? The developers? The socialites? The achievers?
It sounds like it has so many 'conveniences' for players that the fantasy atmosphere may be eroded. I always thought of North Karana in the original EQ as a giant subway station; trains every 15 minutes, day and night, pick up some goods from the vendors while you pass through...
For example, why don't they try to be creative about the teleports to the moon? Why not have them only take place when the moon is directly overhead or some similar predictable celestial event? Why not make the ground shake? A pillar of light maybe? Animals fleeing in terror? Something?! Add some sense of wonder to the thing!
I didn't expect much from EQ2 after seeing the stagnation of EQ1. Maybe we have to go back to the drawing board. Grow the concepts founded in MUD(MOO,MUSH) into new games at a simpler level. Start over.
A friend of mine sent me this excellent criticism of EverQuest 2 written by an EverQuest MVP Beta Tester. The thread is long but the writer is well spoken and she goes into great depth about all aspects of game play, their strengths, and their [numerous, critical] flaws:
http://eq2.forums.thedruidsgrove.org/showthread.ph p?t=7973&page=1&pp=15
This is a must-read thread for anyone even remotely thinking of dropping money on this game.
Sorry, but this statement is straight up false. The WinCE kernel is based off of the Windows NT 4.0 kernel. Also, WinCE shares the architecture of Windows 2000.
Microsoft ripped out a large part of the OS functionality and replaced other parts. Most of the API is the exact same as Win2K, but a lot of function calls with eleven arguments under Win2K require to you pass nine of them as NULL or zero under WinCE.
Just imagine the security situation this chainsaw OS surgery has created. Think bluesnarfing is fun now? Try it when you can hijack the entire entertainment and navigation system of that expensive SUV that just cut you off!
The current systems do not support the production of safe drugs with well-know side-effects, and people expect corporations to produce a safe genetic mutant being?
Bullshit!
Guess I found one of my own hot-buttons...
I was thinking about this the other day, and was wondering if this is a huge gap in the Windows user interaction model.
Think about how you input info using windows. You click on a few locations using the mouse, perhaps use some keyboard input, click some more. The output from these inputs is arbitrary: it may result in anything from a 'File/Save' dialog to a custom error dialog box. There is no linear path for inputting commands, or for mapping inputs to results.
Compare this to the command line. You enter a few distinct atomic commands, and view the results in the same medium. You then enter more commands, refining your actions. The key here is that you already have a linear model for input that produces well defined expected results, all in a common medium that is conceptually simple, visible to the user, and easily processed by machines. Extending this model to accept voice input or output is trivial.
How is one supposed to quantify basic tasks and turn them into equivelant voice commands without a baseline framework or paradigm to extend from? How do you automate, simplify, or extend existing tasks without a common input or output medium? GUIs provide no such medium or framework; that same framework is at the heart of the command line interface!
Perhaps this is why we never saw voice recognition technology take off on Windows. It's blinking impossible to script actions for an arbitrary task, let alone process the arbitrary results!
On a similar note we may see voice recognition on Linux take off like a rocket. Anybody can add voice recognition to perform almost any command because the actions are all scriptable throught the CLI already. If you can type it, you can get your computer to do it when you say 'computer, foo!'
Mars
P.S. It would be greatly appreciated if someone could please clarify my point. It's buried in there somewhere...
Just tried out the Live Bookmarks feature in 1.0PR. I don't know who came up with this idea, but I think they missed some basic usability testing before including this feature. Here are just a few observations from a half-day of use:
If you are an RSS freak stuck using Windows and haven't tried out SharpReader, I would highly recommend it. It is simple (read: no chrome), powerful, and it works. I also find that it handles bulk feed reading better than any other aggregator out there. I'm just waiting for the GTK# version or a good wxAnything version to come out so I can use it on Linux. As for Live Bookmarks, I am sad to say that it is the first feature for Firefox where I feel that it should have been left on the drawing table.
Mars
Just a little contrast for those who read only one level deep.
Mars
... with a digital camera. I wonder what their offices look like? I'm sure we would all love to know.
Remember [H]ard|OCP's expose "Behind the Infinium Phantom Console"? Perhaps someone needs to perform some similar detective work in this case as well.
This is just stupid! Google does not define the context of your search. When I search for 'AXA', maybe I am not looking for your stupid company. Maybe I was looking for the name of my favorite stock quote, or my favorite hemorrhoid cream!
They have no claim to 'AXA' any more than Microsoft has claim to the word 'Windows' when used outside of the specific context that applies to their software.
Check out the Canadian Coalition for Fair Digital Access's FAQ. [http://www.ccfda.ca/subsections/eng_faqs.html]
From the FAQ: The amount distributed to artists is even lower. Last I heard it was on the order of 0.23 cents for each dollar collected. Not to mention that the levy is probably unconstitutional.
I think that networks that build on the concept of WASTE may offer the revival of BBS-like communities. It has the potential to tie together the community members in a similar fashion to BBS. With a BBS, you have to have a friend with the number. With a WASTE network, you have to have a friend with the public key.
.02 CDN cents. Hope they were worth the mod points =)
But I think that WASTE would have to adopt a more server-centric role to foster the community of a BBS. You would have a central server, offering a bulletin board, doors, and file sharing. It would be pretty cool to be able to set up your own little community for you and your friends just by running a server on your home system. Sure, you can do that now by setting up phpBB with a dyDNS account, but for some reason I see the WASTE concept being easier to advertise and implement (the privacy aspect helps as well). The community could be private or public, and I believe that the community that would grow from such a network could resemble the BBSes of old in a way. Not a replacement, but an alternative.
My
Mars
It's a damn good book and it may help you answer your questions.
I have the same problem. People tell me to stop analysing things all the time. This book shed light on their views, and helped me to understand my own.
Cheers,
Mars
Now we know that the US was desperately looking for support in the UN security council for it's war resolution. As a result, many of the officials were informed that they may have been 'observed' by the US government, so that the government might devise a strategy that would make their resolution more appealing to those undecided security council members. Wouldn't those officials like to know that for the last 2 months the United States Government has had exclusive access to their email correspondence? Also, notice how there hasn't been any information given out with regards to detecting a break-in using this exploit. One might say there is no point due to the fact that the exploit was not observed in the wild. However, I'm sure that if a method of detection was discovered and applied then some governments and organizations might find some interesting server activity in the previous two months. Mars
Even if a high quality software is produced I don't think there is a good chance it will be adopted by the masses.
Take my favorite editing program, EditPlus. It was recommended by a friend and I found it to be perfect for what it is supposed to do: edit files. It beats the crap out of Notepad and Kate for KDE is just a broken reflection in comparison. But nobody has heard of the program and no one uses it.
If there is a Linux equivalent I haven't heard of it and I don't think there is any way I could. Currently there is no way that the highest quality software can be brought to the market. If users could go and easily try out and aquire different programs for their regular tasks then I'm sure the quality of software would appear to increase dramatically.
Unfortunately we are stuck with the defaults and the status quo (notepad.exe).
ICQ was an exception to this theory, great software when it came out, sadly useless now. Trillian is a case for the theory, better (I think) than ICQ, but not that many people seem to have heard of it or use it.
Mars
I see the resurgence of the floppy disk, the demand for the USB dime drives, the flash memory cards!
As white lists and circles of trust emerge as the way to communicate in the future, we will often find ourselves needing to communicate with a friend from an unfamiliar location, one without our identifying marks [PGP key].
In steps the long forgotten floppy disk to save the day! A miraculous device that can hold all of our private keys and their corresponding identities, ready to be used from any location that is not your own PC, so that your friends might know it is in fact you sending that email.
Think of a floppy disk holding your personalities and private encryption keys as an unofficial digital ID card.
You go to the campus computer center, pick a terminal, pop in your disk, use the keys on it to send out your emails, remove the disk and walk away without a worry. Stuck using a co-worker's computer for a very urgent message? Use the disk! Without it you would be up a creek without a paddle, risking your email getting sent to their junk box, to hopefully be picked out of the 1000 spam mails it resides with.
The real irony? A lot of computers don't work well with floppy drives anymore, and it seems (to me at least) that most applications are turning away from architectures supporting removable media, in the assumption that the system is networked anyways so why would you have to tote information around on a floppy disk?
Mars