Ok, forgive me for standing on a soapbox, but when I see people talking about computer literacy, I wonder why they don't focus on just plain literacy.
I am a (recent) product of the US educational system, and I still find the statistics on illiteracy and functional illiteracy in the US staggering. Without going into the hows and whys of the problem with illiteracy in the US, I think that I can say that it is a problem that needs to be solved before it is reasonable to expect computer literacy.
I think that anyone who has ever worked in tech support, or tried to help people on IRC, or who have any relatives at all has been forced to ask themselves at least once "Can't these people even read a $favorite_curse_word message box". I think that, in at least some cases, the answer is "no". Though the everyday user might come into contact with some computer jargon in their regular usage, I would suspect that it is much more common that the writing in various bits of documentation, error messages, etc. are above the reading level of the average highschool graduage (and perhaps a few college graduates as well).
I would be interested to see someone do a study on the reading level of various bits of documentation (perhaps a comparison between some *nix man pages, OS X and Windows help, and the average reading level of articles on a few common sites that contain documentation).
Aside from people being able to read, I think that one of the major aspects of computer literacy is teaching people to read things that pop up on the screen. I think that many people see error messages, etc. and just assume that it will be above their heads and make no attempt to understand it.
I do not personally own a PSP, but I've seen them (actually, I've only ever seen 1 person who owned one, and that person worked at Gamestop and had pretty much everything because he got a nice employee discount), and they do look larger than the DS. The size of the PSP aside, the DS is definitely bulky. I got mine soon after they were released because at the time I had a family member who was in the hospital and I was spending around 15 hours a week at the hospital. I occasionally take it with me to school when I have some time between classes. For the most part though, I consider it way too bulky to take along in most circumstances. Even when I put it in my backpack it takes up a significant amount of room, and I cant imagine it to fit comfortably in anything smallter than a backpack, briefcase, or large purse.
Of course, even with a more slimline DS, I can't really see the point in taking along a portable gaming system unless you have a long commute or something. I know that personally, I play my DS almost exculsively at home (I keep it by my computer, and play games for 30-45 minutes usually while I'm waiting for something to render.)
The exclusive colours thing has always mystified me. Nintendo has always been particularly bad about it, releasing a console in some colours in one location, in other colours in a different location, and then once you buy one, they finally release it in the colour you actually want.
I have an original Nintendo DS, but I am considering getting a DS Lite because the original is a little bulky, but I will be rather irritated if I break down and buy one in a colour that I don't really care much for, only to have it released in that colour soon afterwards.
I think students definitely need to be introduced to coding without an IDE. I have a good friend who graduated a couple of semesters before me. I sent him some code to look at that I had been working on, and he had absolutely no idea how to compile it without using an IDE (and it wasn't some horribly complex application in 12 different languages or anything, it was around 4.java files, and had no weird dependencies or anything). This was someone who graduated with a degree in CIS and already had a degree in CET, had been using Linux for years, and he still didn't really get what was going on with compilation.
That said, I think a short introduction early on should be enough. For beginning students a good IDE can help to re-enforce the learning. Syntax highlighting can help them to remember keywords, and auto-intention and braces can help keep their code clean so they don't get too frustrated early on.
Code completion is a bit of a double-edged sword. It can help students to remember the names of functions, etc. but it could be bad if they come to rely on it too much early on.
I also agree with some of the other posters who have said that vi and emacs might have too steep of a learning curve. If you are on Windows, then Textpad is a fairly nice program that is sort of half-way between a text editor and a fully featured IDE.
I've been trying to put materials together recently to start teaching a volunteer community education class on Java programming, and considering everything I've mentioned above, my plan is to give an introduction to compiling from the command line, and have student practice building demo programs from the command line, and then introduce a couple of IDEs (I plan to demo Eclipse, Netbeans, and X Code). From there on I'll probably tell students to play around with each and then stick with their favorite way of developing, while giving demos in Eclipse, simply because it's the IDE I prefer (though I run most things from the command line outside of Eclipse, and end up using Eclipse as a glorified text editor, mainly because my notebook is underpowered enough that the speed difference justifies the tiny amount of extra effort).
With PHP it's really impractical to completely seperate out all of the HTML from the PHP. The situation can be helped a lot by planning out the development before hand. This planning really comes into play in two different situations:
The first is that you should focus on breaking the code into modules. A lot of people overlook that newer versions of PHP have lot of OO features that can ease development- though these people tend to not be pro developers. If you plan the site out and break the code into modules, aside from the other benefits, it can make it easier to keep a lot of the code out of the rest of the site, since you can largely just call objects.
The other way planning can come in helpful is to plan out the design with the designer. This way you can set up the code you generate to fit into the look and feel of the site without having to have someone who may not be familiar with PHP try to edit the generated HTML. If everything is planned out well, most layout changes can be handled by changing stylesheets without having to worrying about changing the underlying code.
One thing I've learned is that, sometimes it's simply not reasonable to not embed a content into your code. If you spend too much time trying to figgure out how to get around doing so, chances are that even if you succeed the resulting code will be at least a couple of: slow, bloated, buggy, obfuscated, or difficult to change later. Usually, if I have to generate a fair bit of HTML in my PHP, I do it like:
echo<<<END some html <tags> go $here </tags> END;
Usually, that way if someone has to change the layout later, they can skim through the code and see a block of mostly HTML that looks familiar enough that they can change it.
I have often wondered if much of the difficulty which arises in written communcation (email, IM, etc.) is due to a general degredation in the vocabulary of the populous. I beleive that my own vocabulary is just slightly above what may have been the average for people born a generation or two before me, but I think that it is vastly larger than that of many of my 20-something peers. Although there may be many causes of this, such as a general decline in literacy, a lack of focus on grammar in schools, MTV, a general trend toward a more streamlined form of english , a conspiracy run by the dental floss industry, Mercury in retrograde-whatever. The result is that by having a smaller vocabulary, the effective resolution of the language is degredated. The more subtle details of language are lost like converting a true color PNG to an 8 bit gif.
Compare the letters written by- for example- soldiers during the civil war with letters that are written today. It should be a safe assumption that the regular infantry whos letters are oft cited from that era would be average for the time period. In both cases, we are dealing with a form of written communication. While it is perhaps true that letters written before the advent of email were subject to more revisions and were generally more well thought out, the fact is that there is a much larger breadth of vocabulary used in them. I think that if people today were willing and able to use a larger vocabulary they would be able to correspond more effectively and avoid misunderstandings.
I've helped a lot of people transition to Linux, and there are some valid reasons for the switch sometimes being difficult, but I don't see the "lack of multimedia" as a valid argument really. For multimedia, the "average" user (if such a thing exists) needs to be able to listen to music, watch videos (steaming, flash, MPEG2 and DivX seem to be most common for average users), play games, and manage photos. SuSE (the boxed set, not OpenSuSE), which is what I use primarily, comes out of the box with flash, libmpeg123, Nvidia's binary drivers (actually downloaded off the net, but this is handled during the install process and is transparent to the user), and a number of nice multimedia applications including XMMS, Bleep Media Player, and Kaffine. This covers most multimedia needs. Personally, I find digiKam to be superior to iPhoto for managing photographs, and all I had to do to get my camera to work was to plug it in, launch digiKam, and let it automatically detect my camera.
The fact is that I do a lot of multimedia work professionally, and I use Linux as my primary OS (I have an iBook that I use for Photoshop and to take with me when I'm meeting clients). Setting up my desktop for my work pretty much involved putting in the DVD, letting the installer run, installing the main off-the-shelf application that I use for work (which has a native Linux version incidentally), and get to work.
The fact is that Linux is different than Windows. Some applications require a bit of effort to download and install <sarcasm> thanks to all those patent laws that help to encourage innovation</sarcasm> but some things that are fairly automagic on Linux require effort to get working on Windows, and many of these things (drivers comming to mind) are more fundamental to having a working system than the issues that Linux has. What it really comes down to though, in my opinion, is that there are a lot of people who switch to Linux without really having a reason to switch. Yeah, viruses, malware, buggy drivers, expense- for most people these aren't really reason enough to switch.
I started using Linux in 97 or 98 because at the time I was just starting to really learn about computers, and about programming, and I wanted a system that would allow me to really explore the system. I continued with it because I found it to be a superior development platform compared to Windows.
To contrast the experience many people have had- when I started at my University, all of the machines were using Windows 2000. I decided to try dual booting so that I could run some of the required software for some of the classes. In the end I gave up and was disgusted because I didn't really have a reason that made me WANT to use a different system. Instead of taking the obvious and easier solution of dual booting and running the applications we needed at school in Windows, I either found online, bought, or wrote my own applications so I could stick with the system I was more comfortable with.
When I decided to get a laptop, I decided to get an iBook because I had a reason, but more importantly, I WANTED to try OS X. In the end, a lot of people who try linux and complain about it just don't WANT to try Linux, and so they don't do what is required.
I have to agree with some of the other posters, this biometric thumb drive idea just smells horribly of a poorly thought out plan that is destined to fail catastrophically when your company either makes it into a money sink that never works out properly, or a poor implementation leads to sensitive data being stolen.
There are a number of reasons that it just seems like a strange a bad idea to me, but here are some of the most obvious things that pop into my head:
Firstly, thumb drives seem to be just now getting up into the 2GB range. I'm sure you could find larger ones if you looked, but the largest drive I was able to find with a google search for "thumb drive biometric authentication" was 2GB - and that devices wasn't exactly secure, since the biometric authentication could be overridden by a password. Now, the thing about it is, what sort of data do you have only 2GB of that is so vital as to require it's own backup system? Furthermore, what data do you have that is so vital that it requires it's own special backup system with biometric authentication, and is not vital enough that you aren't already hosting it on some machine with a RAID and nightly backups to tape. Most data that people need to back up now days tends to be stored in a database, which are going to log the hell out of everything, plus have multiple backups- onsite and off site. The idea of some 10 billion dollar banking institution having all of their local branches running their systems on a local access database, and a bank manager backing up the database file to a thumb drive every night would be frightening if it wasn't so absurd.
The second big thing that jumps out at me is the fact that biometrics really aren't all that secure. Many finger/thumb print recognition systems can be defeated with a gummibear; and I've never seen any sort of thumb drive with a built in retinal scanner.
holy crap, link is not safe for people with heart conditions.
I've seen the "scary thing pops up at you at the end of a flash video" things before, and they still get me every damned time.
I'm not sure that I really agree with your statement. I think that there may have been some people who thought FF X-2 was too "girly", but I think that there are a lot of valid complaints regarding the gameplay that really made it one of the low points of the series. Specifically, the game to me felt too disjointed, more like a series of sidequests than an actual game. The Dress Grid system too was problematic at times. While the idea of requiring strategic planning to lay out spheres on the dress grid for versatility was an interesting idea, in practice it felt far too limiting. It was too easy to master a given job, and the dress grid system seemed like a very artificial way of limiting characters who would have otherwise been too powerful because of the awkward pacing for gaining skills.
Really, I think most of the recent FF games have been different enough in their own ways. FF VI was really the best IMHO, but VII was the first to really present the story in a mature way (to US audiences at least). While the others (IV sticks out in my mind) had mature stories, VII was the first to really present the story in the way that it did. VIII was horrible IMHO (I never made it past the 2nd disc, and it's the only FF game to date that I haven't completed) but it did introduce a number of new concepts. IX was what X-2 could have been - that is a fairly lighthearted story that never took itself too seriously and instead focused on solid gameplay and humor. X was the first game to really present a world that felt real. Abandoning the overworld gave the game a sense of cohesion.
Square does recycle a lot of ideas for the FF series, but the games are far from carbon copies of eachother. Not ever FF game is a hit, not even all of the earlier ones were that great. At the end of the day, the Final Fantasy series really is a sort of McRPG series anyway- people play the FF games for a sense of familiarity. When the new FF game comes out, most people don't buy it for a totally new experience, they buy it to see the latest spin on a known and comfortable formula. There are a lot of great RPGs out there if you want something different (Xenosaga, Star Ocean), and series that do the same thing as Final Fantasy, but which reuse a different formula (Dragon Quest, Breath of Fire).
I've sort of lost my point now, but I think it was this. First of all- don't think that the only people who didn't like FF X-2 were teenage boys who were insecure with their masculinity, and second- all of the FF series have done something different- none of them are drastically different because FF isn't about radical and drastic new things- it's about new revisions to a forumla that people are comfortable and familiar with.
No offence taken. I'm no game industry analyst (heck, I don't even get to play games much anymore, let alone closely follow the industry). My comment was probably 20% prediction, 30% humor, and 50% mocking the completely baseless predictions most people make leading up to E3.
I actually think Sony will probably have a good showing, and I also think that Nintendo will have a decent showing, but I'm not sure if ANYTHING nintendo can do will live up to the hype.
The article's predictions seemed reasonable, though really there is no way of telling how accurate they may be. Keeping in line with the E3 fervor, I'll post some of my own predictions of what I think (or perhaps hope) will happen at E3. Nintendo
Nintendo will announce a general release date for the Wii. It will be sooner than expected.
Nintendo will announce some accessory for the DS that will add motion-sensitivty to it, for use with the Wii.
Twilight Princess will be delayed.
Nintendo will show off a slew of sports games for Wii, including Tennis, Golf, and Fishing.
We may see the next "Halo" on the Wii. At the very least, the next Duck Hunt.
Wii launch titles will include a Mario game and a Wario game.
We will probably learn more about the Virtual Console.
Sony
We will see a re-designed controller for the PS3. It will still look like a boomerang, but will look slightly more like the PS2 controller.
Sony will announce that the PS3 will launch in Q1 2007.
We'll see the same MGS and RE demos.
Sony will show new trailers that are "approximations" of what the system might be capable of.
The PS3 will not be playable.
I don't really follow Microsoft much, nor care much about the 360, so I will not make predictions regarding it.
One of the most useful exercises that I have had in a writing course was given by my first semester composition professor. On the first day of class he told us to spend 30 minutes writing about some topic (I can't remember what it was now, something like why we decided to enroll in higher education or something like that). At the end of the class he told everyone to stand up, take their paper, wad it up, and throw it in the trash.
The point of this exerciese, he explained, was to get people used to throwing out writing. Especially for inexperienced writers, most of the first draft will be thrown away. Students should get used to that, as well as get used to the idea that if something isn't working, sometimes it's better to just start afresh.
Another useful exerciese was presented in my Technical Writing course. In it we were given exerpts from various technical manuals. Generally we were given something along the lines of 3-4 paragraphs and told to condense it down into a single paragraph. Througout the entire semester, the professor put a great deal of emphisis on brevity. Almost all assignments given in that class were explicitly given as a 1 page MAXIMUM.
I know that, personally, I have always had a propencity to use more complex language than may be strictly nessesary in my writing, and this is perhaps a symptom of the fact that I also use rather elevated language in my everyday speech. In general however, I think that many students have benefitted from being instructed to write more like that would speak. Specifically, many people speak in consice sentences. If you can teach students to write with such brevity, but also to add the clarity nessesary for written communication I think that you will find it a great help in improving their writing.
Finally, I would say that while grammar may not be a focus of the course, you should by no means disregard it. The standard of grammar and spelling among most people today is abysmal. I'm sure that an astute average reader or grammer nazi could find dozens of errors in this post, and I think that my own grammar and spelling is above average compared to that of most people. This being the case, you should be sure to tell students when they have poor grammar, and attempt to correct it. I would suggest not accepting any papers that have over a certain number of obvious grammatical errors. Common mistakes like its vs it's, they're vs. their, effect vs. affect, etc. should not be accepted. Many of these errors will not detract from the understanding of what is written, but it will immediately cause most readers who catch the errors to disregard the entire contents of the paper.
I'm at a loss as to why someone or some group of large publishers hasn't set up some sort of virtual E3. The XBOX360's allowing users to download videos and demos is a huge step toward this- but it only really works for people who have a 360.
I can imagine some sort of Virtual E3- have some live streaming video of the various events, virtual booths where you can view game demos, maybe read interviews with developers and get high resolution screenshots. I think a lot of people would pay to have access to something like that as well. I can't really imagine a better situation. Millions of gamers who would sell their mothers to go to E3 pay publishers for the priviledge of watching a few hours of advertisements.
The only reason I can think why they might not do this is that to the game journalists, E3 is like christmas. I would imagine magazine and web subscriptions probably go up considerably around E3, and as E3 is really a press event, it might not do well to piss off the press by stealing their subscribers.
I'm not sure I would consider the situation an ultimatum exactly. It's more like:
As an employee, you are selling your time, knowledge and skills to the company to do some job in exchange for a salary or hourly wadge, plus usually some benefits. The way it works at most jobs is, at any time for pretty much any reason, your employer can say "well, we dont need you any more, clear out your desk and go home. We'll put your last check in the mail."
In fact, the basis of "at will" employement is that either party is able to terminate the agreement for employement at any time.
In such a situation, it is not equitable for the employer to have the power to end that employment agreement at any time without the employee having the same opportunity. As having another job is largely a factor in being able to reasonably terminate your current employment agreement, an employer asking an employee to not have their resume available for other interested parties is functionally equivilent to them removing your ability to terminate your at will employment at any time, while they retain that right.
What I am suggesting is that, if your employer wishes you to terminate that right, then for the arrangement to remain equitable, you should have mutual assurance that, if they effectively ask you to end the right to terminate your employment at will, then they themselves should give up that right. The employer may then decide that you are valuable enough that they wish to enter into such an agreement, or they may not decide that. The point is that there remains a balance of power in the employment agreement.
As for being a valuable asset to the company, I would say that if you do not feel that you are a valuable asset to the company, then you should be considering another job anyway. Self actualization is an important part of overall happyness, and for many people that invovles a feeling of usefullness, value, and accomplishment at work.
In the end, you might still end up in a position where an employer just gets rid of you and hires someone else, but in the long run I think that people that take such a stance are likely to find themselves in more satisfying positions with more respectful companies. If everyone takes such a stance, it might even be a small stride in helping to level out the vastly out-of-balance relationship between businesses and employees that currently exists. All that it takes, really, is to have the right mindset. Remember that as a worker you are not a drone or a cog in a machine, but a talented individual who is selling their talents to help the orginization acheive it's goals.
I should preface this comment with the fact that I'm only 22, and barely in the "real world" myself- so remember that although I may have no idea of what I'm talking about from experience, I think what I'm going to infer does make sense- and perhaps someone who has seen more of the world can validate or invalidate my ideas. That said, here goes:
Before the advent of sites such as Monster.com, etc. job hunting was a fairly active pursuit. It involved looking at potentially interested companies- sending in your resume to them, etc. Now days, job "hunting" can be much more benign. The fact is that it's quite reasonable to be perfectly content with ones job, and not actively seeking a new employer, but still to have your resume online 'incase something better comes along'. In fact, I would be that many of the people who's resumes were posted on Monster.com had posted them there before they got their current position.
It seems that the optimal solution is really to just get Managers/HR drones to realize this and to not associate running across someones resume online with the idea that they are actively searching for new employment.
If HR still doesn't like it (especially if where you work is an 'At Will' employment place), then I would politely inform them that- if they are worried about you leaving then they should consider negotiating a contract for your exclusive employement, and if you are able to find mutually acceptable terms, then you will remove your resume.
I've played with a number of various multimedia applications, and I always come back to mplayer. Personally, I use KMplayer when I want a GUI, since it has a few nice features that GMplayer doesn't (drag and drop playlist, maintains the correct aspect ratio of the file when resizing, nicer integration with KDE). I still occasionally use Ogle for DVDs, but I'm eagerly anticipating MPlayer supporting DVD menus.
For those of you who might have stuck with Xine based players and haven't played around much with MPlayer, there are a few reasons I really like it:
The largest reason is that it plays bloody everything. I've personally never come across a file that I couldn't open with MPlayer. The worst I've ever run into is in some files that are slightly corrupted I've had to use the -idx flag to reindex the file so that I can gracefully skip over bad sections of the file instead of the video just stopping playing. I find this particularly handy when I'm downloading television shows off bittorrent and the seeders all go away when I'm at like 90%.
Mplayer also seems more lightweight ot me than Xine. Most of the time, if I'm watching video at my computer, it's because I'm doing something that's taking long enough that I'm sitting at the desk waiting for it to finish (compiling a lot of software, doing 3D rendering, etc.) so it's nice to be able to dedicate more cycles to whatever real work is getting done while still being able to relax with a video.
I'd never heard that quote before, but I must say that it's one of those that I think should be posted on the front of all CS related course syllabi.
I'm sure that I'm not alone, I know that I've written code that at the time I thought was quite clever- and then later when I had to debug that area of the code I ended up having to re-write it because I have difficultly understanding exactly what the heck I was doing.
Luckily, I try to shy away from neat but strange code when I'm doing code that other people will use or look at, so it's easier to deal with code that I actually support.
I'd say the next most common one would be Naziism
Did you just Godwin the name of Nintendo's new console? Are they going to have to change to something else now?...and just when I'd started to think the name was kinda neat.
fair enough, I hadn't had breakfast or lunch or dinner yet, and was a bit grumpy. Plus a few other commentors were less with the sarcastic humor and more with the being mean (you'd think I'd have tougher skin having been commenting on slashdot for a few years, but I guess not).
Two things: One is that, although there is no "W" sound in German, it does not mean that a native german speaker would not be able to produce that sound.
Secondly, as I said in my post, I would not expect it to be pronounced as in the english "we" in german, but as in the german "wie". That was sorta the whole point of my post- that though the sounds may differ, Wii has an analogous word in all three languages.
I was not claiming to speak french, as you surmised I did in fact use bablefish to translate. Someone else helpfully pointed out a better translation, I was merely trying to get a point across that.
IDNSJ (I Do Not Speak Japanese) but it seems unlikely that it would be true to say "the japanese can't pronounce it".
It seems more likely that they will use the same stylized logo and spelling (IIRC romanji is considered very stylish in japan anyway) and simply adjust the pronounciation to fit the local language.
In English speaking countries, it is "We"
In German speaking countries, "wie"
In French speaking countries, "oui" ..etc. It's actually quite clever because it is a word in each of those languages. A single name and logo, and one can get "Wii play together" or "Parole juste Wii" (just say yes) or "Wii wir umziehen, wii wir spielen" (how we move, how we play).
These are just theoretical ideas of course, but it nintendo were able to do find homonyms in other languages, it could create a globally recognized product name.
Actually, a number of states have laws that explicitly state that intercorse can only be between a man and a woman. In other states, (as a sibling AC posts) sexual intercourse is further defined as being limited to certain positions.
If Oklahoma is one of the states that has such laws, the it may be nessesary for them to add in the clause about "homosexuality", though I agree that the wording seems vauge and someone could potentially try to use it to say that any signs of affection between two people of the same gender would be considered "homosexuality".
You get these security implications anyway, the instant you hook a computer up to the net. Spyware. Adware.
That is true, to an extent, but the point I was trying (and perhaps failed) to make was that with a centeralized system it becomes much easier.
Traditionally, if you wanted a users documents, you needed to do two things: You needed to somehow compromise that users computer, and then once the computer is compromised, you need to locate relevant documents for retreval. Now, for someone who is a talented cracker and social engineer, getting into most personal computers is trivial. For someone who is untalented as a cracker or social engineer (see: script kiddies) it is less trivial, but still possible. Retreiving files is relatively simple in either case, but still requires scanning the hard disk for whatever types of documents you are looking for, deciding which of those documents is relevant, and sending them back. Simple for a single user- but for most traditional purposes, one would want the documents of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of users. Granted, a lot of spyware is installed on that many machines- but I think that if some spyware application were to actually send out copies of all of a users personal documents, they would take note and a patch would be issued quickly. Plus what about all of the documents of people who use Linux or BSD or OS X, etc.
The point is, it can be done- but making it much easier to do so by having everything in a nice neat package makes doing so much more attractive to those in a position to make use of such data.
Furthermore, to get a bit more big-brother, consider the following two situations:
Situation A:
The government decides that it wants to monitor all of the personal documentation of all of it's citizens that fall under a certain demographic (say anyone who is within 4 generations of having lived in the middle east, anyone registered with the democratic party, or anyone born on a tuesday). The government passes a law requiring all citizens to install some sort of application. The government may or may not tell people what this application does- but sooner or later someone will let people know that this application is sending copies of all of their personal documents for government viewing. Either way people are suspicious that the government required them to install this application. (This person may or may not later have their human rights violated in guantanemo).
Situation B:
The government quietly sends a request to the people hosting this service. They say that under the patriot act they want access to this services database. No one is to be told about this. Now the government has access to everyones documents.
The point isn't that it's impossible to get the documents, the point is that it suddenly becomes reasonably trivial to do so completely undetected.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, forgive me for standing on a soapbox, but when I see people talking about computer literacy, I wonder why they don't focus on just plain literacy.
I am a (recent) product of the US educational system, and I still find the statistics on illiteracy and functional illiteracy in the US staggering. Without going into the hows and whys of the problem with illiteracy in the US, I think that I can say that it is a problem that needs to be solved before it is reasonable to expect computer literacy.
I think that anyone who has ever worked in tech support, or tried to help people on IRC, or who have any relatives at all has been forced to ask themselves at least once "Can't these people even read a $favorite_curse_word message box". I think that, in at least some cases, the answer is "no". Though the everyday user might come into contact with some computer jargon in their regular usage, I would suspect that it is much more common that the writing in various bits of documentation, error messages, etc. are above the reading level of the average highschool graduage (and perhaps a few college graduates as well).
I would be interested to see someone do a study on the reading level of various bits of documentation (perhaps a comparison between some *nix man pages, OS X and Windows help, and the average reading level of articles on a few common sites that contain documentation).
Aside from people being able to read, I think that one of the major aspects of computer literacy is teaching people to read things that pop up on the screen. I think that many people see error messages, etc. and just assume that it will be above their heads and make no attempt to understand it.
I do not personally own a PSP, but I've seen them (actually, I've only ever seen 1 person who owned one, and that person worked at Gamestop and had pretty much everything because he got a nice employee discount), and they do look larger than the DS. The size of the PSP aside, the DS is definitely bulky. I got mine soon after they were released because at the time I had a family member who was in the hospital and I was spending around 15 hours a week at the hospital. I occasionally take it with me to school when I have some time between classes. For the most part though, I consider it way too bulky to take along in most circumstances. Even when I put it in my backpack it takes up a significant amount of room, and I cant imagine it to fit comfortably in anything smallter than a backpack, briefcase, or large purse.
Of course, even with a more slimline DS, I can't really see the point in taking along a portable gaming system unless you have a long commute or something. I know that personally, I play my DS almost exculsively at home (I keep it by my computer, and play games for 30-45 minutes usually while I'm waiting for something to render.)
The exclusive colours thing has always mystified me. Nintendo has always been particularly bad about it, releasing a console in some colours in one location, in other colours in a different location, and then once you buy one, they finally release it in the colour you actually want.
I have an original Nintendo DS, but I am considering getting a DS Lite because the original is a little bulky, but I will be rather irritated if I break down and buy one in a colour that I don't really care much for, only to have it released in that colour soon afterwards.
I think students definitely need to be introduced to coding without an IDE. I have a good friend who graduated a couple of semesters before me. I sent him some code to look at that I had been working on, and he had absolutely no idea how to compile it without using an IDE (and it wasn't some horribly complex application in 12 different languages or anything, it was around 4 .java files, and had no weird dependencies or anything). This was someone who graduated with a degree in CIS and already had a degree in CET, had been using Linux for years, and he still didn't really get what was going on with compilation.
That said, I think a short introduction early on should be enough. For beginning students a good IDE can help to re-enforce the learning. Syntax highlighting can help them to remember keywords, and auto-intention and braces can help keep their code clean so they don't get too frustrated early on.
Code completion is a bit of a double-edged sword. It can help students to remember the names of functions, etc. but it could be bad if they come to rely on it too much early on.
I also agree with some of the other posters who have said that vi and emacs might have too steep of a learning curve. If you are on Windows, then Textpad is a fairly nice program that is sort of half-way between a text editor and a fully featured IDE.
I've been trying to put materials together recently to start teaching a volunteer community education class on Java programming, and considering everything I've mentioned above, my plan is to give an introduction to compiling from the command line, and have student practice building demo programs from the command line, and then introduce a couple of IDEs (I plan to demo Eclipse, Netbeans, and X Code). From there on I'll probably tell students to play around with each and then stick with their favorite way of developing, while giving demos in Eclipse, simply because it's the IDE I prefer (though I run most things from the command line outside of Eclipse, and end up using Eclipse as a glorified text editor, mainly because my notebook is underpowered enough that the speed difference justifies the tiny amount of extra effort).
The first is that you should focus on breaking the code into modules. A lot of people overlook that newer versions of PHP have lot of OO features that can ease development- though these people tend to not be pro developers. If you plan the site out and break the code into modules, aside from the other benefits, it can make it easier to keep a lot of the code out of the rest of the site, since you can largely just call objects.
The other way planning can come in helpful is to plan out the design with the designer. This way you can set up the code you generate to fit into the look and feel of the site without having to have someone who may not be familiar with PHP try to edit the generated HTML. If everything is planned out well, most layout changes can be handled by changing stylesheets without having to worrying about changing the underlying code.
One thing I've learned is that, sometimes it's simply not reasonable to not embed a content into your code. If you spend too much time trying to figgure out how to get around doing so, chances are that even if you succeed the resulting code will be at least a couple of: slow, bloated, buggy, obfuscated, or difficult to change later. Usually, if I have to generate a fair bit of HTML in my PHP, I do it like:
Usually, that way if someone has to change the layout later, they can skim through the code and see a block of mostly HTML that looks familiar enough that they can change it.
I have often wondered if much of the difficulty which arises in written communcation (email, IM, etc.) is due to a general degredation in the vocabulary of the populous. I beleive that my own vocabulary is just slightly above what may have been the average for people born a generation or two before me, but I think that it is vastly larger than that of many of my 20-something peers. Although there may be many causes of this, such as a general decline in literacy, a lack of focus on grammar in schools, MTV, a general trend toward a more streamlined form of english , a conspiracy run by the dental floss industry, Mercury in retrograde-whatever. The result is that by having a smaller vocabulary, the effective resolution of the language is degredated. The more subtle details of language are lost like converting a true color PNG to an 8 bit gif.
Compare the letters written by- for example- soldiers during the civil war with letters that are written today. It should be a safe assumption that the regular infantry whos letters are oft cited from that era would be average for the time period. In both cases, we are dealing with a form of written communication. While it is perhaps true that letters written before the advent of email were subject to more revisions and were generally more well thought out, the fact is that there is a much larger breadth of vocabulary used in them. I think that if people today were willing and able to use a larger vocabulary they would be able to correspond more effectively and avoid misunderstandings.
I've helped a lot of people transition to Linux, and there are some valid reasons for the switch sometimes being difficult, but I don't see the "lack of multimedia" as a valid argument really. For multimedia, the "average" user (if such a thing exists) needs to be able to listen to music, watch videos (steaming, flash, MPEG2 and DivX seem to be most common for average users), play games, and manage photos. SuSE (the boxed set, not OpenSuSE), which is what I use primarily, comes out of the box with flash, libmpeg123, Nvidia's binary drivers (actually downloaded off the net, but this is handled during the install process and is transparent to the user), and a number of nice multimedia applications including XMMS, Bleep Media Player, and Kaffine. This covers most multimedia needs. Personally, I find digiKam to be superior to iPhoto for managing photographs, and all I had to do to get my camera to work was to plug it in, launch digiKam, and let it automatically detect my camera.
The fact is that I do a lot of multimedia work professionally, and I use Linux as my primary OS (I have an iBook that I use for Photoshop and to take with me when I'm meeting clients). Setting up my desktop for my work pretty much involved putting in the DVD, letting the installer run, installing the main off-the-shelf application that I use for work (which has a native Linux version incidentally), and get to work.
The fact is that Linux is different than Windows. Some applications require a bit of effort to download and install <sarcasm> thanks to all those patent laws that help to encourage innovation</sarcasm> but some things that are fairly automagic on Linux require effort to get working on Windows, and many of these things (drivers comming to mind) are more fundamental to having a working system than the issues that Linux has. What it really comes down to though, in my opinion, is that there are a lot of people who switch to Linux without really having a reason to switch. Yeah, viruses, malware, buggy drivers, expense- for most people these aren't really reason enough to switch.
I started using Linux in 97 or 98 because at the time I was just starting to really learn about computers, and about programming, and I wanted a system that would allow me to really explore the system. I continued with it because I found it to be a superior development platform compared to Windows.
To contrast the experience many people have had- when I started at my University, all of the machines were using Windows 2000. I decided to try dual booting so that I could run some of the required software for some of the classes. In the end I gave up and was disgusted because I didn't really have a reason that made me WANT to use a different system. Instead of taking the obvious and easier solution of dual booting and running the applications we needed at school in Windows, I either found online, bought, or wrote my own applications so I could stick with the system I was more comfortable with.
When I decided to get a laptop, I decided to get an iBook because I had a reason, but more importantly, I WANTED to try OS X. In the end, a lot of people who try linux and complain about it just don't WANT to try Linux, and so they don't do what is required.
I have to agree with some of the other posters, this biometric thumb drive idea just smells horribly of a poorly thought out plan that is destined to fail catastrophically when your company either makes it into a money sink that never works out properly, or a poor implementation leads to sensitive data being stolen.
There are a number of reasons that it just seems like a strange a bad idea to me, but here are some of the most obvious things that pop into my head:
Firstly, thumb drives seem to be just now getting up into the 2GB range. I'm sure you could find larger ones if you looked, but the largest drive I was able to find with a google search for "thumb drive biometric authentication" was 2GB - and that devices wasn't exactly secure, since the biometric authentication could be overridden by a password. Now, the thing about it is, what sort of data do you have only 2GB of that is so vital as to require it's own backup system? Furthermore, what data do you have that is so vital that it requires it's own special backup system with biometric authentication, and is not vital enough that you aren't already hosting it on some machine with a RAID and nightly backups to tape. Most data that people need to back up now days tends to be stored in a database, which are going to log the hell out of everything, plus have multiple backups- onsite and off site. The idea of some 10 billion dollar banking institution having all of their local branches running their systems on a local access database, and a bank manager backing up the database file to a thumb drive every night would be frightening if it wasn't so absurd.
The second big thing that jumps out at me is the fact that biometrics really aren't all that secure. Many finger/thumb print recognition systems can be defeated with a gummibear; and I've never seen any sort of thumb drive with a built in retinal scanner.
holy crap, link is not safe for people with heart conditions.
I've seen the "scary thing pops up at you at the end of a flash video" things before, and they still get me every damned time.
I'm not sure that I really agree with your statement. I think that there may have been some people who thought FF X-2 was too "girly", but I think that there are a lot of valid complaints regarding the gameplay that really made it one of the low points of the series. Specifically, the game to me felt too disjointed, more like a series of sidequests than an actual game. The Dress Grid system too was problematic at times. While the idea of requiring strategic planning to lay out spheres on the dress grid for versatility was an interesting idea, in practice it felt far too limiting. It was too easy to master a given job, and the dress grid system seemed like a very artificial way of limiting characters who would have otherwise been too powerful because of the awkward pacing for gaining skills.
Really, I think most of the recent FF games have been different enough in their own ways. FF VI was really the best IMHO, but VII was the first to really present the story in a mature way (to US audiences at least). While the others (IV sticks out in my mind) had mature stories, VII was the first to really present the story in the way that it did. VIII was horrible IMHO (I never made it past the 2nd disc, and it's the only FF game to date that I haven't completed) but it did introduce a number of new concepts. IX was what X-2 could have been - that is a fairly lighthearted story that never took itself too seriously and instead focused on solid gameplay and humor. X was the first game to really present a world that felt real. Abandoning the overworld gave the game a sense of cohesion.
Square does recycle a lot of ideas for the FF series, but the games are far from carbon copies of eachother. Not ever FF game is a hit, not even all of the earlier ones were that great. At the end of the day, the Final Fantasy series really is a sort of McRPG series anyway- people play the FF games for a sense of familiarity. When the new FF game comes out, most people don't buy it for a totally new experience, they buy it to see the latest spin on a known and comfortable formula. There are a lot of great RPGs out there if you want something different (Xenosaga, Star Ocean), and series that do the same thing as Final Fantasy, but which reuse a different formula (Dragon Quest, Breath of Fire).
I've sort of lost my point now, but I think it was this. First of all- don't think that the only people who didn't like FF X-2 were teenage boys who were insecure with their masculinity, and second- all of the FF series have done something different- none of them are drastically different because FF isn't about radical and drastic new things- it's about new revisions to a forumla that people are comfortable and familiar with.
No offence taken. I'm no game industry analyst (heck, I don't even get to play games much anymore, let alone closely follow the industry). My comment was probably 20% prediction, 30% humor, and 50% mocking the completely baseless predictions most people make leading up to E3.
I actually think Sony will probably have a good showing, and I also think that Nintendo will have a decent showing, but I'm not sure if ANYTHING nintendo can do will live up to the hype.
Nintendo
Sony
I don't really follow Microsoft much, nor care much about the 360, so I will not make predictions regarding it.
One of the most useful exercises that I have had in a writing course was given by my first semester composition professor. On the first day of class he told us to spend 30 minutes writing about some topic (I can't remember what it was now, something like why we decided to enroll in higher education or something like that). At the end of the class he told everyone to stand up, take their paper, wad it up, and throw it in the trash.
The point of this exerciese, he explained, was to get people used to throwing out writing. Especially for inexperienced writers, most of the first draft will be thrown away. Students should get used to that, as well as get used to the idea that if something isn't working, sometimes it's better to just start afresh.
Another useful exerciese was presented in my Technical Writing course. In it we were given exerpts from various technical manuals. Generally we were given something along the lines of 3-4 paragraphs and told to condense it down into a single paragraph. Througout the entire semester, the professor put a great deal of emphisis on brevity. Almost all assignments given in that class were explicitly given as a 1 page MAXIMUM.
I know that, personally, I have always had a propencity to use more complex language than may be strictly nessesary in my writing, and this is perhaps a symptom of the fact that I also use rather elevated language in my everyday speech. In general however, I think that many students have benefitted from being instructed to write more like that would speak. Specifically, many people speak in consice sentences. If you can teach students to write with such brevity, but also to add the clarity nessesary for written communication I think that you will find it a great help in improving their writing.
Finally, I would say that while grammar may not be a focus of the course, you should by no means disregard it. The standard of grammar and spelling among most people today is abysmal. I'm sure that an astute average reader or grammer nazi could find dozens of errors in this post, and I think that my own grammar and spelling is above average compared to that of most people. This being the case, you should be sure to tell students when they have poor grammar, and attempt to correct it. I would suggest not accepting any papers that have over a certain number of obvious grammatical errors. Common mistakes like its vs it's, they're vs. their, effect vs. affect, etc. should not be accepted. Many of these errors will not detract from the understanding of what is written, but it will immediately cause most readers who catch the errors to disregard the entire contents of the paper.
I'm at a loss as to why someone or some group of large publishers hasn't set up some sort of virtual E3. The XBOX360's allowing users to download videos and demos is a huge step toward this- but it only really works for people who have a 360.
I can imagine some sort of Virtual E3- have some live streaming video of the various events, virtual booths where you can view game demos, maybe read interviews with developers and get high resolution screenshots. I think a lot of people would pay to have access to something like that as well. I can't really imagine a better situation. Millions of gamers who would sell their mothers to go to E3 pay publishers for the priviledge of watching a few hours of advertisements.
The only reason I can think why they might not do this is that to the game journalists, E3 is like christmas. I would imagine magazine and web subscriptions probably go up considerably around E3, and as E3 is really a press event, it might not do well to piss off the press by stealing their subscribers.
I'm not sure I would consider the situation an ultimatum exactly. It's more like:
As an employee, you are selling your time, knowledge and skills to the company to do some job in exchange for a salary or hourly wadge, plus usually some benefits. The way it works at most jobs is, at any time for pretty much any reason, your employer can say "well, we dont need you any more, clear out your desk and go home. We'll put your last check in the mail."
In fact, the basis of "at will" employement is that either party is able to terminate the agreement for employement at any time.
In such a situation, it is not equitable for the employer to have the power to end that employment agreement at any time without the employee having the same opportunity. As having another job is largely a factor in being able to reasonably terminate your current employment agreement, an employer asking an employee to not have their resume available for other interested parties is functionally equivilent to them removing your ability to terminate your at will employment at any time, while they retain that right.
What I am suggesting is that, if your employer wishes you to terminate that right, then for the arrangement to remain equitable, you should have mutual assurance that, if they effectively ask you to end the right to terminate your employment at will, then they themselves should give up that right. The employer may then decide that you are valuable enough that they wish to enter into such an agreement, or they may not decide that. The point is that there remains a balance of power in the employment agreement.
As for being a valuable asset to the company, I would say that if you do not feel that you are a valuable asset to the company, then you should be considering another job anyway. Self actualization is an important part of overall happyness, and for many people that invovles a feeling of usefullness, value, and accomplishment at work.
In the end, you might still end up in a position where an employer just gets rid of you and hires someone else, but in the long run I think that people that take such a stance are likely to find themselves in more satisfying positions with more respectful companies. If everyone takes such a stance, it might even be a small stride in helping to level out the vastly out-of-balance relationship between businesses and employees that currently exists. All that it takes, really, is to have the right mindset. Remember that as a worker you are not a drone or a cog in a machine, but a talented individual who is selling their talents to help the orginization acheive it's goals.
I should preface this comment with the fact that I'm only 22, and barely in the "real world" myself- so remember that although I may have no idea of what I'm talking about from experience, I think what I'm going to infer does make sense- and perhaps someone who has seen more of the world can validate or invalidate my ideas. That said, here goes:
Before the advent of sites such as Monster.com, etc. job hunting was a fairly active pursuit. It involved looking at potentially interested companies- sending in your resume to them, etc. Now days, job "hunting" can be much more benign. The fact is that it's quite reasonable to be perfectly content with ones job, and not actively seeking a new employer, but still to have your resume online 'incase something better comes along'. In fact, I would be that many of the people who's resumes were posted on Monster.com had posted them there before they got their current position.
It seems that the optimal solution is really to just get Managers/HR drones to realize this and to not associate running across someones resume online with the idea that they are actively searching for new employment.
If HR still doesn't like it (especially if where you work is an 'At Will' employment place), then I would politely inform them that- if they are worried about you leaving then they should consider negotiating a contract for your exclusive employement, and if you are able to find mutually acceptable terms, then you will remove your resume.
I've played with a number of various multimedia applications, and I always come back to mplayer. Personally, I use KMplayer when I want a GUI, since it has a few nice features that GMplayer doesn't (drag and drop playlist, maintains the correct aspect ratio of the file when resizing, nicer integration with KDE). I still occasionally use Ogle for DVDs, but I'm eagerly anticipating MPlayer supporting DVD menus.
For those of you who might have stuck with Xine based players and haven't played around much with MPlayer, there are a few reasons I really like it:
The largest reason is that it plays bloody everything. I've personally never come across a file that I couldn't open with MPlayer. The worst I've ever run into is in some files that are slightly corrupted I've had to use the -idx flag to reindex the file so that I can gracefully skip over bad sections of the file instead of the video just stopping playing. I find this particularly handy when I'm downloading television shows off bittorrent and the seeders all go away when I'm at like 90%.
Mplayer also seems more lightweight ot me than Xine. Most of the time, if I'm watching video at my computer, it's because I'm doing something that's taking long enough that I'm sitting at the desk waiting for it to finish (compiling a lot of software, doing 3D rendering, etc.) so it's nice to be able to dedicate more cycles to whatever real work is getting done while still being able to relax with a video.
I'd never heard that quote before, but I must say that it's one of those that I think should be posted on the front of all CS related course syllabi.
I'm sure that I'm not alone, I know that I've written code that at the time I thought was quite clever- and then later when I had to debug that area of the code I ended up having to re-write it because I have difficultly understanding exactly what the heck I was doing.
Luckily, I try to shy away from neat but strange code when I'm doing code that other people will use or look at, so it's easier to deal with code that I actually support.
I'd say the next most common one would be Naziism ...and just when I'd started to think the name was kinda neat.
Did you just Godwin the name of Nintendo's new console? Are they going to have to change to something else now?
fair enough, I hadn't had breakfast or lunch or dinner yet, and was a bit grumpy. Plus a few other commentors were less with the sarcastic humor and more with the being mean (you'd think I'd have tougher skin having been commenting on slashdot for a few years, but I guess not).
Two things: One is that, although there is no "W" sound in German, it does not mean that a native german speaker would not be able to produce that sound.
Secondly, as I said in my post, I would not expect it to be pronounced as in the english "we" in german, but as in the german "wie". That was sorta the whole point of my post- that though the sounds may differ, Wii has an analogous word in all three languages.
I was not claiming to speak french, as you surmised I did in fact use bablefish to translate. Someone else helpfully pointed out a better translation, I was merely trying to get a point across that.
IDNSJ (I Do Not Speak Japanese) but it seems unlikely that it would be true to say "the japanese can't pronounce it".
..etc. It's actually quite clever because it is a word in each of those languages. A single name and logo, and one can get "Wii play together" or "Parole juste Wii" (just say yes) or "Wii wir umziehen, wii wir spielen" (how we move, how we play).
It seems more likely that they will use the same stylized logo and spelling (IIRC romanji is considered very stylish in japan anyway) and simply adjust the pronounciation to fit the local language.
In English speaking countries, it is "We"
In German speaking countries, "wie"
In French speaking countries, "oui"
These are just theoretical ideas of course, but it nintendo were able to do find homonyms in other languages, it could create a globally recognized product name.
Actually, a number of states have laws that explicitly state that intercorse can only be between a man and a woman. In other states, (as a sibling AC posts) sexual intercourse is further defined as being limited to certain positions.
If Oklahoma is one of the states that has such laws, the it may be nessesary for them to add in the clause about "homosexuality", though I agree that the wording seems vauge and someone could potentially try to use it to say that any signs of affection between two people of the same gender would be considered "homosexuality".
You get these security implications anyway, the instant you hook a computer up to the net. Spyware. Adware.
That is true, to an extent, but the point I was trying (and perhaps failed) to make was that with a centeralized system it becomes much easier.
Traditionally, if you wanted a users documents, you needed to do two things: You needed to somehow compromise that users computer, and then once the computer is compromised, you need to locate relevant documents for retreval. Now, for someone who is a talented cracker and social engineer, getting into most personal computers is trivial. For someone who is untalented as a cracker or social engineer (see: script kiddies) it is less trivial, but still possible. Retreiving files is relatively simple in either case, but still requires scanning the hard disk for whatever types of documents you are looking for, deciding which of those documents is relevant, and sending them back. Simple for a single user- but for most traditional purposes, one would want the documents of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of users. Granted, a lot of spyware is installed on that many machines- but I think that if some spyware application were to actually send out copies of all of a users personal documents, they would take note and a patch would be issued quickly. Plus what about all of the documents of people who use Linux or BSD or OS X, etc.
The point is, it can be done- but making it much easier to do so by having everything in a nice neat package makes doing so much more attractive to those in a position to make use of such data.
Furthermore, to get a bit more big-brother, consider the following two situations:
Situation A:
The government decides that it wants to monitor all of the personal documentation of all of it's citizens that fall under a certain demographic (say anyone who is within 4 generations of having lived in the middle east, anyone registered with the democratic party, or anyone born on a tuesday). The government passes a law requiring all citizens to install some sort of application. The government may or may not tell people what this application does- but sooner or later someone will let people know that this application is sending copies of all of their personal documents for government viewing. Either way people are suspicious that the government required them to install this application. (This person may or may not later have their human rights violated in guantanemo).
Situation B:
The government quietly sends a request to the people hosting this service. They say that under the patriot act they want access to this services database. No one is to be told about this. Now the government has access to everyones documents.
The point isn't that it's impossible to get the documents, the point is that it suddenly becomes reasonably trivial to do so completely undetected.