It's famous for it's high quality photoshop contests, but you can also sponsor a corporate contest: http://www.worth1000.com/popup.asp?faq=265. You'd upload your photos, set the prize price, and then let the competition begin.
If you look around the site, you'll see that there's a lot of talent.
I haven't actually tried this (can anyone who has reply?), but I've heard that sitting on a balance ball, Pic, can give you exercise and strengthen your back while you're sitting at your desk.
You just replace your desk chair with the ball and you'll be getting constant exercise.
Javacript should probably be last, since you shouldn't need it much, if at all. A lot of sites have a hundred K of javascript code to try and make things "cool". Go for functional, not cool. Things like confirmation dialogs are good. Things like form validate is WRONG - the backend should do that, not the client.
While I would agree that the backend should definitely validate form data, I would disagree that you should not also validate with script on the frontend.
For example, Imagine that you have a long form and a slow server. In one of the fields you made a typo or accidentally entered an invalid value. If you only have backend validation, you'll have to wait for the form to submit, before you find out anything is wrong.
If you have client side validation, you'll get instant feedback and will save both server time and the user's time.
I'm still downloading the Modern Day Gamer video, so I can't comment on that yet, but here's a basic summary of the article:
Video Games are not seen as a legitimate hobby, while other activities that may or may not be as brainless or antisocial (watching tv, reading books) do get respected as legitimate hobbies.
The author makes the point that video games actually do foster a community, both in the sense that MMORPGS are played with other real people with whom you can communicate, and because even single player games can develop an online community with forums where players share tips, tricks, and strategies. Furthermore, video games also provide players with levels of shared experience, from watching the same intro clips to beating the same bosses. These shared experience can form a foundation for social interaction.
The author concludes with observation that like other media, there exist both bad and good video games. However, people seem to be judging video games based on the lowest common denominator, games like Grand Theft Auto, instead of the games that have a more obvious social and intellectual value.
Oregon Trail was one of my favorite games when I was younger. It's definitely considered educational. You learn how to plan for the future, and have to make decisions weighing time, health, and money. Also, from reading the Amazon review, I see that it builds reading skills - amazing the things we take for granted.
I might suggest that someone who has shelled out 100,000's of dollars on an MBA wouldn't want to contribute her services for free. If the MBA and developer really had the talent to create a "killer app" wouldn't they want to get paid for it?
I don't mean to troll, I really am curious. I hear many people on slashdot harp on the benefits of OSS in one breath, and then complain about their jobs in the next. Wouldn't it make sense for these people to get a job writing software and getting paid for it, instead of writing high quality software for free and then earning money doing something they hate?
Writing free (as in beer) software for home users I can understand. But CRM and Accounting software saves companies thousands of dollars in labor costs. If his company is going to be making money with your software, doesn't it make sense that you should get a kickback?
So what the hell is the purpose of making a product line that will do nothing but cost you money?
The purpose of selling the Xbox at a loss is to make up for the loss by the huge premium on the games. Consider how much the materials to make a $50 Xbox game cost.
Why not put such documents in a more Portable Document Format?
Since both pdf files and doc files require the user to install a reader (acrobat or word) and both readers are free, why shouldn't they use.doc format?
What is it that you think makes pdf a better format?
Okay, it seems at though you must pay to add a commercial site to the directory, but non commercial sites (I think linux sites should qualify here). Can add through www.zeal.com
Actually the sponsored sites are now on the right-hand side, same as where google puts them. The first 16 results are web directory sites. From the little about link it says:
Web Directory results contain Web sites within the MSN Web Directory that best match your search words.
Note:
Within Web Directory results, there may also be links where the Web site owners have paid for the expedited review of their site or for clicks to their site. These sites are ranked using the normal algorithm applied to all links within each section, with no change in rank due to payment.
Under related topics, you can see how to add your own site to the directory.
MSN Search, in partnership with LookSmart, enables you to add your commercial or nonprofit Web site to the Web Directory.
MSN Search enables you to add your commercial or nonprofit Web site to the Web Directory.
On the MSN Search home page, click Submit a Site.
On the LookSmart listings page, click Get Listed Now and follow the provided instructions.
Notes
For questions about adding your site to the Web Directory, please contact LookSmart.
MSN reserves the right to decline any submission.
I don't yet know if you have to pay money to submit your site. I'll check and report back.
As a TA for a computer science class I saw many instances of cheating, but they could be split into two types.
People who cheated on most assignments
Questions that many people cheated on
For the people who cheat on many assignments, often turning in identical, alpha-renamed problem sets, I think the best solution is to give them a Zero and send them to whichever judicial administration your school has in place for academic integrity violations. Those people probably don't want to be in a CS course in the first place, or they have other priorities (Sports, Social life, etc.), or maybe they just have no faith in their ability to pass on their own and just need more tutoring. If you can make it less worth their time to cheat than to just not take the class at all, hopefully those people will take another class that they might be more interested in.
But I've seen questions that honest/smart students cheat on. I've heard of people in the labs shouting answers across the room. The questions that caused this kind of cheating tended to be trial-and-error questions with one line solutions. In any class students are going to work together, and I think it's wonderful if they can help each other understand what's going on.
So to avoid cheating, the best way is to create problems where the understanding is separated from the answer. This way students that just get the answer really miss out on something that the students who solved it honestly get.
Here's an idea that I don't think has been explored much... maybe the big problem was that he said the opinions were his own and not @stake's.
If I worked for Adobe, and then decided to release a photoshop clone in my spare time, and claimed that it was my own program, not Adobe's, I think that there would be some problems.
In his job as a security expert, I'm sure that he used @stake's resources and expertise in coming up with the paper. So technically he might not have the right to say that the paper is his own and has no affiliation with the company.
Perhaps if he had brought the paper to his employers and gotten their approval, they could have released it as part of a security report and sold it. Basically he took something that he made for his company and gave it away.
I think that this article brings up a very interesting point. I don't think that it is the technical "difficulty" of putting songs on a website that stops people from sharing songs.
There is a difference between sharing a song and downloading a song. People want to download songs. We directly benefit from being able to listen to a song. It's a selfish desire, although we can justify it in many ways (convience, cost, evilness of RIAA).
I don't think that ANYONE wants to share songs. We don't get any benefit from giving our songs to strangers, and we put ourselves at risk for lawsuits. On top of this is the effort that it takes to host a website and the cost. The only upside I can see is the possible ego boost or the chance that other people will allow you to download their songs.
So most of us feel no incentive to host mp3s on a website, and when people are prosecuted for it we feel no sympathy, after all we wouldn't have done it.
But p2p wouldn't work without people sharing songs, and so sharing your music directory is turned on by default in most p2p clients. How many Kazaa users do you think change the defaults? I'd be willing to bet that a good portion of people don't know that they are sharing their own songs, and wouldn't know how to prevent it. Other people who do know feel guilty if they download songs without sharing their own. Back in the Napster days I remember people would cut off a connection if you weren't sharing any songs.
When a p2p sharer is sued, we can sympathize, and we're afraid that it could be us next. But it's our desire to download and not our desire to share that causes our sympathy. P2P seems okay because we only see our end - we get to listen to a song that we wouldn't have bought anyway - no one gets hurt. We don't even think about the other half - that we are distributing all the songs that we paid good money for to any shmo with an internet connection.
A great alternative to Monopoly is The Farming Game. It's a little depressing to play since you start out $20,000 in debt, but I guess that's realistic.
You know it's a good game when they've actually bought it in Russia to teach people about farming.
I'm one of the 28,000 who bought the game and then canceled my subscription. I actually beta tested it for a few months before it came out.
TSO failed because it eliminated all the things that made The Sims popular:
Designing your dream house - without cheat codes designing a house was unaffordable, and earning money in the game was a boring waste of time.
Designing custom material - if you search google you'll find hundreds of sites with downloadable skins, furniture, decarations and houses. People made objects with photoshop and mesh editors, and people loved them so much they would pay real life $$ to download.
Playing God - in The Sims you controlled a character or family in a god-like way. Sometimes they would ignore your commands, and if you didn't tell them to do anything they would manage on their own - eating, peeing, going to work. In TSO you are your sim. If you don't tell it to do anything it'll just stand there.
When I called up to cancel they offered me a free month, but I declined. It was an unrewarding waste of my time.
Many women cs majors that I know, myself included, are very interested in cognitive studies and where it overlaps with computer science.
Cognitive studies is a combination of computer science, psychology, linguistics, philosophy and neurobiology.
There's a good chance that women in the other four fields might be interested in computer science. Perhaps you can organize an event with all five fields and invite freshman to learn more about them.
They're not aiming (sorry for the pun) this at people, they're trying to sell it to companies. Companies would probably be willing to pay for features such as chat history if a substantial amount of business communication is done over IM.
Trillian lets you connect to AIM, ICQ, MSN messenger, Yahoo messenger, and IRC.
The biggest problem with IM is that you dont' choose a client because of features, you choose it because it's what the people you want to communicate with use. Trillian makes it a lot easier to talk to everyone you want.
launch.yahoo.com is what you are referrring to I believe. It's really amazing. It will recommend songs that were liked by other people with similar ratings to you. It will also let you listen to "sounds like" stations so that you can hear tracks that sound like george carlin or a certain album. In my opinion it's worth the 30 second commercials every few songs.
Slashdot Mirror
Worth 1000 has what you're looking for.
It's famous for it's high quality photoshop contests, but you can also sponsor a corporate contest: http://www.worth1000.com/popup.asp?faq=265. You'd upload your photos, set the prize price, and then let the competition begin. If you look around the site, you'll see that there's a lot of talent.
I haven't actually tried this (can anyone who has reply?), but I've heard that sitting on a balance ball, Pic, can give you exercise and strengthen your back while you're sitting at your desk.
You just replace your desk chair with the ball and you'll be getting constant exercise.
For example, Imagine that you have a long form and a slow server. In one of the fields you made a typo or accidentally entered an invalid value. If you only have backend validation, you'll have to wait for the form to submit, before you find out anything is wrong.
If you have client side validation, you'll get instant feedback and will save both server time and the user's time.
How can you tell the difference between intentionally and unintentionally unsecured networks?
Well the fact that he wrote this article might be a clue...
I'm still downloading the Modern Day Gamer video, so I can't comment on that yet, but here's a basic summary of the article:
Video Games are not seen as a legitimate hobby, while other activities that may or may not be as brainless or antisocial (watching tv, reading books) do get respected as legitimate hobbies.
The author makes the point that video games actually do foster a community, both in the sense that MMORPGS are played with other real people with whom you can communicate, and because even single player games can develop an online community with forums where players share tips, tricks, and strategies. Furthermore, video games also provide players with levels of shared experience, from watching the same intro clips to beating the same bosses. These shared experience can form a foundation for social interaction.
The author concludes with observation that like other media, there exist both bad and good video games. However, people seem to be judging video games based on the lowest common denominator, games like Grand Theft Auto, instead of the games that have a more obvious social and intellectual value.
Oregon Trail was one of my favorite games when I was younger. It's definitely considered educational. You learn how to plan for the future, and have to make decisions weighing time, health, and money. Also, from reading the Amazon review, I see that it builds reading skills - amazing the things we take for granted.
I might suggest that someone who has shelled out 100,000's of dollars on an MBA wouldn't want to contribute her services for free. If the MBA and developer really had the talent to create a "killer app" wouldn't they want to get paid for it?
I don't mean to troll, I really am curious. I hear many people on slashdot harp on the benefits of OSS in one breath, and then complain about their jobs in the next. Wouldn't it make sense for these people to get a job writing software and getting paid for it, instead of writing high quality software for free and then earning money doing something they hate?
Writing free (as in beer) software for home users I can understand. But CRM and Accounting software saves companies thousands of dollars in labor costs. If his company is going to be making money with your software, doesn't it make sense that you should get a kickback?
Not so. From Microsoft's Mac Page:
run around generating their own sudo standards
I believe the word you are looking for is "pseudo".
So what the hell is the purpose of making a product line that will do nothing but cost you money?
The purpose of selling the Xbox at a loss is to make up for the loss by the huge premium on the games. Consider how much the materials to make a $50 Xbox game cost.
Why not put such documents in a more Portable Document Format?
.doc format?
Since both pdf files and doc files require the user to install a reader (acrobat or word) and both readers are free, why shouldn't they use
What is it that you think makes pdf a better format?
Okay, it seems at though you must pay to add a commercial site to the directory, but non commercial sites (I think linux sites should qualify here). Can add through www.zeal.com
- People who cheated on most assignments
- Questions that many people cheated on
For the people who cheat on many assignments, often turning in identical, alpha-renamed problem sets, I think the best solution is to give them a Zero and send them to whichever judicial administration your school has in place for academic integrity violations. Those people probably don't want to be in a CS course in the first place, or they have other priorities (Sports, Social life, etc.), or maybe they just have no faith in their ability to pass on their own and just need more tutoring. If you can make it less worth their time to cheat than to just not take the class at all, hopefully those people will take another class that they might be more interested in.But I've seen questions that honest/smart students cheat on. I've heard of people in the labs shouting answers across the room. The questions that caused this kind of cheating tended to be trial-and-error questions with one line solutions. In any class students are going to work together, and I think it's wonderful if they can help each other understand what's going on.
So to avoid cheating, the best way is to create problems where the understanding is separated from the answer. This way students that just get the answer really miss out on something that the students who solved it honestly get.
I agree completly, one of my friends, who is actually quite intelligent, wanted to know where to buy Windows XP for the Mac.
Here's an idea that I don't think has been explored much... maybe the big problem was that he said the opinions were his own and not @stake's.
If I worked for Adobe, and then decided to release a photoshop clone in my spare time, and claimed that it was my own program, not Adobe's, I think that there would be some problems.
In his job as a security expert, I'm sure that he used @stake's resources and expertise in coming up with the paper. So technically he might not have the right to say that the paper is his own and has no affiliation with the company.
Perhaps if he had brought the paper to his employers and gotten their approval, they could have released it as part of a security report and sold it. Basically he took something that he made for his company and gave it away.
I think that this article brings up a very interesting point. I don't think that it is the technical "difficulty" of putting songs on a website that stops people from sharing songs.
There is a difference between sharing a song and downloading a song. People want to download songs. We directly benefit from being able to listen to a song. It's a selfish desire, although we can justify it in many ways (convience, cost, evilness of RIAA).
I don't think that ANYONE wants to share songs. We don't get any benefit from giving our songs to strangers, and we put ourselves at risk for lawsuits. On top of this is the effort that it takes to host a website and the cost. The only upside I can see is the possible ego boost or the chance that other people will allow you to download their songs.
So most of us feel no incentive to host mp3s on a website, and when people are prosecuted for it we feel no sympathy, after all we wouldn't have done it.
But p2p wouldn't work without people sharing songs, and so sharing your music directory is turned on by default in most p2p clients. How many Kazaa users do you think change the defaults? I'd be willing to bet that a good portion of people don't know that they are sharing their own songs, and wouldn't know how to prevent it. Other people who do know feel guilty if they download songs without sharing their own. Back in the Napster days I remember people would cut off a connection if you weren't sharing any songs.
When a p2p sharer is sued, we can sympathize, and we're afraid that it could be us next. But it's our desire to download and not our desire to share that causes our sympathy. P2P seems okay because we only see our end - we get to listen to a song that we wouldn't have bought anyway - no one gets hurt. We don't even think about the other half - that we are distributing all the songs that we paid good money for to any shmo with an internet connection.
A great alternative to Monopoly is The Farming Game. It's a little depressing to play since you start out $20,000 in debt, but I guess that's realistic.
You know it's a good game when they've actually bought it in Russia to teach people about farming.
TSO failed because it eliminated all the things that made The Sims popular:
When I called up to cancel they offered me a free month, but I declined. It was an unrewarding waste of my time.
View the source code, it's html encoded. Or at least it was until you posted it unencoded on slashdot.
Doh!
Many women cs majors that I know, myself included, are very interested in cognitive studies and where it overlaps with computer science.
Cognitive studies is a combination of computer science, psychology, linguistics, philosophy and neurobiology.
There's a good chance that women in the other four fields might be interested in computer science. Perhaps you can organize an event with all five fields and invite freshman to learn more about them.
Are people willing to pay for instant messaging?
They're not aiming (sorry for the pun) this at people, they're trying to sell it to companies. Companies would probably be willing to pay for features such as chat history if a substantial amount of business communication is done over IM.
Here is a description of what trillian offers people who pay.
Trillian lets you connect to AIM, ICQ, MSN messenger, Yahoo messenger, and IRC.
The biggest problem with IM is that you dont' choose a client because of features, you choose it because it's what the people you want to communicate with use. Trillian makes it a lot easier to talk to everyone you want.
launch.yahoo.com is what you are referrring to I believe. It's really amazing. It will recommend songs that were liked by other people with similar ratings to you. It will also let you listen to "sounds like" stations so that you can hear tracks that sound like george carlin or a certain album. In my opinion it's worth the 30 second commercials every few songs.