Developing good handwriting skills takes practice and discipline, concepts I find grossly underrepresented in modern education.
The essence of vast majority of arguments against teaching cursive... Admit it, this is the real reason why cursive is "irrelevant" - students won't have the discipline to learn it, and teachers won't be able to enforce it.
Let's get rid of art and other "useless" subjects that only a small minority will need directly while we're at it, too (or did we already?)
Try Japan: To buy a pre-paid cell phone (you have to buy the phone, even if you just want the SIM card), you have to be registered with city hall, have the right kind of visa (not a tourist visa), and have a landline you can be contacted at.
Japanese cell phone market is way too complicated, but an actual "prepaid" phone certainly doesn't seem to be a good deal for any circumstances I can think of.
I'm not sure you absolutely have to register with the city hall - I believe sometimes other documents like an IDP (or even credit card) will be recognized. Either way, "confirming identity" is a common bureaucratic procedure for service...
Minimum service is a little less than 1000 yen/month right now, and includes a little more than 1000 yen call time in some situations (i.e. 2-year contract with cancellation fees). Considering that the phone is often free, and there's a crapload of extra features/services, it's really not as bad of a deal as it seems at first.
It seems to be the worst country when it comes to vendor lock-in (firmware branding, sim locking), long contracts, high costs and craptastic prepaid packages.
Actually... I'm not sure if there's a place where most of that isn't true. Japan, in particular, fits all of the above quite nicely (difference, of course, being the service quality).
Anyway, there is, in fact, a fairly decent prepaid provider in Canada - Speakout, branded by 7-11, and also Petrocanada, running on Rogers' network. The price per minute is high, but you can keep the credit for a year (depending on the amount, actually), and with frequent promotions you might even get a simple phone for free/cheap with around $50-100 credit.
Also, don't have much experience with Rogers directly (and even that is mostly negative), but I was able to get a Fido prepaid SIM card from a store without any issues or extra questions. The numerous billing/voicemail/etc. issues made me give up after two months, though...
Just what I thought when reading the summary. Who cares if some blogger out there doesn't like the graphics? IMHO, at this point, graphics look "real enough" to stop noticing them after a few minutes anyway (and have been that way for a few years).
RTCW had plenty of (again, IMHO) undeserved criticism, but to me, it was just about perfect (well, except near the end). If they can keep about the same level of variety in the story/missions (supernatural, covert ops, plain shoot-em-up, etc.) throughout this one, I'll gladly play it.
(Oh, and a Linux port. Not going to bother otherwise.)
Don't be so quick to call someone an idiot. Look at the last link in the summary.
If I understand correctly from a quick scan of the explanation, the list you see there is what they have supposedly seen as fake "From:" addresses (which they happen to know to be undeliverable).
So while it's not quite as bad as what GP thought, it's (IMHO) dangerously close.
Michael Simms: I think Blizzard made a mistake. There has never been any kind of open source threat to any of their current titles, there have just been fans emulating their older games, or in the case of battle.net trying to play their purchased games in a better way.
All Blizzard has managed to do is alienate some of its most loyal fans and supporters, aka their best customers.
Blizzard is definitely no friend to Linux or the open source community. Sure they make good games, but thats about it. There is a Linux version of the hugely popular World of Warcraft, and Blizzard canned it, without warming or explaination, even though it was functionally complete and ready to go, and after a discussion of a support agreement with LGP. It would have risked nothing for them to make the game available, and they chose not to.
Sorry for heavy offtopic, but WTF is this crap again?! I'm not sure I like someone using two accounts to post on/. (if it's proven, the other side is heard, etc.), but constant personal attacks/trolling like these are plain *stupid* and annoying.
Sure, cool and simple it is, but do you want to start placing bets on how many people are seriously going to think before pointing this at a mirror? This is the kind of article you'd expect to have a page of safety instructions in big flashing letters before ANY instructions. Free speech it is, but the author AND editor need to have some fscking sense of responsibility, too.
As far as the country and government are concerned, Canada is completely metric. Sadly, not quite true, I can think of at least one metric-imperial conversion (and more than that, actually...) problem I'm dealing with right now. Just go into a hardware store, plumbing section in particular.
As one who has suffered through 2 physics lab courses last year with win98/Excel boxes (lab report had to be done in the lab... and I don't need to remind anyone how nice is it to work with win98), and something similar in high school, I find BOTH Calc and Excel absolutely horrible at the task of simple graphing. (I really don't care if one of them is marginally more "usable" than the other)
Please... Don't make your students suffer through hundreds of dialog boxes/menus just to plot a few points/join them with a curve... IMHO (as a student:) something like Gnuplot (which is what I've been using, with EPS output) does the job far nicer, produces a clean-looking graph by default, and is probably sufficient in most cases (and can use CSV data from the spreadsheet). Maybe this is the case where CLI/can/ be more user-friendly than a GUI?
The downside (?) is, of course, you have to understand what you're trying to do rather than clicking all buttons until it works. That is, students have to be explained what, for example, the "fit" command does, or what does "plot [-1:1] x**2" mean. But in my (though not very extensive) experience, it's actually not all that difficult to do.
Blizzard is definitely no friend to Linux or the open source community. Sure they make good games, but thats about it. There is a Linux version of the hugely popular World of Warcraft, and Blizzard canned it, without warming or explaination, even though it was functionally complete and ready to go, and after a discussion of a
support agreement with LGP. It would have risked nothing for them to make the game available, and they chose not to.
I've had my mail on yandex.ru (yes, it's up) probably since I got my first personal Internet connection (thus it's probably more or less publicized in the RUnet at least:(, and I should say my spam seems to be pretty evenly divided between English and Russian one (with some other languages from time to time), and didn't go down all that much.
I haven't received any Russian spam originating on May 25 yet, either, only a few delayed ones from May 24. Not that it helps much, even despite the apparent.ru domain...
I don't see a troll here, parent is quite right (at least in the context of this thread), somebody had to make that reminder. Having more popular applications (games) available, especially when some of us have absolutely no need for any of them != doing something "better" (i.e. with more features, more stable, faster, etc) (yes, I run Gentoo on AMD64 and am quite comfortable with the apps and a few games that I have).
Well, not quite like that... But either way, you'll have to install a 32bit browser (I've heard about some howtos on installing a 32bit Internet Destroyer, but I've no idea whether it still works), maybe Firefox will actually be easier for this (but then...). An extra hassle it probably is.
(Disclaimer: I've never seen or used win64, I might be totally wrong, maybe they just include 32bit IE in the box or figure some sort of mechanism like Konqueror's to use 32bit plugins)
That means, us designers who like to use Photoshop or just play games (that don't run on linux that is) can finally put our 64-bit processor to some good use.
That is, to run mostly the exact same 32bit binaries (with a few exceptions)... There has been great incentive for people to use 32bit distros on their AMD64, while full 64bit equivalents were available all the time, and this is even with open source apps. So IMHO even a retail release won't mean any significant switch anytime soon (i.e. not in the next 3 years or so). And as others have said already, this is probably a public release to get things like compatibility bugs worked out, which certainly won't help its image in the mind of an average user, either.
(The only reason why I would even remotely care myself, though, is the lack of 64bit Flash plugin - boy is it annoying. Maybe a 64bit windows release will be followed by a 64bit linux build, as well)
There's also a similar problem even with the format the works are handed in (although, I suppose, that's mostly a school problem). For example, when I was in the equivalent of junior high (actually, same idea throughout all school years) in North America, there was simply no way the teacher would accept typed essays/other works with exception of really lengthy reports which would not have a high content of originality anyway.
The idea, at least partially, was that the student must show that (s)he actually cares about the work (s)he has done, and has taken the time to even re-write a clean copy by hand, and in a way that was readable by the teacher (thus showing at least a marginal amount of respect). The teacher, on the other hand, is accepting that value by spending time deciphering each student's handwriting (and adapting to it)...
I guess both sides would lose by not using a format that would be easier to write/read, but that also means they both recognize each other's effort, which seems kind of favourable to me...
I'm using shaw cable, I've just checked by downloading ET 2.60 via BT (zerowing.idsoftware.com tracker) and I don't see any problems. Or was this meant as a joke of sorts?
these republics having gained the unfortunate notoriety of being dens of villainy and hackerdom
Wow, two pieces of pure flame BS in one sentence, AND not even in the article text. Worst of all, the author appears to not even know the meaning of the word "hacker" (hello? Is this/. or what?).
Yeah, if $90K were being transferred to the US that would have made it look so much more legitimate than to Latvia (which is, btw, probably the last country I'd think of when someone says "ex-USSR"). Notice that the receipient bank held $70K of those, too.
This just goes to prove that namecalling is only effective when the receipients knows what you're calling them. If you keep expecting an subtle insult, then don't complain when you see one:) Besides, even if it was one, its only purpose would be to highlight the very annoying aspect of that OS' in the market, not to, say, call its users stupid.
That was indeed an excellent idea, but I can neither find one of those again, nor did I hear anything as to why they were removed. At least it's something even an average gamer can relate to - practically making a middle-end PC into a game console - insert the CD, play the game.
Not "legal issues" again?
Judging from this, ID isn't particularly happy about allowing people to redistribute anything but the original installer, it's probably the same way with the rest...
> So... the copy protection prevents me from playing legitimate movies, forcing me to make a pirated copy if I want to watch the film.
Not just DVDs, some supposedly "audio" CDs which you can't play in any regular player, too. CSS also has given me quite some headaches, to the point where the ridicolous situation "buy the DVD - download the movie" is the only way out. And what about rented DVDs? Sometimes I actually have to copy some of the worst ones to hdd in order for the playback to be more or less smooth. Guess that's illegal too, as well as using mplayer/xine to try to play them in the first place, meaning I can't have my universal box to play DVDs/home-made recordings/view photos/etc... How about they spend that time making, say, a standard for _text_ subtitles for hardware players(which I can scale/colour/change font/size/play around with easily)?
Great, just great. I wonder when will it come to the point where it's cheaper and easier to go to a movie theater(as they'd probably like) each time than try and watch it at home.
I'm getting more and more disappointed that I bought 5500 instead of waiting a little and buying a C760...;( (SL5600 and C700 looked suspicious at the time because of the buggy CPU)
Myself i can't understand this hunt for a "sub-notebook", either - a laptop like the one in the review, as nice as it is(even running Linux) can't really be put in a pocket and carried around, you'll still have to think of some sort of special bag just for it - so, are 200 or so additional grams going to pull of your arms, in exchange for a few hundred $? I don't think and extra half-centimetre will make a huge difference on your lap/desk, either. So really, why bother?
Am I missing some killer advantages a sub-notebook going to offer over a somewhat smaller than average laptop(or even a (very) good PDA, then - you aren't going to play many games on it, are you)?
Slashdot Mirror
Developing good handwriting skills takes practice and discipline, concepts I find grossly underrepresented in modern education.
The essence of vast majority of arguments against teaching cursive... Admit it, this is the real reason why cursive is "irrelevant" - students won't have the discipline to learn it, and teachers won't be able to enforce it.
Let's get rid of art and other "useless" subjects that only a small minority will need directly while we're at it, too (or did we already?)
Try Japan:
To buy a pre-paid cell phone (you have to buy the phone, even if you just want the SIM card), you have to be registered with city hall, have the right kind of visa (not a tourist visa), and have a landline you can be contacted at.
Japanese cell phone market is way too complicated, but an actual "prepaid" phone certainly doesn't seem to be a good deal for any circumstances I can think of.
I'm not sure you absolutely have to register with the city hall - I believe sometimes other documents like an IDP (or even credit card) will be recognized. Either way, "confirming identity" is a common bureaucratic procedure for service...
Minimum service is a little less than 1000 yen/month right now, and includes a little more than 1000 yen call time in some situations (i.e. 2-year contract with cancellation fees). Considering that the phone is often free, and there's a crapload of extra features/services, it's really not as bad of a deal as it seems at first.
It seems to be the worst country when it comes to vendor lock-in (firmware branding, sim locking), long contracts, high costs and craptastic prepaid packages.
Actually... I'm not sure if there's a place where most of that isn't true. Japan, in particular, fits all of the above quite nicely (difference, of course, being the service quality).
Anyway, there is, in fact, a fairly decent prepaid provider in Canada - Speakout, branded by 7-11, and also Petrocanada, running on Rogers' network. The price per minute is high, but you can keep the credit for a year (depending on the amount, actually), and with frequent promotions you might even get a simple phone for free/cheap with around $50-100 credit.
Also, don't have much experience with Rogers directly (and even that is mostly negative), but I was able to get a Fido prepaid SIM card from a store without any issues or extra questions. The numerous billing/voicemail/etc. issues made me give up after two months, though...
Just what I thought when reading the summary. Who cares if some blogger out there doesn't like the graphics? IMHO, at this point, graphics look "real enough" to stop noticing them after a few minutes anyway (and have been that way for a few years).
RTCW had plenty of (again, IMHO) undeserved criticism, but to me, it was just about perfect (well, except near the end). If they can keep about the same level of variety in the story/missions (supernatural, covert ops, plain shoot-em-up, etc.) throughout this one, I'll gladly play it.
(Oh, and a Linux port. Not going to bother otherwise.)
Don't be so quick to call someone an idiot. Look at the last link in the summary.
If I understand correctly from a quick scan of the explanation, the list you see there is what they have supposedly seen as fake "From:" addresses (which they happen to know to be undeliverable).
So while it's not quite as bad as what GP thought, it's (IMHO) dangerously close.
I do believe OP missed one more, namely:
(X) Blacklists suck
But really,
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
sums up the failure quite nicely.
I was waiting too long for this comment. m(_)m
Someone smart could say something about a Mousse impersonation.
Hate to plagiarize my own comment, but I was particularly annoyed the first time I saw it... Not that I care about WoW specifically. Original discussion at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159086&cid=13323538
(Can't find the original article, used to be at http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/10249. Below is the only quote I could find.)
Michael Simms: I think Blizzard made a mistake. There has never been any kind of open source threat to any of their current titles, there have just been fans emulating their older games, or in the case of battle.net trying to play their purchased games in a better way.
All Blizzard has managed to do is alienate some of its most loyal fans and supporters, aka their best customers.
Blizzard is definitely no friend to Linux or the open source community. Sure they make good games, but thats about it. There is a Linux version of the hugely popular World of Warcraft, and Blizzard canned it, without warming or explaination, even though it was functionally complete and ready to go, and after a discussion of a
support agreement with LGP. It would have risked nothing for them to make the game available, and they chose not to.
Sorry for heavy offtopic, but WTF is this crap again?! I'm not sure I like someone using two accounts to post on /. (if it's proven, the other side is heard, etc.), but constant personal attacks/trolling like these are plain *stupid* and annoying.
Sure, cool and simple it is, but do you want to start placing bets on how many people are seriously going to think before pointing this at a mirror? This is the kind of article you'd expect to have a page of safety instructions in big flashing letters before ANY instructions. Free speech it is, but the author AND editor need to have some fscking sense of responsibility, too.
As one who has suffered through 2 physics lab courses last year with win98/Excel boxes (lab report had to be done in the lab... and I don't need to remind anyone how nice is it to work with win98), and something similar in high school, I find BOTH Calc and Excel absolutely horrible at the task of simple graphing. (I really don't care if one of them is marginally more "usable" than the other)
:) something like Gnuplot (which is what I've been using, with EPS output) does the job far nicer, produces a clean-looking graph by default, and is probably sufficient in most cases (and can use CSV data from the spreadsheet). Maybe this is the case where CLI /can/ be more user-friendly than a GUI?
Please... Don't make your students suffer through hundreds of dialog boxes/menus just to plot a few points/join them with a curve... IMHO (as a student
The downside (?) is, of course, you have to understand what you're trying to do rather than clicking all buttons until it works. That is, students have to be explained what, for example, the "fit" command does, or what does "plot [-1:1] x**2" mean. But in my (though not very extensive) experience, it's actually not all that difficult to do.
Blizzard is definitely no friend to Linux or the open source community. Sure they make good games, but thats about it. There is a Linux version of the hugely popular World of Warcraft, and Blizzard canned it, without warming or explaination, even though it was functionally complete and ready to go, and after a discussion of a support agreement with LGP. It would have risked nothing for them to make the game available, and they chose not to.
I've had my mail on yandex.ru (yes, it's up) probably since I got my first personal Internet connection (thus it's probably more or less publicized in the RUnet at least :(, and I should say my spam seems to be pretty evenly divided between English and Russian one (with some other languages from time to time), and didn't go down all that much.
.ru domain...
I haven't received any Russian spam originating on May 25 yet, either, only a few delayed ones from May 24. Not that it helps much, even despite the apparent
I don't see a troll here, parent is quite right (at least in the context of this thread), somebody had to make that reminder. Having more popular applications (games) available, especially when some of us have absolutely no need for any of them != doing something "better" (i.e. with more features, more stable, faster, etc) (yes, I run Gentoo on AMD64 and am quite comfortable with the apps and a few games that I have).
Totally redundant explanation, but whatever...
Well, not quite like that... But either way, you'll have to install a 32bit browser (I've heard about some howtos on installing a 32bit Internet Destroyer, but I've no idea whether it still works), maybe Firefox will actually be easier for this (but then...).
An extra hassle it probably is.
(Disclaimer: I've never seen or used win64, I might be totally wrong, maybe they just include 32bit IE in the box or figure some sort of mechanism like Konqueror's to use 32bit plugins)
That means, us designers who like to use Photoshop or just play games (that don't run on linux that is) can finally put our 64-bit processor to some good use.
That is, to run mostly the exact same 32bit binaries (with a few exceptions)... There has been great incentive for people to use 32bit distros on their AMD64, while full 64bit equivalents were available all the time, and this is even with open source apps. So IMHO even a retail release won't mean any significant switch anytime soon (i.e. not in the next 3 years or so). And as others have said already, this is probably a public release to get things like compatibility bugs worked out, which certainly won't help its image in the mind of an average user, either.
(The only reason why I would even remotely care myself, though, is the lack of 64bit Flash plugin - boy is it annoying. Maybe a 64bit windows release will be followed by a 64bit linux build, as well)
Kind of sad, isn't it?
There's also a similar problem even with the format the works are handed in (although, I suppose, that's mostly a school problem). For example, when I was in the equivalent of junior high (actually, same idea throughout all school years) in North America, there was simply no way the teacher would accept typed essays/other works with exception of really lengthy reports which would not have a high content of originality anyway.
The idea, at least partially, was that the student must show that (s)he actually cares about the work (s)he has done, and has taken the time to even re-write a clean copy by hand, and in a way that was readable by the teacher (thus showing at least a marginal amount of respect). The teacher, on the other hand, is accepting that value by spending time deciphering each student's handwriting (and adapting to it)...
I guess both sides would lose by not using a format that would be easier to write/read, but that also means they both recognize each other's effort, which seems kind of favourable to me...
I'm using shaw cable, I've just checked by downloading ET 2.60 via BT (zerowing.idsoftware.com tracker) and I don't see any problems. Or was this meant as a joke of sorts?
these republics having gained the unfortunate notoriety of being dens of villainy and hackerdom
/. or what?).
Wow, two pieces of pure flame BS in one sentence, AND not even in the article text. Worst of all, the author appears to not even know the meaning of the word "hacker" (hello? Is this
Yeah, if $90K were being transferred to the US that would have made it look so much more legitimate than to Latvia (which is, btw, probably the last country I'd think of when someone says "ex-USSR"). Notice that the receipient bank held $70K of those, too.
This just goes to prove that namecalling is only effective when the receipients knows what you're calling them. If you keep expecting an subtle insult, then don't complain when you see one :)
Besides, even if it was one, its only purpose would be to highlight the very annoying aspect of that OS' in the market, not to, say, call its users stupid.
That was indeed an excellent idea, but I can neither find one of those again, nor did I hear anything as to why they were removed. At least it's something even an average gamer can relate to - practically making a middle-end PC into a game console - insert the CD, play the game.
Not "legal issues" again?
Judging from this, ID isn't particularly happy about allowing people to redistribute anything but the original installer, it's probably the same way with the rest...
Of course it is signed.
PGP sig for the patch
Instructions
> So... the copy protection prevents me from playing legitimate movies, forcing me to make a pirated copy if I want to watch the film.
Not just DVDs, some supposedly "audio" CDs which you can't play in any regular player, too.
CSS also has given me quite some headaches, to the point where the ridicolous situation "buy the DVD - download the movie" is the only way out. And what about rented DVDs? Sometimes I actually have to copy some of the worst ones to hdd in order for the playback to be more or less smooth. Guess that's illegal too, as well as using mplayer/xine to try to play them in the first place, meaning I can't have my universal box to play DVDs/home-made recordings/view photos/etc... How about they spend that time making, say, a standard for _text_ subtitles for hardware players(which I can scale/colour/change font/size/play around with easily)?
Great, just great. I wonder when will it come to the point where it's cheaper and easier to go to a movie theater(as they'd probably like) each time than try and watch it at home.
I'm getting more and more disappointed that I bought 5500 instead of waiting a little and buying a C760... ;( (SL5600 and C700 looked suspicious at the time because of the buggy CPU)
Myself i can't understand this hunt for a "sub-notebook", either - a laptop like the one in the review, as nice as it is(even running Linux) can't really be put in a pocket and carried around, you'll still have to think of some sort of special bag just for it - so, are 200 or so additional grams going to pull of your arms, in exchange for a few hundred $? I don't think and extra half-centimetre will make a huge difference on your lap/desk, either. So really, why bother?
Am I missing some killer advantages a sub-notebook going to offer over a somewhat smaller than average laptop(or even a (very) good PDA, then - you aren't going to play many games on it, are you)?