Calculators help you explore math. They shouldn't be used as a crutch on a test.
Personally, I rarely use my graphing for tests. I use a class graphing for statistics - calculating standard deviation, regression lines, etc. I rarely use my four-function watch, except for molar-mass stuff in Chem. I lost my graphing about a month ago at a math tournament. It turned up with a teacher in a school 150 miles away. We're going there for a tournament in about a month; I haven't bothered trying to get it earlier, since I don't need it. It helps a lot to prove/demonstrate stuff in Calc, but I have no problem sitting quietly instead.
Let's say I walked into the library and marked up their encyclopedias with red ink (making legitimate corrections, in my opinion). Would you consider that credible?
Before I respond, I'll call straw-man, since you're assuming that one person's edits are analogous to a community of hundreds of committed editors and thousands more of casual editors. Think about it - the encyclopedia came from draft articles, marked up with red ink by a few people, and published nicely.
Then I'll answer: yes, I would consider this credible, if I see the corrections as worthwhile. If you wrote "LOL PWNED" and "BUSH SUXXORZ" on the book, of course not. If you corrected an article that I see is definitely flawed or lacking information, I would assume that you are probably more correct than the encyclopedia.
"A bunch of people on the Internet think it's good" does not constitute an editorial review.
"A bunch of people in a corporation" does? What is your definition of editorial review? How does it differ from a definition of WP's review where the wording is equally biased to the other side (given that the editors have shown themselves to be committed, and that several are quite accomplished in their subject)? WP is not reviewed by random people on the Internet, as you suggest.
This article explores just how successful one troll can be in disrupting the flow of things for a while -- and how the entire world can witness it.
No; this article suggests how even the most determined troll cannot stand up to Wikipedia, whose community knows how to write an unbiased article and remove personal attacks or self-praise.
However, I was very careful to not take on high-profile companies or do anything that might get me noticed because I knew that something like this might happen and the law would be thrown out. Thank you, person who doesn't even live in Maryland, for ruining it for the rest of us.
You're on very precarious legitimacy grounds here. You shouldn't be using a law that you know is challengeable for lack of authority, and trying to continue using it hoping that it'll be insignificant. That's like stealing a credit card number and using it for small purchases; it's equally illegal, with respect to legitimacy. Interstate "commerce" (heh, commercial e-mail counts as commerce) is not Maryland's domain, and they don't have the right to legislate acts across state lines (see the Supreme Court cases in the late 1800s, which effectively said that populists and farmers in Western states' governments could not influence interstate policy). This law would be legal if Maryland were its own nation. But part of the deal in the Union is that you give some authority to the federal government, so you don't have 50 conflicting laws that effectively make it illegal to send any commercial e-mail (meaning business e-mail, not necessarily advertising) because you don't know where it might be routed.
Frankly, even lawyers worth less than the amount of money you sued them for should've been able to pull Interstate Commerce on you. I'm surprised you -- and others -- were able to use this law this long.
Certainly I recall that in second and third year calc, when asked to compute a derivative or an integral we would usually be given the answer.
Same here in Calc II this morning. She gives us the answer packet a few minutes later, and we check our answers against each others to find mistakes in the work.
My point was that Math'ca is useful for self-exploration; you can do a lot more figuring out what mathematically happens when you do certain things than you can in class. Of course, it only works if you're self-motivated.
Which brings me to a question for the original submitter:
Are you looking for something to help students struggling in math, or bright students looking for ways to challenge themselves in math beyond what school offers? Math'ca is definitely not the answer for the former. The pencil-and-paper-ists are right if they're talking about struggling students.
(I know I know it was free for you because you stole it)
Where did I say that? Why could I not have bought it?
It was free for me, but because my dad has a departmental license; he's a university engineering professor. Even if he hadn't installed it at home, he still has SSH access to the university's computer labs...and he has it on his office box.
By the way, you'll be happy to know that your mention of $100 inspired me to go look at the price. I thought even student edition cost much more...it's just $140. I'm going to ask for it for Christmas; I need a version for Macintosh.;-) Now it's definitely not stolen.
And sure, there are books which'll give you examples of several derivatives. But it's a lot easier to get Mathematica to solve it than to search in books for this particular one. I could've asked my teacher if I wanted to...I could've googled it; it's just x^x (which is weird if you try to work it using x^n or a^x formulae, and you don't know logarithmic differentiation)...but I wanted to figure out the method on my own. Oh, and there's the element of laziness.
Learning is SUPPOSED to be hard because if it isn't hard then you aren't learning anything.
Isn't it a lot harder to look at an answer, look at the question, and say "what's the method relating these" than to just look in a book for the answer? And if it's too hard to the point that nothing is happening, you're of course not learning anything - which is why I used Math'ca.
By the way, you might want to send that phrase to my school...heh. Might make things a little less boring. My 4th-grade spelling teacher had the theory that if I kept aceing the tests, I wasn't really learning. So she gave me harder tests. I aced those, too; I think that was the end of that, as far as I remember.
I still disagree. The girls who didn't know 40+8 should have lost points on general principle. You should be able to use graphing calculators if you know how to use them - namely, writing programs to eliminate values or perform large repeated operations on thousands of numbers, using the graphing features to visualize areas, using the matrix and list arithmetic to simplify computations, etc.
It's hard (meaning non-intuitive) to use stat features on a scientific to calculate standard deviation. StdDev({1,2,3}) on an 83+ is a lot easier than fumbling with stat mode on a one-liner or even calculating it by hand.
I still have no idea why people insist on hand-calculating std dev more than once, in the beginning of the year, and another two times on the first test and the final. Once you've shown you know how it works, you shouldn't need to write down everything to do what, for the calculator, is a half-second computation.
Conversely, of course, you shouldn't type into the calculator what, for you, should be a half-second computation.
"Burglarize" is the original word. "Burgle" is a back-formation, "what a burglar must do".
I was quite embarassed to find that this was AHD's listed etymology after disrupting class last Wednesday to "correct" the teacher for using "burglarize".
At National Mu Alpha Theta this summer (a math tournament), I had brought my OS X laptop which happened to have Maxima on it. I use Mathematica at home, but I only have the Win32 version. Maxima is difficult to learn (not user-friendly, but it's almost as powerful as Mathematica -- in fact, its predecessor, Macsyma, was one of the first CASes, predating Mathematica. I used Maxima to verify some lengthy integrals after one test when the answer posted differed significantly from my answer.
Oh, and it's GPL, and it works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X (via Fink).
BTW, you probably know this, but if you can afford Mathematica or a Math'ca-based product, or at least a student license, it's going to be a lot better and more powerful than any OSS math product today. Math'ca is really an excellent product. Unfortunately, the price matches its quality.
Software is useful. As a freshman in trig, I was learning calculus on my own, and Mathematica helped. There was one derivative in particular which I couldn't figure out; after using Mathematica to find the answer, the method whereby you reach that answer came to me a few days later -- it was much more obvious from the answer than from the question. There have been countless discussions between my friend and I as to how Mathematica arrived at a certain solution.
You try doing large integrals with pencil-and-paper and then come back and tell me that mathematics software isn't worth it for highschoolers. The only thing I can see is "useful" is the handwriting practice.
the quickest way to the brain is through the fingers
Software which shows you how to work a problem gets to the brain a lot quicker than fingers which have no idea what to do. Besides, I have seen countless cases of classmates in physics who have no idea what they're doing but can write down the examples that the teacher gives without fail.
The problem, of course, is software which devolves to mindless number-punching. I frown upon that - except when you would be punching in the same numbers into a calculator, surrounded by some function signs that are relatively obvious, or when you'd be sitting there for 2 hours working the problem by hand. Apart from stupid programs, it's hard to claim that writing out things helps you work better than using calculators and computers.
And then how do you figure out which file the text is from? And cat `find/` basically means "print everything on my drive". cat/dev/hda would work as well - or better, since it shows deleted files and stuff.
What you probably meant was grep foo `find/`, which a quick test shows would work. Add the line-number switch and you're set. Only thing is that it can't read from binary files (Word docs, PDFs, compressed files, etc.)
Maybe there's a filesystem that can mount an existing folder (or a drive) as decrypted text only - incorporating antiword and such?
iChat is equally proprietary, it doesn't allow you to create profiles, and it messes up the IM/chat metaphor by using the same interface for both -- you can't be sure how it'll show up on an AIM user's screen.
I'm a happy iChat user, though, so don't take this as a criticism of the software. I'm just mentioning that it too has problems, and is proprietary. Oh, and AIM Mac's ads seem to be much better than AIM Windows'.
Gaim, for all its awesomeness, has about 5 million.
That's because most Linux GAIM users have it bundled with their Linux distribution, or download it from their package manager instead of through SourceForge.
Most Windows users, quite frankly, will use the official client, myself included. Somehow I feel that the official client will work better with the AIM servers than GAIM - its innate/"gut feeling"; don't bother trying to convince me otherwise. I'm glad to use GAIM when on Linux, but AIM feels better for Windows. And there are many other IM programs for Linux.
eMule, however, is the most popular client for eD2K, and it's Windows - which means larger target audience, and more likelihood to use SourceForge. I'm sure the actual number of copies of GAIM floating around may be much closer to (if not more than) the number of eMule copies.
Section 9 concerns upgrading and says "After upgrading, you may no longer use the software that formed the basis for your upgrade." This means that if you have a CD of XP SP1 and upgrade to SP2, then according to this agreement you have to buy a totally new copy of Windows to reinstall should your system get hosed.
I would assume that SP2 doesn't count as an upgrade; otherwise, even Windows Update Security Patch 12345 would count.
I also assume that if your system is hosed, you can terminate and reaccept the license, and redo the upgrade. The intent of this section is to prevent people from installing the original software on another machine. I'm sure you can reinterpret the EULA to allow you to forcefully "uninstall" your upgrade and the original, and then reinstall the original and then the upgrade.
Enough other posters have said that the principle behind this is a bad idea, so instead of reiterating that, I'm going to comment on the technical method of metering HTTP usage.
First, if it's just time restrictions, you can probably use your router's features. My router's setup page lets me block access from an IP range to a port range between a time range; I've used this to block a spam daemon on my mom's computer from getting to port 25 [yes, this blocked normal e-mail], or to block myself from wasting time past 7PM.
Barring that, I'd suggest writing your own server, or getting someone to do so for you. An HTTP server and a client are not hard to write; I wrote them in about a week of classtime each (got bored in my programming class). Or you can simply put a Perl script together that uses standard modules. Once you have a client and a server, it's a simple matter to tie them together, totaling the number of bytes transferred into a variable/disk file.
On a completely unrelated and stupid-sounding idea: does Apache stop serving when it can't write to log files? If so, just make it log proxy requests to a floppy disk.
6) They'll donate to the school - either kiosk computers with just IE, some web system that only works with IE, or enough general funds for new computers or a Steven Ballmer Building so that they'll retract their statement or never do something like that again.
At this point, Microsoft needs to pay for market share and mindshare. IE can't compete at its current price (free/bundled), so they'll lower it.
Correction. Yes, it is possible to repartition my USB disk. Windows won't let you do it. Mac OS X let me do it in the Terminal: umount/dev/disk1, fdisk a partition table onto it, and then mkfs or Disk Utility|Initialize/dev/disk1s*. It seems to work great in Mac OS X - once you overwrite the filesystem with a partition table - but Windows can only recognize the first/active partition.
I suppose you can write a bootloader to the disk and let non-MS systems take the upper partitions. I've only been able to get this working under MacBochs, with disk 0 as/dev/disk1. My PC won't actually boot off the USB drive.
I guess my assertion about the two kinds of disks merely refer to disks that come with a partition table and special software to access partitions other than the active one.
Eh, if a parent is such a control freak that they have to go so far as to know what movies their kids are watching with friends, maybe the parent shouldn't let their kids outside the house at all.
I really hope that you intended that to be read as sarcasm.
Ok, I'm trying right now. I went to Mac OS X's terminal, sudo unmount'ed the disks (and confused the GUI in the process), and then used fdisk on the partition manually. I don't think there's an easy automatic way of turning a single partition (/dev/disk1) into a boot sector (/dev/disk1 and/dev/disk1s1).
The other method, once you unmount the disk, is to boot a DOS or FreeDOS in Bochs from a floppy/image, and let it think that your disk itself is its C drive. Then you can use DOS fdisk and format to redo the disk.
Under Mac OS X, and presumably under *BSD and Linux, you can read all the partitions. Windows only recognized the first one and didn't read the volume label. Although it sees the other partitions, under Computer Management's disk screen, it refuses to assign letters to the extended partitions, saying that I need to reboot the computer.
I have not tried to create 3 primary partitions. My setup is a single primary partition and two logicals in an extended. I have not tried rebooting, or booting from the USB drive. I'm going to do so now.
Slashdot Mirror
exams we were allowed to use calculators in
Calculators help you explore math. They shouldn't be used as a crutch on a test.
Personally, I rarely use my graphing for tests. I use a class graphing for statistics - calculating standard deviation, regression lines, etc. I rarely use my four-function watch, except for molar-mass stuff in Chem. I lost my graphing about a month ago at a math tournament. It turned up with a teacher in a school 150 miles away. We're going there for a tournament in about a month; I haven't bothered trying to get it earlier, since I don't need it. It helps a lot to prove/demonstrate stuff in Calc, but I have no problem sitting quietly instead.
Let's say I walked into the library and marked up their encyclopedias with red ink (making legitimate corrections, in my opinion). Would you consider that credible?
Before I respond, I'll call straw-man, since you're assuming that one person's edits are analogous to a community of hundreds of committed editors and thousands more of casual editors. Think about it - the encyclopedia came from draft articles, marked up with red ink by a few people, and published nicely.
Then I'll answer: yes, I would consider this credible, if I see the corrections as worthwhile. If you wrote "LOL PWNED" and "BUSH SUXXORZ" on the book, of course not. If you corrected an article that I see is definitely flawed or lacking information, I would assume that you are probably more correct than the encyclopedia.
"A bunch of people on the Internet think it's good" does not constitute an editorial review.
"A bunch of people in a corporation" does? What is your definition of editorial review? How does it differ from a definition of WP's review where the wording is equally biased to the other side (given that the editors have shown themselves to be committed, and that several are quite accomplished in their subject)? WP is not reviewed by random people on the Internet, as you suggest.
This article explores just how successful one troll can be in disrupting the flow of things for a while -- and how the entire world can witness it.
No; this article suggests how even the most determined troll cannot stand up to Wikipedia, whose community knows how to write an unbiased article and remove personal attacks or self-praise.
However, I was very careful to not take on high-profile companies or do anything that might get me noticed because I knew that something like this might happen and the law would be thrown out. Thank you, person who doesn't even live in Maryland, for ruining it for the rest of us.
You're on very precarious legitimacy grounds here. You shouldn't be using a law that you know is challengeable for lack of authority, and trying to continue using it hoping that it'll be insignificant. That's like stealing a credit card number and using it for small purchases; it's equally illegal, with respect to legitimacy. Interstate "commerce" (heh, commercial e-mail counts as commerce) is not Maryland's domain, and they don't have the right to legislate acts across state lines (see the Supreme Court cases in the late 1800s, which effectively said that populists and farmers in Western states' governments could not influence interstate policy). This law would be legal if Maryland were its own nation. But part of the deal in the Union is that you give some authority to the federal government, so you don't have 50 conflicting laws that effectively make it illegal to send any commercial e-mail (meaning business e-mail, not necessarily advertising) because you don't know where it might be routed.
Frankly, even lawyers worth less than the amount of money you sued them for should've been able to pull Interstate Commerce on you. I'm surprised you -- and others -- were able to use this law this long.
I for one would like to see Mr. Wales put Sollog in jail for stalking.
Apart from simply being really cool, it would be a nice threat against anyone else who dare vandalize Wikipedia in the future.
Certainly I recall that in second and third year calc, when asked to compute a derivative or an integral we would usually be given the answer.
Same here in Calc II this morning. She gives us the answer packet a few minutes later, and we check our answers against each others to find mistakes in the work.
My point was that Math'ca is useful for self-exploration; you can do a lot more figuring out what mathematically happens when you do certain things than you can in class. Of course, it only works if you're self-motivated.
Which brings me to a question for the original submitter:
Are you looking for something to help students struggling in math, or bright students looking for ways to challenge themselves in math beyond what school offers? Math'ca is definitely not the answer for the former. The pencil-and-paper-ists are right if they're talking about struggling students.
(I know I know it was free for you because you stole it)
;-) Now it's definitely not stolen.
Where did I say that? Why could I not have bought it?
It was free for me, but because my dad has a departmental license; he's a university engineering professor. Even if he hadn't installed it at home, he still has SSH access to the university's computer labs...and he has it on his office box.
By the way, you'll be happy to know that your mention of $100 inspired me to go look at the price. I thought even student edition cost much more...it's just $140. I'm going to ask for it for Christmas; I need a version for Macintosh.
And sure, there are books which'll give you examples of several derivatives. But it's a lot easier to get Mathematica to solve it than to search in books for this particular one. I could've asked my teacher if I wanted to...I could've googled it; it's just x^x (which is weird if you try to work it using x^n or a^x formulae, and you don't know logarithmic differentiation)...but I wanted to figure out the method on my own. Oh, and there's the element of laziness.
Learning is SUPPOSED to be hard because if it isn't hard then you aren't learning anything.
Isn't it a lot harder to look at an answer, look at the question, and say "what's the method relating these" than to just look in a book for the answer? And if it's too hard to the point that nothing is happening, you're of course not learning anything - which is why I used Math'ca.
By the way, you might want to send that phrase to my school...heh. Might make things a little less boring. My 4th-grade spelling teacher had the theory that if I kept aceing the tests, I wasn't really learning. So she gave me harder tests. I aced those, too; I think that was the end of that, as far as I remember.
graphing calculators are unnecessary
I still disagree. The girls who didn't know 40+8 should have lost points on general principle. You should be able to use graphing calculators if you know how to use them - namely, writing programs to eliminate values or perform large repeated operations on thousands of numbers, using the graphing features to visualize areas, using the matrix and list arithmetic to simplify computations, etc.
It's hard (meaning non-intuitive) to use stat features on a scientific to calculate standard deviation. StdDev({1,2,3}) on an 83+ is a lot easier than fumbling with stat mode on a one-liner or even calculating it by hand.
I still have no idea why people insist on hand-calculating std dev more than once, in the beginning of the year, and another two times on the first test and the final. Once you've shown you know how it works, you shouldn't need to write down everything to do what, for the calculator, is a half-second computation.
Conversely, of course, you shouldn't type into the calculator what, for you, should be a half-second computation.
"Burglarize" is the original word. "Burgle" is a back-formation, "what a burglar must do".
I was quite embarassed to find that this was AHD's listed etymology after disrupting class last Wednesday to "correct" the teacher for using "burglarize".
At National Mu Alpha Theta this summer (a math tournament), I had brought my OS X laptop which happened to have Maxima on it. I use Mathematica at home, but I only have the Win32 version. Maxima is difficult to learn (not user-friendly, but it's almost as powerful as Mathematica -- in fact, its predecessor, Macsyma, was one of the first CASes, predating Mathematica. I used Maxima to verify some lengthy integrals after one test when the answer posted differed significantly from my answer.
Oh, and it's GPL, and it works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X (via Fink).
BTW, you probably know this, but if you can afford Mathematica or a Math'ca-based product, or at least a student license, it's going to be a lot better and more powerful than any OSS math product today. Math'ca is really an excellent product. Unfortunately, the price matches its quality.
No.
Software is useful. As a freshman in trig, I was learning calculus on my own, and Mathematica helped. There was one derivative in particular which I couldn't figure out; after using Mathematica to find the answer, the method whereby you reach that answer came to me a few days later -- it was much more obvious from the answer than from the question. There have been countless discussions between my friend and I as to how Mathematica arrived at a certain solution.
You try doing large integrals with pencil-and-paper and then come back and tell me that mathematics software isn't worth it for highschoolers. The only thing I can see is "useful" is the handwriting practice.
the quickest way to the brain is through the fingers
Software which shows you how to work a problem gets to the brain a lot quicker than fingers which have no idea what to do. Besides, I have seen countless cases of classmates in physics who have no idea what they're doing but can write down the examples that the teacher gives without fail.
The problem, of course, is software which devolves to mindless number-punching. I frown upon that - except when you would be punching in the same numbers into a calculator, surrounded by some function signs that are relatively obvious, or when you'd be sitting there for 2 hours working the problem by hand. Apart from stupid programs, it's hard to claim that writing out things helps you work better than using calculators and computers.
A/O/L???
Ignore the grandparent. If posting to trolltalk doesn't scream "known troll", nothing does.
Oh, btw, if you try to click on the link to trolltalk's homepage in his posting history, it goes to Goatse (or the closed-down remnants of it).
cat `find /` > index
/` basically means "print everything on my drive". cat /dev/hda would work as well - or better, since it shows deleted files and stuff.
/`, which a quick test shows would work. Add the line-number switch and you're set. Only thing is that it can't read from binary files (Word docs, PDFs, compressed files, etc.)
And then how do you figure out which file the text is from? And cat `find
What you probably meant was grep foo `find
Maybe there's a filesystem that can mount an existing folder (or a drive) as decrypted text only - incorporating antiword and such?
that's the way we likes it...
We likes it, my precious! We likes the imperial unitses!
iChat is equally proprietary, it doesn't allow you to create profiles, and it messes up the IM/chat metaphor by using the same interface for both -- you can't be sure how it'll show up on an AIM user's screen.
I'm a happy iChat user, though, so don't take this as a criticism of the software. I'm just mentioning that it too has problems, and is proprietary. Oh, and AIM Mac's ads seem to be much better than AIM Windows'.
Gaim, for all its awesomeness, has about 5 million.
That's because most Linux GAIM users have it bundled with their Linux distribution, or download it from their package manager instead of through SourceForge.
Most Windows users, quite frankly, will use the official client, myself included. Somehow I feel that the official client will work better with the AIM servers than GAIM - its innate/"gut feeling"; don't bother trying to convince me otherwise. I'm glad to use GAIM when on Linux, but AIM feels better for Windows. And there are many other IM programs for Linux.
eMule, however, is the most popular client for eD2K, and it's Windows - which means larger target audience, and more likelihood to use SourceForge. I'm sure the actual number of copies of GAIM floating around may be much closer to (if not more than) the number of eMule copies.
Section 9 concerns upgrading and says "After upgrading, you may no longer use the software that formed the basis for your upgrade." This means that if you have a CD of XP SP1 and upgrade to SP2, then according to this agreement you have to buy a totally new copy of Windows to reinstall should your system get hosed.
I would assume that SP2 doesn't count as an upgrade; otherwise, even Windows Update Security Patch 12345 would count.
I also assume that if your system is hosed, you can terminate and reaccept the license, and redo the upgrade. The intent of this section is to prevent people from installing the original software on another machine. I'm sure you can reinterpret the EULA to allow you to forcefully "uninstall" your upgrade and the original, and then reinstall the original and then the upgrade.
Why not just get them all iPods?
Then they'll have to go to Duke.
Seriously, iPods have a visual interface. Their device has to be usable with at most static Braille text.
And why do the blind get all the good parking spaces?
Can they drive, let alone park?
Reminds me of a joke by Yakov Smirnov (inventor of In Soviet Russia): Only in America do drive-up ATMs have Braille on the numbers.
Enough other posters have said that the principle behind this is a bad idea, so instead of reiterating that, I'm going to comment on the technical method of metering HTTP usage.
First, if it's just time restrictions, you can probably use your router's features. My router's setup page lets me block access from an IP range to a port range between a time range; I've used this to block a spam daemon on my mom's computer from getting to port 25 [yes, this blocked normal e-mail], or to block myself from wasting time past 7PM.
Barring that, I'd suggest writing your own server, or getting someone to do so for you. An HTTP server and a client are not hard to write; I wrote them in about a week of classtime each (got bored in my programming class). Or you can simply put a Perl script together that uses standard modules. Once you have a client and a server, it's a simple matter to tie them together, totaling the number of bytes transferred into a variable/disk file.
On a completely unrelated and stupid-sounding idea: does Apache stop serving when it can't write to log files? If so, just make it log proxy requests to a floppy disk.
6) They'll donate to the school - either kiosk computers with just IE, some web system that only works with IE, or enough general funds for new computers or a Steven Ballmer Building so that they'll retract their statement or never do something like that again.
At this point, Microsoft needs to pay for market share and mindshare. IE can't compete at its current price (free/bundled), so they'll lower it.
I congratulate you on making Apple take the Slashdotting for hosting a leak of their own product.
Will they have to C&D themselves now?
Correction. Yes, it is possible to repartition my USB disk. Windows won't let you do it. Mac OS X let me do it in the Terminal: umount /dev/disk1, fdisk a partition table onto it, and then mkfs or Disk Utility|Initialize /dev/disk1s*. It seems to work great in Mac OS X - once you overwrite the filesystem with a partition table - but Windows can only recognize the first/active partition.
/dev/disk1. My PC won't actually boot off the USB drive.
I suppose you can write a bootloader to the disk and let non-MS systems take the upper partitions. I've only been able to get this working under MacBochs, with disk 0 as
I guess my assertion about the two kinds of disks merely refer to disks that come with a partition table and special software to access partitions other than the active one.
Eh, if a parent is such a control freak that they have to go so far as to know what movies their kids are watching with friends, maybe the parent shouldn't let their kids outside the house at all.
I really hope that you intended that to be read as sarcasm.
Ok, I'm trying right now. I went to Mac OS X's terminal, sudo unmount'ed the disks (and confused the GUI in the process), and then used fdisk on the partition manually. I don't think there's an easy automatic way of turning a single partition (/dev/disk1) into a boot sector (/dev/disk1 and /dev/disk1s1).
The other method, once you unmount the disk, is to boot a DOS or FreeDOS in Bochs from a floppy/image, and let it think that your disk itself is its C drive. Then you can use DOS fdisk and format to redo the disk.
Under Mac OS X, and presumably under *BSD and Linux, you can read all the partitions. Windows only recognized the first one and didn't read the volume label. Although it sees the other partitions, under Computer Management's disk screen, it refuses to assign letters to the extended partitions, saying that I need to reboot the computer.
I have not tried to create 3 primary partitions. My setup is a single primary partition and two logicals in an extended. I have not tried rebooting, or booting from the USB drive. I'm going to do so now.