Agreed. And last I heard, there was research into making the large batteries needed where volume & weight is no object (as would be the case for these static batteries) out of cellulose, aka wood fibers! https://link.springer.com/arti...
As you mention, the amount of lithium needed is minimal, the insulating layer between the electrodes within the battery is a larger problem, however.
you beat me to it! I truly do miss the feel of a keyboard when using a touchscreen. If this means we can now get tactile feedback for pressing on "virtual keys", I'm all for it!
I think by "lawful" they're really aiming to comply with anti child pornography and other "think of the children" type of legislation currently in the US which ISPs are already blocking when they find out about it.
Also, net neutrality doesn't mean you can't set bandwidth quotas for a service. If your service is to watch the web, you pay for a certain bandwidth. If they decide to provide you with more bandwidth to pass through your TV service, and set your data quota to what you pay for, where's the problem, right?
For wireless access, the problem I think has more to do with being able to provide better service for critical instances. Like trying to dial 911 would have priority over some software download or other...
In the US, corporations have the same rights as a person, except for taxes. It's one of the most screwed up things in the legal system, but it's there nonetheless.
The reason they're doing this is because like you said, wireless is a huge growth sector. But the majority of Verizon's wired infrastructure (i.e. FiOS) can handle a HUGE amount of data - they've already invested in it. Wireless on the other hand, is a restricted data flow pipeline.
The bandwidth available for wireless transmission is determined by the range of frequencies available, divided by the number of users on that band. It's a FIXED amount. The FCC's not going to widen it just because, there are too many considerations for it.
You can only achieve a given data speed over wifi. We've improved it over time. But there is a physical limit for reliability of the signal, and that's why wireless is a different story. With wired (or land-based into wifi hotspots) you can just lay more lines in parallel, add a separate color laser to your fiber, etc. which makes it feasible to upgrade and widen the bandwidth. When you have an easily maintainable infrastructure, you don't mind letting it be used freely without priority restrictions.
Now pictures this: if wireless providers went all net neutral as per your calls, then a phone call would have the same priority as an app downloading updates in the background. Do you know you're going to always have good enough reception to guarantee call quality? Or are OS/firmware updates not more important than that stupid youtube of a dog who can't get up?
The point is that for wireless, there is a need to prioritize bandwidth, and because it's a fixed bandwidth, if you want priority over something else, you can't just claim it like you do on a landline network. The whole point here is that they're making an argument that you pay to use a cellphone, and instead of having a monthly data cap like you would with european providers (they have rates of $0.5 per Mbit after you exceed your allowance of 125, 250 or 500 MB), they're making it such that certain traffic will always work. Like maybe accessing your bank website. Or your Verizon account website to pay bills. If they'd adhered to net neutrality on wireless, it would end up in a huge problem because of LIMITED BANDWIDTH.
I'm a net neutrality supporter, big time. But there's no way to make it work on a wireless device practically to begin with. What other restrictions they impose on it afterwards remain to be seen. But I couldn't care less for browsing the web on a screen so small my fingers cover a third of what I'm trying to read/work on.
The pictures are amazing, and I wish there were more of them to be done that way!
Regarding the rest of your comment, I beg to differ!
I'm in the "under 30" category, and I know a great many deal of people my age or younger, who care about history, learn as much as they can about it, and have hobbies that usually involve modelling or simulating WWII-era war machines.
The sad part is that most of those youngsters are also the first ones to enroll in the armed forces, and too few of them ever make it back from the two battlefields we currently have going on.
But that being said, all you need to do to go see how many WWII "warbirds" are being modelled in 3D on the net, or by remote-controlled airplane pilots to notice they're not disappearing in popularity at all. They're just ever so present that most people accept them as part of their heritage, the same way they'll consider the tradition of Thanksgiving. It's so pervasive it's lost a lot of its impact.
Technically, unless specifically stated in the contract, the company can't sue you for "locking the keys to your desk inside your desk".
The company would then spend several hundreds of dollars on a locksmith to force open and re-key the desk, but in no case is that grounds for a trial.
He didn't take the devices with him, he simply left them in a state that was otherwise unuseable. If the city wasn't smart enough to hire someone who could force their way into the devices to re-image them with a configuration of their choosing, that should have no impact on Terry Childs. He did not steal company (or in fact, government) property. He never did. He simply left devices in a secure state, arguing against reason that nobody knew well enough to handle the systems. A bit paranoid, and overly concerned with his job to be sure, but hardly a case to bring him before court. If his manager had been the slightest bit resourceful, he'd have found someone who could re-image those devices, wiping all previous data on them.
I'm assuming it's not that hard to do when you own the damn things and have full vendor support behind you!
A properly implemented TR-69 system is going to be more secure than any machine this guy is running on his network, guaranteed. The administration server address cannot be changed from the user accessible interfaces, the connection is initiated from the CPE to that server instead of the reverse and there are multiple layers of verification and encryption in use before anything is actually allowed to be updated or changed.
Remind me since when do we trust big companies to set anything right to protect their customers from outside threats. They get the best setups in the world for their corporate networks, but their end-users can all go suck dirt where they're concerned.
Also I wouldn't leave out the possibility that they're getting all sorts of data concerning their customers' LAN, to target them for advertising for, say, faster networks, or TV set-top boxes like the Roku player if they notice a lot of video streaming.
Remember, big corporate cares nothing for their customers, they just care about selling you as much as they can, and then some, to increase their profits and cater to their shareholders' wishes.
RTFA: The suit asks the court to ban the sale of locked iPhones in the United States and also seeks a ban on Apple restricting what software users can install.
Now I know you can interpret it a few different ways. But in all cases that means more control of the device for consumers. It's not an absurd lawsuit, it's about information control. Right now, with the iPhone (and to a slightly lesser extent Android phones) all of your data and what you can install on the phones can and is controlled by the company who sold you the phone. Apple controls the market so they have approval rights over what you can install, and also controls how to remove or remotely kill your phone. Google's terms of service for Android are essentially the same. That is what they're seeking to overturn. Return control of the hardware to the customer who purchased it, which is what it's supposed to be!
From the last link in the post, it seems as if the class action suit will try to shut down Apple's restrictions on what software is available in the App Store, as well as the remote-kill switch for installed apps. I would love to see this making it illegal to put a kill switch on the phone for breach of contracts period.
On top of that they're trying to attack the fact that it was sold as a locked phone! Are they going to end up having to use an EU-style cell phone approach to the market? I would hope so, the providers and some manufacturers are really screwing people over!
I would argue that the only thing really required to get a fundamental grasp is to be able to read polar graphs and understand the concept of coefficient. Especially if you use a "specific CFD" tool, like XFLR5 - you don't need to understand ALL of what the variables are to understand Cl/Cd with t=alpha on a graph, same is true with GCm/Cd with t=Re.
Explaining the Reynolds number might be the most complex part of the class, actually. I mean, they're already doing wind-tunnel simulations to begin with - how hard is it to link what you see in your experiments with what a computer's trying to tell you? They can figure it out. If not, they wouldn't be in the class to begin with!
X-Foil - hands down. Designed by MIT, you can download.dat files for airfoils to load them, create NACA airfoils, and output all sorts of polar graphs.
If you're even more ambitious, look up XFLR5 on sourceforge - it does CFD over the entire surface of the aircraft in 3-D, as you can create a wing plan, tail surfaces and even a fuselage using curves.
XFLR5 is great because of the visualizations you can get from it - including animated lift/drag/pressure distributions, static airflow trails, and of course all of the graphs you can get from XFoil.
Just lookup both on Sourceforge - they're designed specifically for aircraft analysis, so you don't need to deal with a complete CFD package that needs more setup.
Seriously, aerodynamics lends itself well to this.
Especially if you're going to do model airplanes. It's not all that expensive to get setup, and you're working with really low reynolds numbers, which is something that'll interest many people because of the search for small flying machines (drones, messenger bots, etc). Couple that with research for an autopilot mechanism and you've got a serious hobby that'll take time and lead to new discoveries without taking all that much money to get new results.
I thought the syntax in your equation looked somewhat familiar, but it's not quite it.
Have you tried using the openoffice equation editor? Or, for that matter, in a text doc, just insert a formula (alt-i -> f or something like it for the shortcut). It lets you enter an equation using a simplistic syntax, and then shapes it to look "real". Admittedly you may need to judiciously learn how to use the parentheses and square brackets to make it work right.
But I did that for some of my advanced math classes, and it worked like a charm. It really makes life easy, and it automatically adjusts the size, lets you do multiple lines etc.
There's a little "tablet" of standard functions, but once you learn the keywords and figure out how to use parentheses to make it select the right thing it'll become easy and accurate. Cheers.
Well do you mean linux used on campus networks, or in a CS curriculum?
I'm seeing a lot of people confused about either of them.
Personally, I can attest that Lewis & Clark college has a Win/Mac support from IT, but the math/CS department has a Linux lab used for the CS curriculum, and has a lab assistant that can help setting up your machine.
Other than that, the network works perfectly with Linux. Wireless and ethernet.
If you wanna know more, send an email to the people here, find the contact info at www.lclark.edu.
Cheers
Why? Lets go into a few specific functions, shall we?
-Formatting: I like to be able to cancel formatting and start redoing my fancy table/numbering from scratch. Word 2003 -> HUGE problems on that end. As in, making a document unuseable huge. -Performance you say? Why in the world does Word generate a 4 MB file for something that's barely 30 pages long with no images and just tables? Creating the same document in OO.o and saving it as a Word 97/2000/2003 file makes the data fit in 250kB. AND IT LOOKS IDENTICAL! Not only that, but Word takes up 30 seconds to load the file, whereas OO.o has the same file (the 250kB file for both suites) useable in about 5. -Menu options and consistency: When I'm looking for a formatting feature I expect it to be listed under the "Format" menu. I don't expect to have to go find the 1 feature I need in under the Insert menu!
So give me a break. OO.o is not perfect, by any means. It still lacks SIGNIFICANT track changes features, but in almost all other aspects, it beats the hell out of Office 2003 any day. Plus it doesn't crash. Saves a lot of time if you don't have to redo the last 10 minutes of your work every hour. But it's not fair to say that either one of them is "better" than the other.
Use what suits your business needs, end of discussion. In my case, OO.o fits the bill better. If you use track changes a lot, keep MS Office. But there's no guarantee that OO.o won't improve their support for track-changes and supplant MS Office in the long run. Remembering back to version 1.1, OO.o has come a LONG way. Word documents in Word and OO.o look the same now. Same for powerpoint files. Don't just brush off one in favor of the other because one version fits your needs better. Evaluate new versions before making claims or business decisions.
My best and only piece of advice on the topic is to get in touch with places that have deployed OSS software in an educational environment.
I have 2 places in mind to give you: - Gould Academy (prep school in Maine, www.gouldacademy.org): their entire infrastructure runs on Linux (or did at one point), and they used LTLP (www.ltlp.org) a lot, for all the classroom workstations. Good ways of recycling aging hardware.
- OMSI, Oregon Museum of Science and Industry: their computer lab demoes many systems, in equal amounts (Windows, Mac and Linux), and while I was working on a project there, I noticed that the linux boxes were often more crowded than the others, simply because of the availability of edutainment games on the platform.
Other universities may also have Linux deployed in their CS department, and they may have tips as well. Contact them fishing for tips and info, you'll probably get better information than here anyways.
So we've been hearing on Slashdot a fair bit about what the Air Force is trying to setup as a cyber-warfare unit. While the goal is understandable (after all, the Estonia DoS attacks have demonstrated how to cripple a country through digital means), I'm a little worried that this unit being in control of the Army could lead to a real problem as far as accountability. No offense to our Air Force generals, but internet security and hacking have little to do with organizing strategic bombings or dogfighting. Who would you like to put in charge of such a division and why?
And what responsibilities would you assign them? As they are part of the US military forces, they are here to protect American interests on this other world that is cyberspace - would they be given the task of attacking hackers and their bot-nets disrupting American businesses? And how would you prefer they go about it? Since the cyber-warfare unit is one of the first of its kind, what kind of rules are they supposed to follow, in this generally un-ruled space known as the Internet?
Was wondering when someone was going to put a link to it on here... I'll point to an XKCD comic. penises http://img.xkcd.com/comics/penises.png Just about sums up how Europeans look at the US in general.
While some people suggest you throw him in one language or another, I don't think that there's a benefit to it. A language is essentially just a syntax, a tool for him to communicate instructions to a computer. What you want him to do is, and I shamelessly quote my CS prof. Jeff Ely on this one, "You need to learn problem solving before anything else."
Jeff taught us that by using a very simplified C language, teaching only if statements and while loops, and throwing simple problems at us, that could be solved using those. Later he introduces arrays, but in CS1, that's all we ever used. His toolkit used only doubles, strings and character variables. And he got us going with that. Another statement I like from him is "The power is in the mind."
Do NOT, I repeat, do *NOT* start with syntax. It's boring and completely useless as far as educational purpose goes. It's not what computer science is about. Give him a problem like "write a program that, from a number of pennies, can tell me how many coins of each type I have", and let him figure out the language he wants. The fact that he's researching it will teach him TONS more than anything you could throw on his desk, because, and I speak from being in his shoes not so long ago, he's a teenager. He won't want to do everything you say, so dropping a Python, or C or other language book on his desk is only going to frustrate him. Give him a problem, point him to the appropriate section in the library, and step back until he comes at you with questions. Just my $0.02 of information on the matter, as a fresh CS grad.
Agreed. To the risk of sounding super lame, have you ever heard of this joke? (not mine, found on bash.org): The day MS makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner!
I believe in part the US can't follow suit because investors keep thinking Hiroshima and Nagasaki or The Incredible Hulk when you meantion Nuclear. And don't forget the nutjobs who will claim it'll make the US an easier target for terrorists.
No, the US won't follow suit because they're too afraid of nuclear stuff. Sure safety works, and the French have it all over the place, but lets face it: France is a fifth the size of Texas, even if it does hold twice the population of California. Hence nuclear power makes sense there because power transmission is done over shorter distances, and nuclear plants can generate the power necessary for dense areas. However in the US, population density is much lower, even in cities! And most power cables in the US could use an overhaul or two, because you lose so much power conveying the energy that it would just not be beneficial on the current infrastructure (har, pun!).
And why do you say "If France, of all nations"? The French DISCOVERED radioactivity (Marie Currie ring any bells?). French scientists and statisticians are also among the best in the world. The rest of the industry lacks the interest in capitalizing on the science, but their scientists are top notch.
It's not the interface's problem, it's the fact that 98% of computer users do not want to and will not learn anything about their computer. Some people will actively refuse to learn anything. So in light of that, the root of the problem is far, far deeper:(
Well then the solution's simple. Give people a license to use a computer. A computer is infintely more complex than a car, yet you need a driver's license for a car. Pending that, if a user decides to NOT get their "computing license", well they deserve to be infected by spyware, regardless of OS, browser etc.
Attempting to make products idiot-proof should not exist. If you want everything to be idiot-proof, you're ensuring that evolutions stops. Even the most hardliner christian can't deny the fact that some people are morons, dangerous or otherwise incapable of contributing to society.
Hence why we need to keep darwinism alive in some form or another. Unfortunately the US has too many lawyers that allow idiots to sue companies into making products idiot-proof, instead of letting idiots manage their population the only way they know how to: let the idiots be idiots and see which ones pull it through. They're either very lucky, or not that idiotic if they manage to not kill themselves.
Have you considered that maybe netflix is having issues keeping with the volume of discs they currently are mailing and getting returned?
It's VERY possible that the simple volume means they have a queue of incoming mail that takes 2 days to sort out.
If you're not happy with it, think about how our family, on a 3 at a time plan, get "throttled"... We keep discs for a few weeks at a time. And it ALWAYS takes 3-5 days to get the next disc in.
Boo netflix! I think the real problem, like I said, is the sheer volume. They probably didn't anticipate quite the level of growth they got.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. And last I heard, there was research into making the large batteries needed where volume & weight is no object (as would be the case for these static batteries) out of cellulose, aka wood fibers! https://link.springer.com/arti... As you mention, the amount of lithium needed is minimal, the insulating layer between the electrodes within the battery is a larger problem, however.
We'd have to ask a blind person to try it out to get the answer I suppose.
you beat me to it! I truly do miss the feel of a keyboard when using a touchscreen. If this means we can now get tactile feedback for pressing on "virtual keys", I'm all for it!
I think by "lawful" they're really aiming to comply with anti child pornography and other "think of the children" type of legislation currently in the US which ISPs are already blocking when they find out about it.
Also, net neutrality doesn't mean you can't set bandwidth quotas for a service. If your service is to watch the web, you pay for a certain bandwidth. If they decide to provide you with more bandwidth to pass through your TV service, and set your data quota to what you pay for, where's the problem, right?
For wireless access, the problem I think has more to do with being able to provide better service for critical instances. Like trying to dial 911 would have priority over some software download or other...
In the US, corporations have the same rights as a person, except for taxes. It's one of the most screwed up things in the legal system, but it's there nonetheless.
Umm, here's my take on this:
The reason they're doing this is because like you said, wireless is a huge growth sector. But the majority of Verizon's wired infrastructure (i.e. FiOS) can handle a HUGE amount of data - they've already invested in it. Wireless on the other hand, is a restricted data flow pipeline.
The bandwidth available for wireless transmission is determined by the range of frequencies available, divided by the number of users on that band. It's a FIXED amount. The FCC's not going to widen it just because, there are too many considerations for it.
You can only achieve a given data speed over wifi. We've improved it over time. But there is a physical limit for reliability of the signal, and that's why wireless is a different story. With wired (or land-based into wifi hotspots) you can just lay more lines in parallel, add a separate color laser to your fiber, etc. which makes it feasible to upgrade and widen the bandwidth. When you have an easily maintainable infrastructure, you don't mind letting it be used freely without priority restrictions.
Now pictures this: if wireless providers went all net neutral as per your calls, then a phone call would have the same priority as an app downloading updates in the background. Do you know you're going to always have good enough reception to guarantee call quality? Or are OS/firmware updates not more important than that stupid youtube of a dog who can't get up?
The point is that for wireless, there is a need to prioritize bandwidth, and because it's a fixed bandwidth, if you want priority over something else, you can't just claim it like you do on a landline network. The whole point here is that they're making an argument that you pay to use a cellphone, and instead of having a monthly data cap like you would with european providers (they have rates of $0.5 per Mbit after you exceed your allowance of 125, 250 or 500 MB), they're making it such that certain traffic will always work. Like maybe accessing your bank website. Or your Verizon account website to pay bills. If they'd adhered to net neutrality on wireless, it would end up in a huge problem because of LIMITED BANDWIDTH.
I'm a net neutrality supporter, big time. But there's no way to make it work on a wireless device practically to begin with. What other restrictions they impose on it afterwards remain to be seen. But I couldn't care less for browsing the web on a screen so small my fingers cover a third of what I'm trying to read/work on.
The pictures are amazing, and I wish there were more of them to be done that way!
Regarding the rest of your comment, I beg to differ!
I'm in the "under 30" category, and I know a great many deal of people my age or younger, who care about history, learn as much as they can about it, and have hobbies that usually involve modelling or simulating WWII-era war machines.
The sad part is that most of those youngsters are also the first ones to enroll in the armed forces, and too few of them ever make it back from the two battlefields we currently have going on.
But that being said, all you need to do to go see how many WWII "warbirds" are being modelled in 3D on the net, or by remote-controlled airplane pilots to notice they're not disappearing in popularity at all. They're just ever so present that most people accept them as part of their heritage, the same way they'll consider the tradition of Thanksgiving. It's so pervasive it's lost a lot of its impact.
Technically, unless specifically stated in the contract, the company can't sue you for "locking the keys to your desk inside your desk".
The company would then spend several hundreds of dollars on a locksmith to force open and re-key the desk, but in no case is that grounds for a trial.
He didn't take the devices with him, he simply left them in a state that was otherwise unuseable. If the city wasn't smart enough to hire someone who could force their way into the devices to re-image them with a configuration of their choosing, that should have no impact on Terry Childs. He did not steal company (or in fact, government) property. He never did. He simply left devices in a secure state, arguing against reason that nobody knew well enough to handle the systems. A bit paranoid, and overly concerned with his job to be sure, but hardly a case to bring him before court. If his manager had been the slightest bit resourceful, he'd have found someone who could re-image those devices, wiping all previous data on them.
I'm assuming it's not that hard to do when you own the damn things and have full vendor support behind you!
A properly implemented TR-69 system is going to be more secure than any machine this guy is running on his network, guaranteed. The administration server address cannot be changed from the user accessible interfaces, the connection is initiated from the CPE to that server instead of the reverse and there are multiple layers of verification and encryption in use before anything is actually allowed to be updated or changed.
Remind me since when do we trust big companies to set anything right to protect their customers from outside threats. They get the best setups in the world for their corporate networks, but their end-users can all go suck dirt where they're concerned.
Also I wouldn't leave out the possibility that they're getting all sorts of data concerning their customers' LAN, to target them for advertising for, say, faster networks, or TV set-top boxes like the Roku player if they notice a lot of video streaming.
Remember, big corporate cares nothing for their customers, they just care about selling you as much as they can, and then some, to increase their profits and cater to their shareholders' wishes.
RTFA:
The suit asks the court to ban the sale of locked iPhones in the United States and also seeks a ban on Apple restricting what software users can install.
Now I know you can interpret it a few different ways. But in all cases that means more control of the device for consumers. It's not an absurd lawsuit, it's about information control. Right now, with the iPhone (and to a slightly lesser extent Android phones) all of your data and what you can install on the phones can and is controlled by the company who sold you the phone. Apple controls the market so they have approval rights over what you can install, and also controls how to remove or remotely kill your phone. Google's terms of service for Android are essentially the same. That is what they're seeking to overturn. Return control of the hardware to the customer who purchased it, which is what it's supposed to be!
From the last link in the post, it seems as if the class action suit will try to shut down Apple's restrictions on what software is available in the App Store, as well as the remote-kill switch for installed apps. I would love to see this making it illegal to put a kill switch on the phone for breach of contracts period.
On top of that they're trying to attack the fact that it was sold as a locked phone! Are they going to end up having to use an EU-style cell phone approach to the market? I would hope so, the providers and some manufacturers are really screwing people over!
I would argue that the only thing really required to get a fundamental grasp is to be able to read polar graphs and understand the concept of coefficient. Especially if you use a "specific CFD" tool, like XFLR5 - you don't need to understand ALL of what the variables are to understand Cl/Cd with t=alpha on a graph, same is true with GCm/Cd with t=Re.
Explaining the Reynolds number might be the most complex part of the class, actually. I mean, they're already doing wind-tunnel simulations to begin with - how hard is it to link what you see in your experiments with what a computer's trying to tell you? They can figure it out. If not, they wouldn't be in the class to begin with!
X-Foil - hands down. Designed by MIT, you can download .dat files for airfoils to load them, create NACA airfoils, and output all sorts of polar graphs.
If you're even more ambitious, look up XFLR5 on sourceforge - it does CFD over the entire surface of the aircraft in 3-D, as you can create a wing plan, tail surfaces and even a fuselage using curves.
XFLR5 is great because of the visualizations you can get from it - including animated lift/drag/pressure distributions, static airflow trails, and of course all of the graphs you can get from XFoil.
Just lookup both on Sourceforge - they're designed specifically for aircraft analysis, so you don't need to deal with a complete CFD package that needs more setup.
Seriously, aerodynamics lends itself well to this. Especially if you're going to do model airplanes. It's not all that expensive to get setup, and you're working with really low reynolds numbers, which is something that'll interest many people because of the search for small flying machines (drones, messenger bots, etc). Couple that with research for an autopilot mechanism and you've got a serious hobby that'll take time and lead to new discoveries without taking all that much money to get new results.
I thought the syntax in your equation looked somewhat familiar, but it's not quite it. Have you tried using the openoffice equation editor? Or, for that matter, in a text doc, just insert a formula (alt-i -> f or something like it for the shortcut). It lets you enter an equation using a simplistic syntax, and then shapes it to look "real". Admittedly you may need to judiciously learn how to use the parentheses and square brackets to make it work right. But I did that for some of my advanced math classes, and it worked like a charm. It really makes life easy, and it automatically adjusts the size, lets you do multiple lines etc. There's a little "tablet" of standard functions, but once you learn the keywords and figure out how to use parentheses to make it select the right thing it'll become easy and accurate. Cheers.
Well do you mean linux used on campus networks, or in a CS curriculum? I'm seeing a lot of people confused about either of them. Personally, I can attest that Lewis & Clark college has a Win/Mac support from IT, but the math/CS department has a Linux lab used for the CS curriculum, and has a lab assistant that can help setting up your machine. Other than that, the network works perfectly with Linux. Wireless and ethernet. If you wanna know more, send an email to the people here, find the contact info at www.lclark.edu. Cheers
You know, I used to think that way too.
And then I got Office 2003 at work.
And I still think that OO.o is superior.
Why? Lets go into a few specific functions, shall we?
-Formatting: I like to be able to cancel formatting and start redoing my fancy table/numbering from scratch. Word 2003 -> HUGE problems on that end. As in, making a document unuseable huge.
-Performance you say? Why in the world does Word generate a 4 MB file for something that's barely 30 pages long with no images and just tables? Creating the same document in OO.o and saving it as a Word 97/2000/2003 file makes the data fit in 250kB. AND IT LOOKS IDENTICAL! Not only that, but Word takes up 30 seconds to load the file, whereas OO.o has the same file (the 250kB file for both suites) useable in about 5.
-Menu options and consistency: When I'm looking for a formatting feature I expect it to be listed under the "Format" menu. I don't expect to have to go find the 1 feature I need in under the Insert menu!
So give me a break. OO.o is not perfect, by any means. It still lacks SIGNIFICANT track changes features, but in almost all other aspects, it beats the hell out of Office 2003 any day. Plus it doesn't crash. Saves a lot of time if you don't have to redo the last 10 minutes of your work every hour. But it's not fair to say that either one of them is "better" than the other.
Use what suits your business needs, end of discussion. In my case, OO.o fits the bill better. If you use track changes a lot, keep MS Office. But there's no guarantee that OO.o won't improve their support for track-changes and supplant MS Office in the long run. Remembering back to version 1.1, OO.o has come a LONG way. Word documents in Word and OO.o look the same now. Same for powerpoint files. Don't just brush off one in favor of the other because one version fits your needs better. Evaluate new versions before making claims or business decisions.
My best and only piece of advice on the topic is to get in touch with places that have deployed OSS software in an educational environment.
I have 2 places in mind to give you:
- Gould Academy (prep school in Maine, www.gouldacademy.org): their entire infrastructure runs on Linux (or did at one point), and they used LTLP (www.ltlp.org) a lot, for all the classroom workstations. Good ways of recycling aging hardware.
- OMSI, Oregon Museum of Science and Industry: their computer lab demoes many systems, in equal amounts (Windows, Mac and Linux), and while I was working on a project there, I noticed that the linux boxes were often more crowded than the others, simply because of the availability of edutainment games on the platform.
Other universities may also have Linux deployed in their CS department, and they may have tips as well. Contact them fishing for tips and info, you'll probably get better information than here anyways.
So we've been hearing on Slashdot a fair bit about what the Air Force is trying to setup as a cyber-warfare unit. While the goal is understandable (after all, the Estonia DoS attacks have demonstrated how to cripple a country through digital means), I'm a little worried that this unit being in control of the Army could lead to a real problem as far as accountability. No offense to our Air Force generals, but internet security and hacking have little to do with organizing strategic bombings or dogfighting. Who would you like to put in charge of such a division and why?
And what responsibilities would you assign them? As they are part of the US military forces, they are here to protect American interests on this other world that is cyberspace - would they be given the task of attacking hackers and their bot-nets disrupting American businesses? And how would you prefer they go about it? Since the cyber-warfare unit is one of the first of its kind, what kind of rules are they supposed to follow, in this generally un-ruled space known as the Internet?
Was wondering when someone was going to put a link to it on here... I'll point to an XKCD comic. penises http://img.xkcd.com/comics/penises.png
Just about sums up how Europeans look at the US in general.
While some people suggest you throw him in one language or another, I don't think that there's a benefit to it. A language is essentially just a syntax, a tool for him to communicate instructions to a computer. What you want him to do is, and I shamelessly quote my CS prof. Jeff Ely on this one, "You need to learn problem solving before anything else."
Jeff taught us that by using a very simplified C language, teaching only if statements and while loops, and throwing simple problems at us, that could be solved using those. Later he introduces arrays, but in CS1, that's all we ever used. His toolkit used only doubles, strings and character variables. And he got us going with that. Another statement I like from him is "The power is in the mind."
Do NOT, I repeat, do *NOT* start with syntax. It's boring and completely useless as far as educational purpose goes. It's not what computer science is about. Give him a problem like "write a program that, from a number of pennies, can tell me how many coins of each type I have", and let him figure out the language he wants. The fact that he's researching it will teach him TONS more than anything you could throw on his desk, because, and I speak from being in his shoes not so long ago, he's a teenager. He won't want to do everything you say, so dropping a Python, or C or other language book on his desk is only going to frustrate him. Give him a problem, point him to the appropriate section in the library, and step back until he comes at you with questions.
Just my $0.02 of information on the matter, as a fresh CS grad.
Agreed. To the risk of sounding super lame, have you ever heard of this joke? (not mine, found on bash.org):
The day MS makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner!
I believe in part the US can't follow suit because investors keep thinking Hiroshima and Nagasaki or The Incredible Hulk when you meantion Nuclear. And don't forget the nutjobs who will claim it'll make the US an easier target for terrorists.
No, the US won't follow suit because they're too afraid of nuclear stuff. Sure safety works, and the French have it all over the place, but lets face it: France is a fifth the size of Texas, even if it does hold twice the population of California. Hence nuclear power makes sense there because power transmission is done over shorter distances, and nuclear plants can generate the power necessary for dense areas. However in the US, population density is much lower, even in cities! And most power cables in the US could use an overhaul or two, because you lose so much power conveying the energy that it would just not be beneficial on the current infrastructure (har, pun!).
And why do you say "If France, of all nations"? The French DISCOVERED radioactivity (Marie Currie ring any bells?). French scientists and statisticians are also among the best in the world. The rest of the industry lacks the interest in capitalizing on the science, but their scientists are top notch.
It's not the interface's problem, it's the fact that 98% of computer users do not want to and will not learn anything about their computer. Some people will actively refuse to learn anything. So in light of that, the root of the problem is far, far deeper :(
Well then the solution's simple. Give people a license to use a computer. A computer is infintely more complex than a car, yet you need a driver's license for a car. Pending that, if a user decides to NOT get their "computing license", well they deserve to be infected by spyware, regardless of OS, browser etc.
Attempting to make products idiot-proof should not exist. If you want everything to be idiot-proof, you're ensuring that evolutions stops. Even the most hardliner christian can't deny the fact that some people are morons, dangerous or otherwise incapable of contributing to society.
Hence why we need to keep darwinism alive in some form or another. Unfortunately the US has too many lawyers that allow idiots to sue companies into making products idiot-proof, instead of letting idiots manage their population the only way they know how to: let the idiots be idiots and see which ones pull it through. They're either very lucky, or not that idiotic if they manage to not kill themselves.
Have you considered that maybe netflix is having issues keeping with the volume of discs they currently are mailing and getting returned? It's VERY possible that the simple volume means they have a queue of incoming mail that takes 2 days to sort out. If you're not happy with it, think about how our family, on a 3 at a time plan, get "throttled"... We keep discs for a few weeks at a time. And it ALWAYS takes 3-5 days to get the next disc in. Boo netflix! I think the real problem, like I said, is the sheer volume. They probably didn't anticipate quite the level of growth they got.