I dare you to pick five cities, of random size, and look up their library websites. I guarantee you at least four of them will be poorly laid out, with broken links, and at least one will have eye-bleeding banners in fantastic 1996 style. The fifth will be seamless, make sense, and (hopefully) work in multiple browsers. The fifth will be the one who had an actual webmaster, instead of "well Jill here is under 30 so she knows something about computers."
it's easy to say "well duh!", but when you have a brand-new out-of-the-box computer, it doesn't exactly come with instructions. My grandmother has no way of knowing she's supposed to be running a firewall, or going to get a Microsoft Security update before doing anything else. WE know these things, because we hang out on Slashdot, but they're not obvious to the rest of the world, and I applaud the BBC for bothering to put this in people's minds. Until the day Microsoft starts shipping Windows with firewalls INSTALLED and ON by default, articles like this will truly be helpful.
ajs318, meet the "print screen" command. Or my camera. Or your workplace's digital surveilence. If we have the technology to find everyone in the country's social network, then certainly security cameras will be everywhere, no? And some of them will be able to see computer screens? So if someone wanted to make a case, they would just have to get security footage of different people's screens and compare. And unless you expect all this security footage to be in a big database only accessible to Big Brother (in which case we're already sunk and democracy is the least of our problems), it wouldn't be difficult for an inquisitive newswriter (or student doing a project?) to get the data.
Unfortunately, college is the time most young adults learn time management skills. Which means a great many freshmen and sophomores don't have them yet. If you allowed them to access their entire course online, many students would wait until the last minute, try to cram all the lectures, and fail the final. This is bad for everyone - the students don't learn, the parents' money is wasted, the university can't offer classes that build on what the student should have learned, and the professor has to dumb down his class to the level that people *won't* fail out. You would see a lot more students failing out of college if we dumped them straight from high school into a "you're the only one responsible for learning so get to it, and we don't give you measurements to tell you if you're doing it right until your final grade" kind of environment.
Slackers exist, and probably always will. Students will procrastinate, then try to find the most effective way of passing a class with a week's worth of studying all crammed at the end. We just don't need to make it easier for them.
In addition to the lazy student issue, are the professors worried about losing copyright on their lectures if they're on the web for anyone to see? Most professors probably don't care, but I remember a few from my college days who would have never allowed it. Restricting access to the class only (give people passwords at the beginning of the semeseter?) would solve that issue. As for the rest, well, if you can time-restrict the lectures (only available for one week following the class, or the time you view them is logged for the professor to see if you're procrastinating), you'd probably stave off some of the problems your "good" students would have - the students who come to the lectures now because they should, but might be tempted to sleep a bit late, every week, and end up in over their head.
I knew a guy who could only log into the network while sitting down. If he was standing up when he tried to log in, no dice.
Turns out he touch typed while sitting, but had to look at the keyboard while standing - and since he "cleaned" his keyboard and put a few key tops back in the wrong places, he was mis-typing has password if he was standing up.
For me, the monthly fees broke down like this:
Cable TV (basic package): $45, and increasing by a few bucks every 2-3 months
OR
Netflix, 4 DVDs at a time, ordering my favorite TV shows: $25
World of Warcraft: $15
I have to admit, I play 30-40 hours of WoW a week, and when I'm not playing WoW I'm watching my Netflix shows. Being sick on my honeymoon a few weeks ago was kind of neat - I got to sit around in the hotel room all day and watch TV! Exciting!
That said, I rarely buy new games that cost more than $20 anyway. I don't do the FPS genre, and I can very happily replay Pharaoh or SimCity or Sid Meyer's Pirates over and over if I don't feel like WoW.
this device would reinforce what the person with autism sees anyway (facial cues) with a discrete signal saying "yes this means the person is getting bored." If anything, this should HELP people with autism learn to better distinguish cues on their own - they're being constantly reinforced.
I'm guessing that for most people, including those with autism, 90% of the people you interact with daily are people you've interact with frequently (barring jobs where you work with the public). So if your coworker had autism and used one of these devices, you would probably learn what facial cues you can use to make sure your coworker saw you were bored - now, you would probably just avoid talking with them if they didn't notice you were bored or uncomfortable. By making it easier for everyone else around the person with autism to interact with them, this device would also give them more chances to work on their visual cues and interaction because other people would be willing to hold more conversations with the autistic person.
I just cancelled my cable. I'm slowly working my way through CSI, the Simpsons, and some of my other favorite shows via Netflix - why do I need overpriced cable again?
That said, the Daily Show was the one thing I realized I'd miss about cable. And now I can get my TV fix for ($10 for Daily Show) + ($18 for Netflix) = about $20 less than I was paying for very basic, TiVoless, 90-percent-commercials cable. Sounds good to me!
I like CSI, the Simpsons, and one or two other shows. I cancelled my cable because, quite frankly, it sucks and they just raised their rates. So I use Netflix primarily for TV show DVDs.
If I want to sit down for the evening, I can watch 4 episodes of CSI back-to-back (one disk). And then maybe one or two more, or I watch one over my lunch break, etc. So I can go through a disk a day, or a disk every two days. Except for some strange reason, the disks started not getting here when Netflix said they would, or the disks would take an extra day (or two or five) to ship. Add to that that about half the CSI disks so far have been cracked (all or partially unplayable), meaning I need to report them/send them back/wait for a replacement, and I'm pretty sure I'm on their throttle list.
I just upgraded my service, from 4/month to 3 at a time "unlimited" to 4 at a time "unlimited" - will they send me any more with 4-at-a-time than they did with 3?
this Brewster Jennings game is great for "real" map skills! Instead of showing kids "look, you can use a piece of paper to discover locations you already know and don't need a map for," I could see this being used as a classroom demonstration that in theory, all maps ARE connected. That's something that gets overlooked - maps show what you want them to show, for the segment of the earth you want them to show it - but now that we're not restricted to data "locked in" on paper, there is no reason kids shouldn't learn how a fluid map system works.
I'm a librarian, and a good deal of what I do is help first-time internet users figure out the net, set up email, etc.
I HATE those "you won an Xbox!" ads because people invariably CLICK on them, expecting something, and I have to explain how they didn't really win anything. EVERY TIME. Then they come up to me complaining the Internet broke and they didn't get their Xbox. *sigh*
more than that. These guys were at DragonCon a few weeks ago, and they assured the audience that now, by their 18th robot, they are *almost* done using Legos . . .
I just saw a bunch of the Adult Swim guys in a Q&A panel at DragonCon this weekend, and . . . yes, it does.
There are some shows they've had before they just can't show again because they don't have the rights to them. Other shows they've made one season of, but can't or won't make more, so they'll just re-show what they already have.
They do have some really cool new stuff coming up, though!
Ditto. I signed up for iTunes to get the "Numa Numa" song, and I've bought two other songs since (one I heard on NPR, and one I downloaded from Napster back in another life). I can't remember the last time I bought a CD.
BUT: this isn't because all music is crap. I may dislike most of the mainstream stuff, but there are some artists out there I'd love to listen to. I won't pay $18 for a CD, though, so I just don't listen to them.
Radio monopolies do suck. If I have to listen to the same 15 songs played over and over all day, I might as well play my own CDs (most of which I've had for 10 years and know by heart) and hear 15 songs I know I like. If I can't sample new music for free, either by hearing it on the radio or downloading it, I'm not buying new CDs. Period.
Bingo. I use Netflix because it's about the same price as Blockbuster for the amount I use it - I figure $3/movie for 4 movies/month is the $12 I pay. With Blockbuster, it's $3/movie plus an extra $10 after I turn it in because they "lost it" or "never got it in the computer," and the selection sucks. I like renting seasons of TV shows (Firefly, anyone?) and having the chance to watch them whenever I want. After Blockbuster "lost" my last 3 movies, I switched to Netflix and never looked back.
I am looking to buy several low-end desktops for my (small) library. I figured I'm probably best off doing something out-of-the-box, so I call Dell, Apple, and Gateway.
Dell: LONG phone tree, but I reach a really helpful guy who gets me what I want and sends me an email quote. The email was basically a long chart of the various features available and what prices they would add to upgrade.
Apple: short phone tree, but I have to talk with a hippie. Helpful, but not at all professional. Also sends me an email, but this consists of text like 40G/288Ghz/E/mes/10.1 . . . no explanations of what these numbers mean, if I didn't already know what was measured in Ghz and what was in K.
Gateway: four phone calls over two days got me four different individual's voicemails, and nobody called me back. I went to the "chat online" function and got a rep who gave me another number - another voicemail. Great. Tried to send feedback to the website that their service sucks, but it won't accept feedback without a purchase number, which I don't have because they won't talk to me. When I finally do get ahold of a rep, he wouldn't listen when I explained what I needed, and kept trying to upsell me to something more expensive. He said he'd send an email, but it hasn't come yet.
So who do you think is out of the running? If Gateway would have only talked to me, they would have probably gotten my business, but as it is I'm going to pay a bit more to go with a company that has a government & educational department that is a bit more with it.
I would assume that the individual published articles gave more quantitative information, like HOW MUCH more college students drink than they think they do (which would be useful in designing campaigns against alcohol poisoning on campus), how often and how precisely doctors and patients need to communicate about drug side effects (useful for standardizing medical requirements), or what temperatures start to affect typing (useful in just about any office going through a thermostat battle-of-the-sexes).
Ridiculing the articles may be interesting, but only a few of the examples struck me as completely frivalous.
I'm the branch manager at a small library, and no, minors can look at any nude pictures in books that they want to. The flip side is that they rarely know what to ask for:-) When the kids in my library discovered our (only) illustrated sex manual, they had a blast - but there is a filter on the internet, and kids can't use the computers until they are at least 10 anyway. To be fair, though, the filter has not yet bothered my surfing, so I doubt anyone who wasn't looking for trouble would have a problem.
libraries are one place I can see this being an advantage. If patrons want to look up a particular article, the library (or other organization who might have members searching for news) can pay a one-time fee for a big chunk of access, instead of NYT having to figure out how many $3 articles need to be charged. It's got to simplify things from the NYT accounting angle.
What worried me was the line in the credits "The planet in Douglas Adams' head is inspired from Starship Titanic, copyright by [some corporation]." I mean, since when does Douglas Adams have to pay royalties to use something from a computer game he also thought up?
The best part of the movie was when the tape suddenly stopped and some soundtrack with horses and men shouting started playing to the blank screen . . . the even better part was that the majority of the theater recognized it as the soundtrack to The Two Towers. First night at a nerdy movie is something one should never miss.
at least in Duke's case, only one student tried, but the Duke scenario says there was only one person who tried, and that Duke kept their admissions decisions away from ApplyYourself anyway. From the article:
"We are backslapping with our IT people today," Jim Gray, associate dean of marketing and communications at Fuqua, said Friday. "We're congratulating them on that today."
Orbitz Low Fare Promise
If you book an airline ticket on Orbitz.com and then find a lower airfare for the same flights, dates, airline and travelers on another Web site, you may be entitled to a $50 coupon per ticket toward your next Orbitz purchase.
* The fare must be at least $5 less per ticket than the airfare purchased on Orbitz.com.
* The lower total airfare may not include Web site service, booking, processing, shipping, paper-ticket or other fees.
********* You must provide the complete Web address (URL) where you found the lower airfare.
SO . . . they want you to deep-link to someone else's site, but not to theirs?
Slashdot Mirror
I dare you to pick five cities, of random size, and look up their library websites. I guarantee you at least four of them will be poorly laid out, with broken links, and at least one will have eye-bleeding banners in fantastic 1996 style. The fifth will be seamless, make sense, and (hopefully) work in multiple browsers. The fifth will be the one who had an actual webmaster, instead of "well Jill here is under 30 so she knows something about computers."
it's easy to say "well duh!", but when you have a brand-new out-of-the-box computer, it doesn't exactly come with instructions. My grandmother has no way of knowing she's supposed to be running a firewall, or going to get a Microsoft Security update before doing anything else. WE know these things, because we hang out on Slashdot, but they're not obvious to the rest of the world, and I applaud the BBC for bothering to put this in people's minds. Until the day Microsoft starts shipping Windows with firewalls INSTALLED and ON by default, articles like this will truly be helpful.
ajs318, meet the "print screen" command. Or my camera. Or your workplace's digital surveilence. If we have the technology to find everyone in the country's social network, then certainly security cameras will be everywhere, no? And some of them will be able to see computer screens? So if someone wanted to make a case, they would just have to get security footage of different people's screens and compare. And unless you expect all this security footage to be in a big database only accessible to Big Brother (in which case we're already sunk and democracy is the least of our problems), it wouldn't be difficult for an inquisitive newswriter (or student doing a project?) to get the data.
Unfortunately, college is the time most young adults learn time management skills. Which means a great many freshmen and sophomores don't have them yet. If you allowed them to access their entire course online, many students would wait until the last minute, try to cram all the lectures, and fail the final. This is bad for everyone - the students don't learn, the parents' money is wasted, the university can't offer classes that build on what the student should have learned, and the professor has to dumb down his class to the level that people *won't* fail out. You would see a lot more students failing out of college if we dumped them straight from high school into a "you're the only one responsible for learning so get to it, and we don't give you measurements to tell you if you're doing it right until your final grade" kind of environment.
Slackers exist, and probably always will. Students will procrastinate, then try to find the most effective way of passing a class with a week's worth of studying all crammed at the end. We just don't need to make it easier for them.
In addition to the lazy student issue, are the professors worried about losing copyright on their lectures if they're on the web for anyone to see? Most professors probably don't care, but I remember a few from my college days who would have never allowed it. Restricting access to the class only (give people passwords at the beginning of the semeseter?) would solve that issue. As for the rest, well, if you can time-restrict the lectures (only available for one week following the class, or the time you view them is logged for the professor to see if you're procrastinating), you'd probably stave off some of the problems your "good" students would have - the students who come to the lectures now because they should, but might be tempted to sleep a bit late, every week, and end up in over their head.
I knew a guy who could only log into the network while sitting down. If he was standing up when he tried to log in, no dice.
Turns out he touch typed while sitting, but had to look at the keyboard while standing - and since he "cleaned" his keyboard and put a few key tops back in the wrong places, he was mis-typing has password if he was standing up.
damn it, I downloaded that MP3, and my dog started going nuts!
For me, the monthly fees broke down like this: Cable TV (basic package): $45, and increasing by a few bucks every 2-3 months OR Netflix, 4 DVDs at a time, ordering my favorite TV shows: $25 World of Warcraft: $15 I have to admit, I play 30-40 hours of WoW a week, and when I'm not playing WoW I'm watching my Netflix shows. Being sick on my honeymoon a few weeks ago was kind of neat - I got to sit around in the hotel room all day and watch TV! Exciting! That said, I rarely buy new games that cost more than $20 anyway. I don't do the FPS genre, and I can very happily replay Pharaoh or SimCity or Sid Meyer's Pirates over and over if I don't feel like WoW.
this device would reinforce what the person with autism sees anyway (facial cues) with a discrete signal saying "yes this means the person is getting bored." If anything, this should HELP people with autism learn to better distinguish cues on their own - they're being constantly reinforced.
I'm guessing that for most people, including those with autism, 90% of the people you interact with daily are people you've interact with frequently (barring jobs where you work with the public). So if your coworker had autism and used one of these devices, you would probably learn what facial cues you can use to make sure your coworker saw you were bored - now, you would probably just avoid talking with them if they didn't notice you were bored or uncomfortable. By making it easier for everyone else around the person with autism to interact with them, this device would also give them more chances to work on their visual cues and interaction because other people would be willing to hold more conversations with the autistic person.
I just cancelled my cable. I'm slowly working my way through CSI, the Simpsons, and some of my other favorite shows via Netflix - why do I need overpriced cable again?
That said, the Daily Show was the one thing I realized I'd miss about cable. And now I can get my TV fix for ($10 for Daily Show) + ($18 for Netflix) = about $20 less than I was paying for very basic, TiVoless, 90-percent-commercials cable. Sounds good to me!
/me raises her hand
I like CSI, the Simpsons, and one or two other shows. I cancelled my cable because, quite frankly, it sucks and they just raised their rates. So I use Netflix primarily for TV show DVDs.
If I want to sit down for the evening, I can watch 4 episodes of CSI back-to-back (one disk). And then maybe one or two more, or I watch one over my lunch break, etc. So I can go through a disk a day, or a disk every two days. Except for some strange reason, the disks started not getting here when Netflix said they would, or the disks would take an extra day (or two or five) to ship. Add to that that about half the CSI disks so far have been cracked (all or partially unplayable), meaning I need to report them/send them back/wait for a replacement, and I'm pretty sure I'm on their throttle list.
I just upgraded my service, from 4/month to 3 at a time "unlimited" to 4 at a time "unlimited" - will they send me any more with 4-at-a-time than they did with 3?
this Brewster Jennings game is great for "real" map skills! Instead of showing kids "look, you can use a piece of paper to discover locations you already know and don't need a map for," I could see this being used as a classroom demonstration that in theory, all maps ARE connected. That's something that gets overlooked - maps show what you want them to show, for the segment of the earth you want them to show it - but now that we're not restricted to data "locked in" on paper, there is no reason kids shouldn't learn how a fluid map system works.
I'm a librarian, and a good deal of what I do is help first-time internet users figure out the net, set up email, etc.
I HATE those "you won an Xbox!" ads because people invariably CLICK on them, expecting something, and I have to explain how they didn't really win anything. EVERY TIME. Then they come up to me complaining the Internet broke and they didn't get their Xbox. *sigh*
more than that. These guys were at DragonCon a few weeks ago, and they assured the audience that now, by their 18th robot, they are *almost* done using Legos . . .
I just saw a bunch of the Adult Swim guys in a Q&A panel at DragonCon this weekend, and . . . yes, it does. There are some shows they've had before they just can't show again because they don't have the rights to them. Other shows they've made one season of, but can't or won't make more, so they'll just re-show what they already have. They do have some really cool new stuff coming up, though!
Ditto. I signed up for iTunes to get the "Numa Numa" song, and I've bought two other songs since (one I heard on NPR, and one I downloaded from Napster back in another life). I can't remember the last time I bought a CD.
BUT: this isn't because all music is crap. I may dislike most of the mainstream stuff, but there are some artists out there I'd love to listen to. I won't pay $18 for a CD, though, so I just don't listen to them.
Radio monopolies do suck. If I have to listen to the same 15 songs played over and over all day, I might as well play my own CDs (most of which I've had for 10 years and know by heart) and hear 15 songs I know I like. If I can't sample new music for free, either by hearing it on the radio or downloading it, I'm not buying new CDs. Period.
Bingo. I use Netflix because it's about the same price as Blockbuster for the amount I use it - I figure $3/movie for 4 movies/month is the $12 I pay. With Blockbuster, it's $3/movie plus an extra $10 after I turn it in because they "lost it" or "never got it in the computer," and the selection sucks. I like renting seasons of TV shows (Firefly, anyone?) and having the chance to watch them whenever I want. After Blockbuster "lost" my last 3 movies, I switched to Netflix and never looked back.
I am looking to buy several low-end desktops for my (small) library. I figured I'm probably best off doing something out-of-the-box, so I call Dell, Apple, and Gateway.
Dell: LONG phone tree, but I reach a really helpful guy who gets me what I want and sends me an email quote. The email was basically a long chart of the various features available and what prices they would add to upgrade.
Apple: short phone tree, but I have to talk with a hippie. Helpful, but not at all professional. Also sends me an email, but this consists of text like 40G/288Ghz/E/mes/10.1 . . . no explanations of what these numbers mean, if I didn't already know what was measured in Ghz and what was in K.
Gateway: four phone calls over two days got me four different individual's voicemails, and nobody called me back. I went to the "chat online" function and got a rep who gave me another number - another voicemail. Great. Tried to send feedback to the website that their service sucks, but it won't accept feedback without a purchase number, which I don't have because they won't talk to me. When I finally do get ahold of a rep, he wouldn't listen when I explained what I needed, and kept trying to upsell me to something more expensive. He said he'd send an email, but it hasn't come yet.
So who do you think is out of the running? If Gateway would have only talked to me, they would have probably gotten my business, but as it is I'm going to pay a bit more to go with a company that has a government & educational department that is a bit more with it.
dude, that just made my day. I'm not the only one!
I would assume that the individual published articles gave more quantitative information, like HOW MUCH more college students drink than they think they do (which would be useful in designing campaigns against alcohol poisoning on campus), how often and how precisely doctors and patients need to communicate about drug side effects (useful for standardizing medical requirements), or what temperatures start to affect typing (useful in just about any office going through a thermostat battle-of-the-sexes).
Ridiculing the articles may be interesting, but only a few of the examples struck me as completely frivalous.
I'm the branch manager at a small library, and no, minors can look at any nude pictures in books that they want to. The flip side is that they rarely know what to ask for :-) When the kids in my library discovered our (only) illustrated sex manual, they had a blast - but there is a filter on the internet, and kids can't use the computers until they are at least 10 anyway. To be fair, though, the filter has not yet bothered my surfing, so I doubt anyone who wasn't looking for trouble would have a problem.
libraries are one place I can see this being an advantage. If patrons want to look up a particular article, the library (or other organization who might have members searching for news) can pay a one-time fee for a big chunk of access, instead of NYT having to figure out how many $3 articles need to be charged. It's got to simplify things from the NYT accounting angle.
What worried me was the line in the credits "The planet in Douglas Adams' head is inspired from Starship Titanic, copyright by [some corporation]." I mean, since when does Douglas Adams have to pay royalties to use something from a computer game he also thought up?
The best part of the movie was when the tape suddenly stopped and some soundtrack with horses and men shouting started playing to the blank screen . . . the even better part was that the majority of the theater recognized it as the soundtrack to The Two Towers. First night at a nerdy movie is something one should never miss.
at least in Duke's case, only one student tried, but the Duke scenario says there was only one person who tried, and that Duke kept their admissions decisions away from ApplyYourself anyway. From the article:
"We are backslapping with our IT people today," Jim Gray, associate dean of marketing and communications at Fuqua, said Friday. "We're congratulating them on that today."
Orbitz Low Fare Promise If you book an airline ticket on Orbitz.com and then find a lower airfare for the same flights, dates, airline and travelers on another Web site, you may be entitled to a $50 coupon per ticket toward your next Orbitz purchase. * The fare must be at least $5 less per ticket than the airfare purchased on Orbitz.com. * The lower total airfare may not include Web site service, booking, processing, shipping, paper-ticket or other fees. ********* You must provide the complete Web address (URL) where you found the lower airfare. SO . . . they want you to deep-link to someone else's site, but not to theirs?