An alternative: tell them to choose "Open Location" from the File menu (it exists by that name in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on a Mac at least), type the address, and press Return. Maybe finding a menu option will be easier for them than the address bar. (On a Mac, Command-L is the shortcut for those three browsers; presumably it's Control-L on Windows. Don't know about IE or Opera.)
This is my thought too: someone who types very slowly (without a physical handicap) is probably someone who hasn't spent a lot of time at a keyboard. The converse isn't necessarily true, though; 100-WPM secretaries aren't all natural programmers.
I know that programming (and specifically, typing in BASIC programs out of magazines) was where I learned to type. By the time I took a typing class in school in 9th grade, I was too good at my own "blind typing" method to bother with that home-row business. Of course, kids don't type programs in from magazines anymore, and today's computers are much less dependent on the keyboard than my old Commodores, so maybe I'm making an old-fogie assumption.
Just checked: the Z key's behavior is duplicated by the space bar, so you can play the whole game with the cursor keys, the space bar, and the shift keys. Not too bad.
I have to ask one question: you've played to the third world, but have you gotten all the puzzle pieces in those three worlds? It's not hard to simply progress in Braid, going from one end of the scene to the other, and I can easily imagine someone sitting down to play, making it from door to door, getting to the third world and thinking "Hey, this is easy!", completely missing the point that those puzzle pieces aren't bonus stars, they're the whole point of the game. If that describes you at all, then go back and try it again. If it doesn't, then I won't argue with your subjective analysis.
For myself, I don't usually have a taste for video games, but I love Braid.
It's what used to be called having a friend over to play. New name for today's more regimented child rearing.
Or rather, for families with busier schedules. In the past, a kid might be able to drop by another kid's house outside of school hours and have a good chance of finding them there or nearby. Now they're as likely to be in daycare (if they're younger) or at extracurricular activities (if they're older).
Hogwash. I was programming in Commodore BASIC when I was 8 or 9. Not a great language, but I learned all about variables, loops, random numbers, arrays, and a number of other important programming concepts, and I learned a love for making the computer do what I told it to do. Once I got to college I took a course in Pascal and learned how to do structured programming, and I haven't had an urge to write GOTO since. I'm not a professional programmer, but as a physicist and hobbyist I write programs in C++, Tcl/Tk, Perl, awk, and bash script on a regular basis.
Not that I'd start a kid off on BASIC today, but it's not the life-ruiner that you make it out to be. I'm sorry that you couldn't get beyond it, but personally I don't know where I would be today if it weren't for that flashing cursor on my Vic-20, just begging me to type something in.
Mod this up. This could actually be seen as civil disobedience on the part of the University: they're pissed by laws requiring them to police their networks, which they think is a waste of time and money, so they dump it onto the local police instead. It's a lot easier to argue against a law that wastes POLICE resources, rather than one that wastes University resources.
1) This isn't new; Safari already has an advantage because it is packaged with the OS. 2) Safari is automatically updated via Software Update, along with other Apple apps. App Store not required. 3) A lot of third-party browsers already have automatic updating software which is slick enough for me (I'm thinking about the programs which notice an update on launch, download and install it in the background, and then give you a button to relaunch.) I don't know how Opera works these days, but if someone cares enough about their browser to go seek out Opera, then updating should pose no barrier.
I am a college professor, so let me point out the obvious. 1) Good teaching requires experience and talent: just because you're a professional engineer or doctor or whatever doesn't mean you can teach your subject well. 2) Good teaching is a full-time job. When I talk to people who are going to teach for the first time, even if it's a single course, I tell them not to expect to get anything else done during that semester, because it will take over your life. It gets easier, but it's not something to do in your spare time. (Maybe he's imagining a larger number of teachers teaching fewer courses, but then see point #1.)
Trying to relegate teaching to hobby or avocation status is ridiculous, unless you're imagining a future where everybody works for free, a la Asimov or communism or something. If anything, universities already have too many classes taught by researchers who have no talent for teaching.
So what, we'll all be using the same desktop OS's forever? Fifty years from now it'll still be Mac vs. Windows?
This is the tech industry: things change all the time. Who knows what will be the dominant OS in the future: maybe it's still Windows, maybe it's Linux, maybe it's iOS, maybe it's something that hasn't been invented yet. Until then, Linux or its descendants will always be around, which is pretty good for something that's "dead".
Hopefully before then they'll start using the constellation forms in H.A. Rey's The Stars; I really don't understand why so many references still use the shapeless randomly-connect-the-dots versions. Is it a copyright issue, maybe?
Isn't the point of steganography that you add the encrypted data on top of some other data, like a photograph or video, so that it looks like normal noise? I agree that carrying a thumb drive around, filled with random 0s and 1s, would be rather suspicious....
How do you manage version control? Do you use a program for it, or do you do it by hand? And are you working alone, or in a group? (Most systems are geared for multiple users and some check-in server, as I understand it, which would be severe overkill for me.)
When I was a grad student, my advisor (who was not really a computer person) wanted me to do hydrodynamic simulations for my dissertation. Now, there has been 50 years of research in how to model fluids on a computer, and there are many pitfalls, but I didn't know that and neither did he, so we started from scratch: basic forward-Euler equations, simplest thing you could think of. And the result was a mess: mass would disappear, velocities would increase exponentially at times, and the data was untrustworthy. It was only by talking to other professors, who had more experience with simulation, that I learned about Runge-Kutta and other things which improved my code at least a little bit, and managed to graduate.
The moral of the story: don't rely entirely on your advisor. Talk to other people in your department and outside your department (Comp. Sci. or Math, for instance) about what you're doing and get their advice. And if the simulations you're doing are nontrivial, learn how to write those simulations: take classes, read papers, have people look over your code from time to time. But don't try to figure it out as you go, lest you end up with months or years of worthless data and wasted time.
I'm in a different boat from most commenters here, I think, because I am a scientist writing simulations; some simluations run a long time and create a lot of data which would be costly to reproduce, and what I wish someone had told me early on was that I should comment my *data files*, not just my code. Each file should include the exact parameters used to create it, an explanation of what each column represents, and preferably there should be a way of knowing what version of your simulation code was used to create it. A couple of times in grad school I had toss out months of data after I discovered a bug in my code, and didn't know when the bug showed up and which data was affected by it.
(I'd welcome other advice from simulationists too; I've never had an advisor who was particularly programming-savvy, even though programming was always a large part of my research, and so I always had to make it up as I went along.)
I'd be quite happy to have "gun control" standards applied to prostitution and drugs: make them legal, and regulate them to curb the worst excesses. Mind you, I have no personal experience of any of the three (well OK, I've shot a BB gun at Scout camp), but it seems to me that prostitution would be a lot safer if prostitutes could unionize, file grievances against their employers, etc; and safer for johns too, if prostitutes were "licensed" with regular checkups and a public identity to sue in cases of fraud.
I may be wrong, but I believe that publishers do more to a document than just open it up with Word: they extract figures, titles, what have you. If they were equipped to handle RTF files then they would certainly say so; if they aren't, then renaming an RTF file probably isn't going to cut it with them. (Maybe for initial review.)
I thank goodness I'm in physics and can submit in LaTeX.:)
I think the point is that there's not a lot of history of the same product in the same medium being provided in ad-supported AND ad-free versions; doesn't mean there aren't alternatives. History would suggest that once ads start showing up on e-books, they will take over, and it will be difficult to buy an e-book without them. (Don't know your age, but those of us who remember when all cable TV was commercial-free are perhaps a little bitter about how advertising crept back in.) But maybe things are changing: I suspect that people have become more sensitive to advertising and its pros and cons given the rise of the web (popups and adblockers and businesses whose only revenue stream is advertising), and of course it's easy to provide multiple versions of the same product when that product is electronic, so maybe things will change. They can look to the Apple Store for a model: maybe we'll be able to get the "Lite" ad-supported version of the next Stephen King e-novel for free, and upgrade it later to the full ad-free version.
I wouldn't really classify the iPad as a tablet computer, any more than I would classify the iPod Touch as a handheld computer; but your definition may vary of course. In any case, Apple clearly has two distinct lines of products-- the Mac line and the iPhone/iPod/iPad line-- for two different markets, and it's not at all obvious that one will replace the other. Certainly, as a physicist who does a lot of programming, an iPad would be useless to me as a primary computer, and switching Macs to an iPad model would cut them off from the portion of the market that includes me. I can easily envision them releasing a new "iBook" on the iPad model, but it would be a new product, not a replacement for the MacBooks.
IMHO of course.
(Like how you linked to the iPad website as if I hadn't heard of it before.:)
I only wondered how long it might take Apple to lock it down so it can only run software that's been approved by Apple.
Sheer speculation: laptops are very different from phones. Given Apple's move to the Intel architecture and the introduction of Boot Camp, their computer division is even moving away from lockdown, since you're not even locked into using their OS anymore.
As for being locked down in general, do please point me to non-Apple hardware that will run Mac OS X without first having to defeat the operating system's protections against running it on non-Apple hardware.
That's also a different issue: software lockdown instead of hardware lockdown.
Plus everyone is exposed to Windows at some point or another; I've owned Macs exclusively for 13 years and I can still basically find my way around a Windows box (though not easily) because they are more ubiquitous; a typical Windows user, on the other hand, is more likely to have never had to use a Mac or Unix system.
(Just extending the point; I don't know if that's a good reason to use a Mac. While I like Macs myself, I am quite familiar with their flaws, and I know so little about Windows that I can't honestly compare. The need for virus protection and the lack of a builtin Unix-like command-line are enough to keep me away from Windows, but tastes vary.)
I wonder if it is illegal for a private citizen to plant a GPS tracker on my car. If so, are there specific laws prohibiting tracking devices, or does it fall under some broader statute like trespassing or vandalism or the like.
Slashdot Mirror
An alternative: tell them to choose "Open Location" from the File menu (it exists by that name in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on a Mac at least), type the address, and press Return. Maybe finding a menu option will be easier for them than the address bar. (On a Mac, Command-L is the shortcut for those three browsers; presumably it's Control-L on Windows. Don't know about IE or Opera.)
This is my thought too: someone who types very slowly (without a physical handicap) is probably someone who hasn't spent a lot of time at a keyboard. The converse isn't necessarily true, though; 100-WPM secretaries aren't all natural programmers.
I know that programming (and specifically, typing in BASIC programs out of magazines) was where I learned to type. By the time I took a typing class in school in 9th grade, I was too good at my own "blind typing" method to bother with that home-row business. Of course, kids don't type programs in from magazines anymore, and today's computers are much less dependent on the keyboard than my old Commodores, so maybe I'm making an old-fogie assumption.
Just checked: the Z key's behavior is duplicated by the space bar, so you can play the whole game with the cursor keys, the space bar, and the shift keys. Not too bad.
I have to ask one question: you've played to the third world, but have you gotten all the puzzle pieces in those three worlds? It's not hard to simply progress in Braid, going from one end of the scene to the other, and I can easily imagine someone sitting down to play, making it from door to door, getting to the third world and thinking "Hey, this is easy!", completely missing the point that those puzzle pieces aren't bonus stars, they're the whole point of the game. If that describes you at all, then go back and try it again. If it doesn't, then I won't argue with your subjective analysis.
For myself, I don't usually have a taste for video games, but I love Braid.
The full Mac version of Braid is also hard to find, which is the reason I bought the bundle.
It's what used to be called having a friend over to play. New name for today's more regimented child rearing.
Or rather, for families with busier schedules. In the past, a kid might be able to drop by another kid's house outside of school hours and have a good chance of finding them there or nearby. Now they're as likely to be in daycare (if they're younger) or at extracurricular activities (if they're older).
Hogwash. I was programming in Commodore BASIC when I was 8 or 9. Not a great language, but I learned all about variables, loops, random numbers, arrays, and a number of other important programming concepts, and I learned a love for making the computer do what I told it to do. Once I got to college I took a course in Pascal and learned how to do structured programming, and I haven't had an urge to write GOTO since. I'm not a professional programmer, but as a physicist and hobbyist I write programs in C++, Tcl/Tk, Perl, awk, and bash script on a regular basis.
Not that I'd start a kid off on BASIC today, but it's not the life-ruiner that you make it out to be. I'm sorry that you couldn't get beyond it, but personally I don't know where I would be today if it weren't for that flashing cursor on my Vic-20, just begging me to type something in.
Mod this up. This could actually be seen as civil disobedience on the part of the University: they're pissed by laws requiring them to police their networks, which they think is a waste of time and money, so they dump it onto the local police instead. It's a lot easier to argue against a law that wastes POLICE resources, rather than one that wastes University resources.
I wonder... will people be able to sell apps through the App Store AND their own websites at the same time. At different prices?
1) This isn't new; Safari already has an advantage because it is packaged with the OS.
2) Safari is automatically updated via Software Update, along with other Apple apps. App Store not required.
3) A lot of third-party browsers already have automatic updating software which is slick enough for me (I'm thinking about the programs which notice an update on launch, download and install it in the background, and then give you a button to relaunch.) I don't know how Opera works these days, but if someone cares enough about their browser to go seek out Opera, then updating should pose no barrier.
I am a college professor, so let me point out the obvious.
1) Good teaching requires experience and talent: just because you're a professional engineer or doctor or whatever doesn't mean you can teach your subject well.
2) Good teaching is a full-time job. When I talk to people who are going to teach for the first time, even if it's a single course, I tell them not to expect to get anything else done during that semester, because it will take over your life. It gets easier, but it's not something to do in your spare time. (Maybe he's imagining a larger number of teachers teaching fewer courses, but then see point #1.)
Trying to relegate teaching to hobby or avocation status is ridiculous, unless you're imagining a future where everybody works for free, a la Asimov or communism or something. If anything, universities already have too many classes taught by researchers who have no talent for teaching.
So what, we'll all be using the same desktop OS's forever? Fifty years from now it'll still be Mac vs. Windows?
This is the tech industry: things change all the time. Who knows what will be the dominant OS in the future: maybe it's still Windows, maybe it's Linux, maybe it's iOS, maybe it's something that hasn't been invented yet. Until then, Linux or its descendants will always be around, which is pretty good for something that's "dead".
Hopefully before then they'll start using the constellation forms in H.A. Rey's The Stars ; I really don't understand why so many references still use the shapeless randomly-connect-the-dots versions. Is it a copyright issue, maybe?
Isn't the point of steganography that you add the encrypted data on top of some other data, like a photograph or video, so that it looks like normal noise? I agree that carrying a thumb drive around, filled with random 0s and 1s, would be rather suspicious....
How do you manage version control? Do you use a program for it, or do you do it by hand? And are you working alone, or in a group? (Most systems are geared for multiple users and some check-in server, as I understand it, which would be severe overkill for me.)
When I was a grad student, my advisor (who was not really a computer person) wanted me to do hydrodynamic simulations for my dissertation. Now, there has been 50 years of research in how to model fluids on a computer, and there are many pitfalls, but I didn't know that and neither did he, so we started from scratch: basic forward-Euler equations, simplest thing you could think of. And the result was a mess: mass would disappear, velocities would increase exponentially at times, and the data was untrustworthy. It was only by talking to other professors, who had more experience with simulation, that I learned about Runge-Kutta and other things which improved my code at least a little bit, and managed to graduate.
The moral of the story: don't rely entirely on your advisor. Talk to other people in your department and outside your department (Comp. Sci. or Math, for instance) about what you're doing and get their advice. And if the simulations you're doing are nontrivial, learn how to write those simulations: take classes, read papers, have people look over your code from time to time. But don't try to figure it out as you go, lest you end up with months or years of worthless data and wasted time.
I'm in a different boat from most commenters here, I think, because I am a scientist writing simulations; some simluations run a long time and create a lot of data which would be costly to reproduce, and what I wish someone had told me early on was that I should comment my *data files*, not just my code. Each file should include the exact parameters used to create it, an explanation of what each column represents, and preferably there should be a way of knowing what version of your simulation code was used to create it. A couple of times in grad school I had toss out months of data after I discovered a bug in my code, and didn't know when the bug showed up and which data was affected by it.
(I'd welcome other advice from simulationists too; I've never had an advisor who was particularly programming-savvy, even though programming was always a large part of my research, and so I always had to make it up as I went along.)
I'd be quite happy to have "gun control" standards applied to prostitution and drugs: make them legal, and regulate them to curb the worst excesses. Mind you, I have no personal experience of any of the three (well OK, I've shot a BB gun at Scout camp), but it seems to me that prostitution would be a lot safer if prostitutes could unionize, file grievances against their employers, etc; and safer for johns too, if prostitutes were "licensed" with regular checkups and a public identity to sue in cases of fraud.
I may be wrong, but I believe that publishers do more to a document than just open it up with Word: they extract figures, titles, what have you. If they were equipped to handle RTF files then they would certainly say so; if they aren't, then renaming an RTF file probably isn't going to cut it with them. (Maybe for initial review.)
I thank goodness I'm in physics and can submit in LaTeX. :)
"And leave off the last N for Nutjob!"
I think the point is that there's not a lot of history of the same product in the same medium being provided in ad-supported AND ad-free versions; doesn't mean there aren't alternatives. History would suggest that once ads start showing up on e-books, they will take over, and it will be difficult to buy an e-book without them. (Don't know your age, but those of us who remember when all cable TV was commercial-free are perhaps a little bitter about how advertising crept back in.) But maybe things are changing: I suspect that people have become more sensitive to advertising and its pros and cons given the rise of the web (popups and adblockers and businesses whose only revenue stream is advertising), and of course it's easy to provide multiple versions of the same product when that product is electronic, so maybe things will change. They can look to the Apple Store for a model: maybe we'll be able to get the "Lite" ad-supported version of the next Stephen King e-novel for free, and upgrade it later to the full ad-free version.
I wouldn't really classify the iPad as a tablet computer, any more than I would classify the iPod Touch as a handheld computer; but your definition may vary of course. In any case, Apple clearly has two distinct lines of products-- the Mac line and the iPhone/iPod/iPad line-- for two different markets, and it's not at all obvious that one will replace the other. Certainly, as a physicist who does a lot of programming, an iPad would be useless to me as a primary computer, and switching Macs to an iPad model would cut them off from the portion of the market that includes me. I can easily envision them releasing a new "iBook" on the iPad model, but it would be a new product, not a replacement for the MacBooks.
IMHO of course.
(Like how you linked to the iPad website as if I hadn't heard of it before. :)
Sheer speculation: laptops are very different from phones. Given Apple's move to the Intel architecture and the introduction of Boot Camp, their computer division is even moving away from lockdown, since you're not even locked into using their OS anymore.
That's also a different issue: software lockdown instead of hardware lockdown.
Plus everyone is exposed to Windows at some point or another; I've owned Macs exclusively for 13 years and I can still basically find my way around a Windows box (though not easily) because they are more ubiquitous; a typical Windows user, on the other hand, is more likely to have never had to use a Mac or Unix system.
(Just extending the point; I don't know if that's a good reason to use a Mac. While I like Macs myself, I am quite familiar with their flaws, and I know so little about Windows that I can't honestly compare. The need for virus protection and the lack of a builtin Unix-like command-line are enough to keep me away from Windows, but tastes vary.)
I wonder if it is illegal for a private citizen to plant a GPS tracker on my car. If so, are there specific laws prohibiting tracking devices, or does it fall under some broader statute like trespassing or vandalism or the like.
I have no idea what that's supposed to be. And I appreciate it. :)