Shortly after the Vincennes shot down that Iranian airliner, I heard a wierd rumor that the thing had been staged by by Iran to embarass the United States and draw attention from their (losing) war with Iraq. Supposedly, the airliner's 290 passengers were really dead bodies from a recent battle during the Persian Gulf War. The Iranians supposedly loaded them on that plane and ordered its pilots to fly close to American fleet which was on maneuvers in the Persian Gulf at the time. They did just that and the Vincennes shot the plane down. Seriously wierd stuff.
I'm on Dvorak's side on this one. There have to be a dozen guys in the computer arena that are more deserving of man of the year status than Bezos is and Gates and Jobs are two of them.
There is nothing unique about Amazon, it just has better PR than other e-commerce companies. There are other e-commerce companies out there that are as old as Amazon, even if they are not as big. Note that I didn't say successful. Amazon has yet to turn a profit, so it can't really be considered successful. Bezos has also done his part to harm e-commerce by jumping on the stupid patent, stupid lawsuit bandwagon.
Like him or not, Gates managed to turn an operating system into a deadly weapon. This is real influence, even if it is bad. The DoJ lawsuit against Microsoft alone could potentially affect the way we use computers for years to come. (If so, would this make Judge Jackson a man of the year candidate?).
Jobs took a company that had spent a decade bent on committing corporate suicide and made it stop slashing its wrists long enough to start putting out fast, useful computers.
Why would anybody bet the farm on a loosing product , I have no idea. Sometimes I think some companies would do anything (like loose money) just to partern with MS. This might just be an example of monopoly power in action, who knows?
It's probably more a case of, "I can bleed longer than you can." These companies know that Microsoft can afford to throw money at something indefinitely. And they are aware of its track record of ruthlessly crushing the competition. So WinCE is a safe bet for MS acolytes. They can take their shot and bail out without losing too much money. And in the end, Microsoft probably owes them a favor.
Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft's shoes have conveyed to every hair with the potential to smite in the crap industry. Through its conduct toward Netscape, Microsoft, Compaq, Oracle, and others, Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense socks to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's gay products. Microsoft's past success in hurting such knives and stifling innovation deters investment in technologies and guns that exhibit the potential to shoot Microsoft. The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit porn never occur for the sole reason that they do not strike with Microsoft's belly.
Yeah, like those £300 `personal appliances` or whatever they`re called, like the palm pilot etc, which have about the same level of functionality as a pen and paper (£0.50), only with the ever-exciting risk of losing all your phone numbers and schedules when you drop it/battery runs out etc....never understood that. Am i missing something?
Yes, convenience and efficiency.
You need a lot of pens and paper to hold the amount of information I keep in my Palm Pilot. I keep simple, Excel compatible spreadsheets in mine. This allows me to consolidate a myriad of paper books. I can keep my phonebook, checkbook, notes, memos, novels, calculators, conversion tables, and alarm clocks in a box that is about the size of a stack of 3" by 5" cards.
I can also keep all of my passwords encrypted. Try doing that with a dead tree notepad.
Ever read Slashdot while riding a car or a bus? I have thanks to AvantGo.
I dropped and broke my Palm III a week after I got it. I didn't lose a single phone number or appointment because it syncs with my computer every night.
I originally bought my Palm III for $254.00 American. I recently upgraded to a Visor Deluxe for about the same price. I'm not up on the current exchange rates but I think that's about £170. This is considerably less than what you think they cost and there are cheaper models available. As far as I'm concerned, they are worth every penny.
I use Windows 95 at work and it crashes about one to three times a week for me. Individual applications (both MS and third party) crash much more frequently, often daily, sometimes several time a day. This is usually caused by the application itself of course. But too often, a poorly written app can take Windows down with it or leave it impaired (usually by making it slow down) in some way. When I run several apps at a time, especially resource hungry MS Office apps, a crash is more likely. When an MS Office app crashes it usally takes the ability of all MS Office apps to print away until I restart Windows.
Windows 9x does tend to be a little messy with its system resources and this causes instability. It does include a handy resource monitor which I run so I'll know when I need to restart Windows and this keeps it from slowing down too much and from crashing too frequently.
This isn't fantasy, it's reality. Note that I'm talking about Windows 95 and 98 here, not NT. That's a completely different story.
I think that a lack of signatures would hardly make your company "commie". Besides, to make such brash political allegations about Microsoft would have to mean that they all get paid the same, and i KNOW that ain't true
I'm talking about the appearence from a PR standpoint. Here you have a story on how Apple is eliminating a harmless little concession to the individuality of its employees. Then the author sticks in a quote from an MS spokesperson where he says that MS already does this and the quote implies that Microsoft takes a collectivist attitude towards its workers. A lot of Americans (myself included) tend to associate collectivism with communism. It's just a matter of perception, not a political allegation.
HP put out a couple of really low end, Windows only laser printers a couple of years back that had no off switch.
A sheetfed Logitech scanner is sitting on my desk without an off switch. As soon as my computer powers up, it's on. If something goes wrong and it can't scan I have to shut down my computer and start it up again. The moral of this little story? The off switch is your friend -- especially if you're stuck with Windows.
I was getting set to contradict you until I reread the article. What a bonehead spokesbot! Microsoft has always had credits and easter eggs and this wuss makes his own company look like a bunch of soulless commie robots for a story that has nothing to do with them! Is it any wonder that they botched their own anti-trust trial so badly with the fake videotape and Bill Gates' limp testimony?
No wonder Windows crashes so much. Like the rest of Microsoft, it's suicidal. At least now they have Apple to keep them company.
Re:About mouse usage with keyboard
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 1
Just the other day I witnessed someone who used his mouse with his foot. He had both of his hands at the keyboard and (quite effectively) moved in the X-environment with his foot...
That just about proves it; Dilbert was right. Computing and evolution have conspired to make monkeys the superior race. In the future all the high paying jobs will be staffed by super-intelligent monkeys who can manipulate the mouse with their tails while keeping both hands on the keyboard. Humans will be kept in zoos, reduced to flinging feces at their monkey overlords.
Brilliant as he was, Disney never foresaw or imagined the Net, the Web or the Digital Age.
Internet the Ride!
It revolutionized the way we communicate. Now it's the world's ultimate thrill ride!
Marvel as you fly through the T3 pipe at blazing speeds! Feel your stomach churn as you hit the 56KB bottleneck. Sit back and enjoy the show as Microsoft battles all comers in a battle for the very soul of the Internet! Lose yourself in the maze of Usenet and IRC. Wander through the Hall of pr0n (seperate admission, adults only). Experience the thrill of watching as server after server is brought down by the dreaded Slashdot Effect!
Bigger than than Steve Jobs' ego, faster than the Linux development cycle, scarier than debugging Windows 2000, wilder than a steel cage death match between Richard M. Stallman and Eric S. Raymond it's Internet the Ride!
I own a Palm III and have ordered Visor (it hasn't arrived yet). It's hard to say how much "pressure" is being placed on Palm by Handspring and the other clones. My definition of pressure may not be the same as yours (unless we're talking force divided by surface area of course). Palm devices have been dropping in price since Handspring arrived on the scene however. I recently saw the Palm IIIx at Buy.com for $259, just a little more than the Visor deluxe but with half the memory.
And is the Handspring COMPLETELY code-compatible?
The Handspring Visor series runs PalmOS 3.1, the same as the Palm IIIx and Palm V. Its ROM is not flash-upgradeable however. So it can't use software like FlashPro to store memory in ROM that isn't being taken up by the OS.
Another issue is that Palm recently released Palm OS 3.3 which must be installed in flash ROM, so the Visor can't be upgraded to this version of the OS. But Palm usually releases upgrades to its OS in RAM anyway. So this might not be as much of a handicap as one would think.
Upcoming... palms with tactile feedback?
Hanspring and the initial reviews of the Visor claim its buttons have very nice tactile feedback.
As good as this news seems, I have to wonder where the Palm platform is headed in terms of expandability. I just ordered a Visor Deluxe with the Springboard expansion slot to replace my Palm III. Then along comes the TRGPro with Compact Flash. Now we've got Sony (PalmMan?) with the memory stick.
That's three, count 'em three, incompatible standards for one computing platform. The Springboard module is bigger than CF so you can make a CF to Springboard adapter.
But what about the memory stick? Granted its supposed to be as small as a stick of gum. So you could probably squeeze it onto the same device as a Springboard or CF slot but we're talking about a device that's the size of a deck of cards here. There just isn't much room for expansion slots.
So you're going to have the situation where one technology will catch on and the others will fall by the wayside. If you bet on the wrong one, you wind up with a hand held Beta VCR. That's a bit of an exageration since you could still use the device as an organizer and handheld computer, just like the Palm Pilot. And it will still run rings aroung WinCE in terms of usability.
I would guess that the memory stick will die out as a technology. It only seems good enough for, well memory while CF and the Springboard are much more versatile.
Microsoft isn't going to just shrivel up and die just because it lost a single court case, Jon's rhetoric not withstanding. Windows is still the most popular OS in the world. It will continue to generate profits for MS for years. Microsoft is still very much alive despite the ruling. Think of how hard it is to keep Dracula dead and you get an idea of how hard it will be to eliminate MS once and for all.
Finally, has anyone ever considered that the best favor the DoJ could do for MS is to break it up? The combined value of AT&T and the Baby Bells today dwarfs the value of the original Ma Bell that was broken up in the early eighties. The combined value of the "Baby Bills" could someday dwarf the current value of Microsoft.
A lot of the crap that has gotten built into Windows was put in to support other products that couldn't compete on their own merits. Internet Explorer springs immediately to mind. Without the burden of having to support Office, IE, and the rest of the MS stable, "Windows Inc." could give its code some much overdo cleaning.
With the days of having to bundle kernel and shell updates with their browser over, "InterGates" could ship a leaner and meaner IE 6.0.
Why would "OfficeSoft" bundle all of its apps in one high priced suite when it could sell them seperately at a low prices? You might even see its apps running on new platforms. Excel for Linux? Visual C++ for Solaris? If MS gets broken up they might become realities.
Three companies for the price of one. That MS stock is starting to look better and better. Just sell off your stock in the company that gets all the bad karma after the big break up.
Something's not right here, as several have pointed out. A crappy essay receives a 100% "outstanding" grade.
[snip]
As several others have pointed out, it was a scary story not an essay so the grammatical standards should be a little lower. Still the story isn't an outstanding one. If he was going to deliberately use bad grammar and spelling, the boy should have prefaced or ended the story with a few lines that let the reader know that they are reading the ramblings of a psycho instead of a narrated tale. "My name is so and so. This is the confession."
Hypothesis Two: If you're paranoid, you'll love this. The teacher was disturbed by the contents of the note. To play along with and placate the student, she gives him the best possible grade and overacts her enjoyment of the story. She then later turns him in, after he's left.
If this is the case, the teacher will not face disciplanary action, and will probably be held up as an example of how to act under these circumstances in the educational circles.
I am and I do. In this case, then the teacher isn't fit to teach since she is unable to deal with the assignment that she herself handed out.
I also wonder if this assignment wasn't meant as a test to root out potential trouble-makers. Assign a story then give the kid's stories to a school shrink and have him determine if any of the kids are potential evil doers. The teacher hears this story, decides she's struck pay dirt and puts your hypothesis two into effect.
This has made me remember something from grade school - sing along with me!
[snip]
Hmmm - should I be in prison???
Yes. It's obvious that you are an unstable Neo-Nazi, Doom playing, trenchcoat mafia guy who plays his Marylin Manson and Rammstein CDs backwards looking for bomb-making instructions. Expect a visit from a fully armed SWAT team and an exorcism by your parish priest soon.
See, everyone knew it was wrong. Instead of crying, it was wrong, it was obvious, lets find out why they believed a sit-down wouldn't be enough, and deal with that problem.
It was an assignment. The teacher wanted a scary story and got a scary story. Maybe if somebody had discovered this story stashed away in the kid's notebook or published on a personal website, there might have been cause for concern and a parent teacher meeting. Then counseling if the child was deemed to be unstable.
But to throw a child in jail for doing what he was told to do by his teacher is a travesty. This constitutes entrapment pure and simple.
Besides, did you notice how poorly written that supposedly, "perfect 100% plus extra credit for reading it aloud" story was? Maybe if teachers weren't so busy trying to entrap kids into revealing themselves as potential Eric Harrises or Dylan Kleybolds, they might have time to actually teach their kids proper spelling and grammer.
Take a classroom of about 20 students (wishful thinking considering school overcrowding I know). Add a PC with four Palm cradles and a Palm III for each kid. Send the kids out on a field trip to gather data. Have them hotsync when they get back and play around with said data. You can set up some pretty nifty projects this way.
I don't see much of a problem. There are no known Palm OS virii or trojans much less virii or trojans that are smart enough to infect multiple platforms. Schools already have a much more serious threat in Word macro viruses that students can infect the school computers with by e-mailing Word documents (or by transporting them on floppy disks). This screws up far more computers than some exotic cross-platform hack that an aspiring young Kevin Mitnick could come up with.
As much as I love my little Palm III, I don't think I'll ever be able to bring down a network with it. Well, I might be able to telnet into the school's server using my Palm III and a modem but I could do that with an old Commodore 64.
Nazi Germany was a pretty dark period in our history. So was the American Civil War (for us Americans anyway). Both periods have been subjects of compelling games in the past because they were compelling times.
Why shouldn't the Nazi era be a subject for computer games? Have we become so politically correct and morally relativistic that we can't even condemn attitudes and behavior that are certifiably evil like the wholesale genocides carried out by the Nazi's in WWII?
I look back at all my "WW-II" and "cold-war" games and wonder if perhaps they should be let to die in peace.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
"Spock's Brain" was a camp classic. Even when TOS sucked, it was fun to watch it suck. When Voyager screws up an episode (which is often), it's just sad.
This was first thing I thought of when the idea of choosing your computer's personality came up. I'll bet that when these personalities come out, they'll be so lame that no one will use them.
Slashdot Mirror
Shortly after the Vincennes shot down that Iranian airliner, I heard a wierd rumor that the thing had been staged by by Iran to embarass the United States and draw attention from their (losing) war with Iraq. Supposedly, the airliner's 290 passengers were really dead bodies from a recent battle during the Persian Gulf War. The Iranians supposedly loaded them on that plane and ordered its pilots to fly close to American fleet which was on maneuvers in the Persian Gulf at the time. They did just that and the Vincennes shot the plane down. Seriously wierd stuff.
I'm on Dvorak's side on this one. There have to be a dozen guys in the computer arena that are more deserving of man of the year status than Bezos is and Gates and Jobs are two of them.
There is nothing unique about Amazon, it just has better PR than other e-commerce companies. There are other e-commerce companies out there that are as old as Amazon, even if they are not as big. Note that I didn't say successful. Amazon has yet to turn a profit, so it can't really be considered successful. Bezos has also done his part to harm e-commerce by jumping on the stupid patent, stupid lawsuit bandwagon.
Like him or not, Gates managed to turn an operating system into a deadly weapon. This is real influence, even if it is bad. The DoJ lawsuit against Microsoft alone could potentially affect the way we use computers for years to come. (If so, would this make Judge Jackson a man of the year candidate?).
Jobs took a company that had spent a decade bent on committing corporate suicide and made it stop slashing its wrists long enough to start putting out fast, useful computers.
Why would anybody bet the farm on a loosing product , I have no idea. Sometimes I think some
companies would do anything (like loose money) just to partern with MS. This might just be an example of monopoly power in action, who knows?
It's probably more a case of, "I can bleed longer than you can." These companies know that Microsoft can afford to throw money at something indefinitely. And they are aware of its track record of ruthlessly crushing the competition. So WinCE is a safe bet for MS acolytes. They can take their shot and bail out without losing too much money. And in the end, Microsoft probably owes them a favor.
Yeah, like those £300 `personal appliances` or whatever they`re called, like the palm pilot etc, which have about the same level of functionality as a pen and paper (£0.50), only with the ever-exciting risk of losing all your phone numbers and schedules when you drop it/battery runs out etc....never understood that. Am i
missing something?
Yes, convenience and efficiency.
You need a lot of pens and paper to hold the amount of information I keep in my Palm Pilot. I keep simple, Excel compatible spreadsheets in mine. This allows me to consolidate a myriad of paper books. I can keep my phonebook, checkbook, notes, memos, novels, calculators, conversion tables, and alarm clocks in a box that is about the size of a stack of 3" by 5" cards.
I can also keep all of my passwords encrypted. Try doing that with a dead tree notepad.
Ever read Slashdot while riding a car or a bus? I have thanks to AvantGo.
I dropped and broke my Palm III a week after I got it. I didn't lose a single phone number or appointment because it syncs with my computer every night.
I originally bought my Palm III for $254.00 American. I recently upgraded to a Visor Deluxe for about the same price. I'm not up on the current exchange rates but I think that's about £170. This is considerably less than what you think they cost and there are cheaper models available. As far as I'm concerned, they are worth every penny.
I use Windows 95 at work and it crashes about one to three times a week for me. Individual applications (both MS and third party) crash much more frequently, often daily, sometimes several time a day. This is usually caused by the application itself of course. But too often, a poorly written app can take Windows down with it or leave it impaired (usually by making it slow down) in some way. When I run several apps at a time, especially resource hungry MS Office apps, a crash is more likely. When an MS Office app crashes it usally takes the ability of all MS Office apps to print away until I restart Windows.
Windows 9x does tend to be a little messy with its system resources and this causes instability. It does include a handy resource monitor which I run so I'll know when I need to restart Windows and this keeps it from slowing down too much and from crashing too frequently.
This isn't fantasy, it's reality. Note that I'm talking about Windows 95 and 98 here, not NT. That's a completely different story.
I think that a lack of signatures would hardly make your company "commie". Besides, to make such brash political allegations about Microsoft would have to mean that they all get paid the same, and i KNOW that ain't true
I'm talking about the appearence from a PR standpoint. Here you have a story on how Apple is eliminating a harmless little concession to the individuality of its employees. Then the author sticks in a quote from an MS spokesperson where he says that MS already does this and the quote implies that Microsoft takes a collectivist attitude towards its workers. A lot of Americans (myself included) tend to associate collectivism with communism. It's just a matter of perception, not a political allegation.
HP put out a couple of really low end, Windows only laser printers a couple of years back that had no off switch.
A sheetfed Logitech scanner is sitting on my desk without an off switch. As soon as my computer powers up, it's on. If something goes wrong and it can't scan I have to shut down my computer and start it up again. The moral of this little story? The off switch is your friend -- especially if you're stuck with Windows.
I was getting set to contradict you until I reread the article. What a bonehead spokesbot! Microsoft has always had credits and easter eggs and this wuss makes his own company look like a bunch of soulless commie robots for a story that has nothing to do with them! Is it any wonder that they botched their own anti-trust trial so badly with the fake videotape and Bill Gates' limp testimony?
No wonder Windows crashes so much. Like the rest of Microsoft, it's suicidal. At least now they have Apple to keep them company.
Just the other day I witnessed someone who used his mouse with his foot. He had both of his hands at the keyboard and (quite effectively) moved in the X-environment with his foot...
That just about proves it; Dilbert was right. Computing and evolution have conspired to make monkeys the superior race. In the future all the high paying jobs will be staffed by super-intelligent monkeys who can manipulate the mouse with their tails while keeping both hands on the keyboard. Humans will be kept in zoos, reduced to flinging feces at their monkey overlords.
Normal ads don't really bother me, but those thick mail-in reply cards make it impossible to flip through the pages.
Actually, I find that those mail cards make great bookmarks!
why is Dennis one of the planets?
He was visiting home.
Brilliant as he was, Disney never foresaw or imagined the Net, the Web or the Digital Age.
Internet the Ride!
It revolutionized the way we communicate. Now it's the world's ultimate thrill ride!
Marvel as you fly through the T3 pipe at blazing speeds! Feel your stomach churn as you hit the 56KB bottleneck. Sit back and enjoy the show as Microsoft battles all comers in a battle for the very soul of the Internet! Lose yourself in the maze of Usenet and IRC. Wander through the Hall of pr0n (seperate admission, adults only). Experience the thrill of watching as server after server is brought down by the dreaded Slashdot Effect!
Bigger than than Steve Jobs' ego, faster than the Linux development cycle, scarier than debugging Windows 2000, wilder than a steel cage death match between Richard M. Stallman and Eric S. Raymond it's Internet the Ride!
I own a Palm III and have ordered Visor (it hasn't arrived yet). It's hard to say how much "pressure" is being placed on Palm by Handspring and the other clones. My definition of pressure may not be the same as yours (unless we're talking force divided by surface area of course). Palm devices have been dropping in price since Handspring arrived on the scene however. I recently saw the Palm IIIx at Buy.com for $259, just a little more than the Visor deluxe but with half the memory.
And is the Handspring COMPLETELY code-compatible?
The Handspring Visor series runs PalmOS 3.1, the same as the Palm IIIx and Palm V. Its ROM is not flash-upgradeable however. So it can't use software like FlashPro to store memory in ROM that isn't being taken up by the OS.
Another issue is that Palm recently released Palm OS 3.3 which must be installed in flash ROM, so the Visor can't be upgraded to this version of the OS. But Palm usually releases upgrades to its OS in RAM anyway. So this might not be as much of a handicap as one would think.
Upcoming... palms with tactile feedback?
Hanspring and the initial reviews of the Visor claim its buttons have very nice tactile feedback.
As good as this news seems, I have to wonder where the Palm platform is headed in terms of expandability. I just ordered a Visor Deluxe with the Springboard expansion slot to replace my Palm III. Then along comes the TRGPro with Compact Flash. Now we've got Sony (PalmMan?) with the memory stick.
That's three, count 'em three, incompatible standards for one computing platform. The Springboard module is bigger than CF so you can make a CF to Springboard adapter.
But what about the memory stick? Granted its supposed to be as small as a stick of gum. So you could probably squeeze it onto the same device as a Springboard or CF slot but we're talking about a device that's the size of a deck of cards here. There just isn't much room for expansion slots.
So you're going to have the situation where one technology will catch on and the others will fall by the wayside. If you bet on the wrong one, you wind up with a hand held Beta VCR. That's a bit of an exageration since you could still use the device as an organizer and handheld computer, just like the Palm Pilot. And it will still run rings aroung WinCE in terms of usability.
I would guess that the memory stick will die out as a technology. It only seems good enough for, well memory while CF and the Springboard are much more versatile.
Microsoft isn't going to just shrivel up and die just because it lost a single court case, Jon's rhetoric not withstanding. Windows is still the most popular OS in the world. It will continue to generate profits for MS for years. Microsoft is still very much alive despite the ruling. Think of how hard it is to keep Dracula dead and you get an idea of how hard it will be to eliminate MS once and for all.
Finally, has anyone ever considered that the best favor the DoJ could do for MS is to break it up? The combined value of AT&T and the Baby Bells today dwarfs the value of the original Ma Bell that was broken up in the early eighties. The combined value of the "Baby Bills" could someday dwarf the current value of Microsoft.
A lot of the crap that has gotten built into Windows was put in to support other products that couldn't compete on their own merits. Internet Explorer springs immediately to mind. Without the burden of having to support Office, IE, and the rest of the MS stable, "Windows Inc." could give its code some much overdo cleaning.
With the days of having to bundle kernel and shell updates with their browser over, "InterGates" could ship a leaner and meaner IE 6.0.
Why would "OfficeSoft" bundle all of its apps in one high priced suite when it could sell them seperately at a low prices? You might even see its apps running on new platforms. Excel for Linux? Visual C++ for Solaris? If MS gets broken up they might become realities.
Three companies for the price of one. That MS stock is starting to look better and better. Just sell off your stock in the company that gets all the bad karma after the big break up.
Something's not right here, as several have pointed out. A crappy essay receives a 100% "outstanding" grade.
[snip]
As several others have pointed out, it was a scary story not an essay so the grammatical standards should be a little lower. Still the story isn't an outstanding one. If he was going to deliberately use bad grammar and spelling, the boy should have prefaced or ended the story with a few lines that let the reader know that they are reading the ramblings of a psycho instead of a narrated tale. "My name is so and so. This is the confession."
Hypothesis Two: If you're paranoid, you'll love this. The teacher was disturbed by the contents of the note. To play along with and placate the student, she gives him the best possible grade and overacts her enjoyment of the story. She then later turns him in, after he's left.
If this is the case, the teacher will not face disciplanary action, and will probably be held up as an example of how to act under these circumstances in the educational circles.
I am and I do. In this case, then the teacher isn't fit to teach since she is unable to deal with the assignment that she herself handed out.
I also wonder if this assignment wasn't meant as a test to root out potential trouble-makers. Assign a story then give the kid's stories to a school shrink and have him determine if any of the kids are potential evil doers. The teacher hears this story, decides she's struck pay dirt and puts your hypothesis two into effect.
This has made me remember something from grade school - sing along with me!
[snip]
Hmmm - should I be in prison???
Yes. It's obvious that you are an unstable Neo-Nazi, Doom playing, trenchcoat mafia guy who plays his Marylin Manson and Rammstein CDs backwards looking for bomb-making instructions. Expect a visit from a fully armed SWAT team and an exorcism by your parish priest soon.
:-)
It was an assignment. The teacher wanted a scary story and got a scary story. Maybe if somebody had discovered this story stashed away in the kid's notebook or published on a personal website, there might have been cause for concern and a parent teacher meeting. Then counseling if the child was deemed to be unstable.
But to throw a child in jail for doing what he was told to do by his teacher is a travesty. This constitutes entrapment pure and simple.
Besides, did you notice how poorly written that supposedly, "perfect 100% plus extra credit for reading it aloud" story was? Maybe if teachers weren't so busy trying to entrap kids into revealing themselves as potential Eric Harrises or Dylan Kleybolds, they might have time to actually teach their kids proper spelling and grammer.
Take a classroom of about 20 students (wishful thinking considering school overcrowding I know). Add a PC with four Palm cradles and a Palm III for each kid. Send the kids out on a field trip to gather data. Have them hotsync when they get back and play around with said data. You can set up some pretty nifty projects this way.
I don't see much of a problem. There are no known Palm OS virii or trojans much less virii or trojans that are smart enough to infect multiple platforms. Schools already have a much more serious threat in Word macro viruses that students can infect the school computers with by e-mailing Word documents (or by transporting them on floppy disks). This screws up far more computers than some exotic cross-platform hack that an aspiring young Kevin Mitnick could come up with.
As much as I love my little Palm III, I don't think I'll ever be able to bring down a network with it. Well, I might be able to telnet into the school's server using my Palm III and a modem but I could do that with an old Commodore 64.
Nazi Germany was a pretty dark period in our history. So was the American Civil War (for us Americans anyway). Both periods have been subjects of compelling games in the past because they were compelling times.
Why shouldn't the Nazi era be a subject for computer games? Have we become so politically correct and morally relativistic that we can't even condemn attitudes and behavior that are certifiably evil like the wholesale genocides carried out by the Nazi's in WWII?
I look back at all my "WW-II" and "cold-war" games and wonder if perhaps they should be let to die in peace.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
"Spock's Brain" was a camp classic. Even when TOS sucked, it was fun to watch it suck. When Voyager screws up an episode (which is often), it's just sad.
This was first thing I thought of when the idea of choosing your computer's personality came up. I'll bet that when these personalities come out, they'll be so lame that no one will use them.
Yes, it means that we're all first posters. From now on "First Post" must be appended to the .sig of every Slashdotter.