I used the Backup application from dotMac faithfully for over a year. Ran well every night, backing up my system. Then, my computers were stolen. No problem, they were insured and I had a backup. These things happen. I got my new Macintosh and went to Backup.app to restore. Selected everything and hit restore.
Backup crashed.
Tried again. Crashed again.
Backup won't restore more than one or two files at a time without crashing. It seems to be a memory leak, as it dies during a memory allocation routine. Granted, I had a lot of files and a lot of incrementals. But this is the JOB OF BACKUP! To be able to RESTORE my FILES! The files are there, I can see them (each backup file has a disk image inside it which you can mount manually). I just can't get at them systematically.
So, I contacted Tech Support. Got something like "wow, that's strange", sent my logs and such. It's been two weeks and I've heard nothing. My followup emails go into the bit-bucket.
By now, it would have been easier for me to have spent the last four nights manually mounting disk images and copying files over by hand.
Needless to say, I'm going with Retrospect as soon as I have something to backup again. Cancelling my dotMac account too.
It's always fun to play with the party and see how they deal with what you throw at them. The key change made in the Expanded Psionics Handbook, however renders your first point moot. Psions no longer have that funny attack/defense mode thing. So really, psions are pretty much just like sorcerers in a lot of ways, except they get to decide: manifest 3 powers at full strength or 7 at half-strength. There's no longer any particular back door or weakness to having a single psion in a non-psionic campaign, except that the character in question probably is sad that they're not getting any good loot.
I agree with the premise: Complete Psionic was a pretty bad book. So bad, in fact, that some denizens of the D&D Psionics board banded together and wrote an alternative supplement that is easily 10 times better.
But don't go bad-mouthing psionics in your review. The base system is clear and well-thought-out. It's not broken at all, although it is misunderstood. It's even part of the core rules and SRD, so there's no reason why you can't read about it for yourself. No, Complete Psionics is bad because it lacked anything good. Nearly all of it was recycled from Dragon magazines or other supplements. There were nearly no good PrCs or powers to speak of. There were a handful of good ideas in there, but 80% of it was drek that nobody would use. That's why Complete Psionic was crap.
Are we sure that the post is legit? The register is reporting that the post, and indeed the whole site is hoked up.
I mean, from TFA: "I know Steve Jobs is a god. Look, I bowed at his feet when the iPod and iTunes was created because HE GOT THE BALL ROLLING. He is as laconically casually cool as Bono and makes really good cartoon movies too." It seems that the post might well be in jest and not written by Rosen.
When I got Tiger, I went and downloaded a bunch of Dashboard widgets to try them out. Later, when my Dasboard launchbar grew to 5 screens of widgets I wanted to remove some from the launchbar. Couldn't figure out how to do it, so I went to apple help.
This is what Help said: "You cannot remove widgets from the Widget Bar or change their order"
And that's just plain stupid. I hope they fix that soon.
Example: you have, in your custody, a person who set a bomb. You don't know where that bomb is, but you know it exists and you know that the person in your custody set it. You also know that it's going to go off at some point in the future and kill people. If it's a nuclear bomb, it might kill millions of people.
Ta-da: torturing that guy is justified.
Really. You know that this person set a bomb somewhere. Maybe, if this were a movie, you'd know that for certain. But in the real world, you probably don't know that this person set a bomb. Perhaps he admitted to it under torture. But people who are being tortured will do anything, especially lie, to escape torture.
The point: torture is not only immoral, it is not even a very good way to get information. It's a great way to make people sign confessions for crimes they may or may not have committed, but it is not a good way to get people to tell you useful things.
I don't use the dock at all anymore, really. I created a folder full of application shortcuts and stuck it in the finder sidebar. So launching an app means using the finder, which I use in column mode, which is very information-dense. The heck with icons in finder windows, they're silly anyway.
My n Button mouse has one button devoted to alt-tab for app switching, and I also use expose a lot to show all windows so I can switch apps that way.
In short, I use the dock to hold minimized windows, but because of expose, I don't actually minimize many windows anymore.
I'm a huge fan of my MX500. Feels just right, and the extra back/forward buttons I have mapped so they switch tabs in my web browser. Of course, I don't know how it compares to the Dual Optical in terms of precision, but in terms of smooth feel and performance, it can't be beat.
Is this different from the University of California, Berkeley? Berkley is in Michigan, Berkeley is in California, and there is no University of Berkeley that I know of.
It's like saying "The University of Ann Arbor" instead of "The University of Michigan". Come on editors.
Yikes! Compare the cost to something like netflix or even your local mom and pop movie rental store (or, i suppose, that really big one). There's no way I'd go this route unless it was $3.99 for unlimited viewings or something like $0.99 for 24 hours. Don't forget software compatibility either. I didn't see anything about a Mac viewer. If they just made the darn thing 4 bux for a big ol MPEG, then they would have something. I'd pay 4 bucks to have a quick download (instead of finding 20 segments on a P2P network and putting them together). Then you don't have to worry about spyware enabled viewers and all that crap.
I'll agree that 400 bux is pretty steep. But CD-MP3 units aren't dynamic at all. For example, you can't easily swap in/out just a few songs to make your playlist much better. Also, the playlist features for the iPod seem to be much more useful than most CD-MP3 units. Plus which, look at the size! CD-MP3 systems can't get smaller than a CD-ROM, unless you go with the 50Mb solution you get from mini-CD format, which is a whole lot smaller.
You betcha. I have been selling my collection Magic: The Gathering cards off on ebay off-and-on for the past year, every time I want to spend some money on a new toy, I sell off an old one. Anyway, I think about 15% of my buyers never contact me (after repeated attempts on my part), and some of my buyers do contact me but give me the run around. In all, I can say about 80% of my completed sales result in me getting paid.
Although one time I got a random money order in the mail, no return address (before this whole anthrax thing), not even signed. I didn't know what it was for, since it was a nice round number (5 bux, no big deal). So karma was on my side that day I suppose.
I sent Senator Barbara Boxer an email regarding the Sklyarov case just about the same time the story broke on slashdot. I got back a form email saying that Sen. Feinstein was working on a way to replace napster with something that would make everyone happy. I guess the napster form-reply was the best match to what I said (since I mentioned the DMCA in my email).
I sent back a reply which said the following (edited for length)
I voted for you in the last election. I may or may not do that again, given the cursory treatment you have obviously given to my prior email. If you are too busy to read my email, by all means, send me a form letter telling me so. But don't send me something that is only tangentially related to the subject I emailed you about. It makes the whole Boxer organization look bad. At least Feinstein sent me "sorry, I may never read your email" rather than an uninformed reply.
I encourage you to reply, or at least one of your interns or something. I would be very interested in opening a dialogue of some sort. In the future, if you are going to send me a form letter, please make sure it's the right one.
FWIW, I think that the iCab browser for Macintosh is one of the few that I've seen that can be configured to not display images of a certain size on the page, just leaving a blank where the ad would have been. And, it comes pre-configured with a list of typical ad/banner sizes to screen out. I believe that it's a "download but don't display mechanism". Is there anything like this in Konqueror (I haven't been able to find it).
Also, OmniWeb for Mac OSX does this. It is a really nice replacement for the MSIE that comes bundled with OSX. You also have java-script options that say things like "disable window.open unless in response to a clicked link" and such.
I may be going out on a limb here, but as a grad student in a school of education, I thought I'd put out some other stuff to look at if you're interested in learning more about just why we have trouble educating our public.
Check out Liping Ma's book: Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics. It is a great set of case studies of elementary teachers in the US and China. Short story is that Chinese teachers, despite considerably less actual training, end up with a much deeper understanding of math, because they actually spend time thinking about it and a lot of time discussing math and teaching with their colleagues.
Also, for the more pop-educationally inclined, Stigler and Hiebert's "The Teaching Gap" is a quickie and a decent discussion of how the US educational system is flawed.
As you talk about the educational system in the US, remember that reforms and the like are almost always political in origin, and stem from people who don't really know about education. Just because you went to High School and got a 4.0 or whatever doesn't mean you know all there is to know about education, but many politicians would have you believe otherwise (and don't even get me started in on standardized testing).
I can't seem to find anything that relates to hooking up a CueCat to a non-ps2 hookup. It seems given the simplicity of the interface one could make a doohickey (technical term) that would allow me to use my CueCat on a nonlegacy system (no PS2) (Okay, it's a PowerBook, but hey, I like to be cutting edge).
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I used the Backup application from dotMac faithfully for over a year. Ran well every night, backing up my system. Then, my computers were stolen. No problem, they were insured and I had a backup. These things happen. I got my new Macintosh and went to Backup.app to restore. Selected everything and hit restore.
Backup crashed.
Tried again. Crashed again.
Backup won't restore more than one or two files at a time without crashing. It seems to be a memory leak, as it dies during a memory allocation routine. Granted, I had a lot of files and a lot of incrementals. But this is the JOB OF BACKUP! To be able to RESTORE my FILES! The files are there, I can see them (each backup file has a disk image inside it which you can mount manually). I just can't get at them systematically.
So, I contacted Tech Support. Got something like "wow, that's strange", sent my logs and such. It's been two weeks and I've heard nothing. My followup emails go into the bit-bucket.
By now, it would have been easier for me to have spent the last four nights manually mounting disk images and copying files over by hand.
Needless to say, I'm going with Retrospect as soon as I have something to backup again. Cancelling my dotMac account too.
It's always fun to play with the party and see how they deal with what you throw at them. The key change made in the Expanded Psionics Handbook, however renders your first point moot. Psions no longer have that funny attack/defense mode thing. So really, psions are pretty much just like sorcerers in a lot of ways, except they get to decide: manifest 3 powers at full strength or 7 at half-strength. There's no longer any particular back door or weakness to having a single psion in a non-psionic campaign, except that the character in question probably is sad that they're not getting any good loot.
I agree with the premise: Complete Psionic was a pretty bad book. So bad, in fact, that some denizens of the D&D Psionics board banded together and wrote an alternative supplement that is easily 10 times better.
But don't go bad-mouthing psionics in your review. The base system is clear and well-thought-out. It's not broken at all, although it is misunderstood. It's even part of the core rules and SRD, so there's no reason why you can't read about it for yourself. No, Complete Psionics is bad because it lacked anything good. Nearly all of it was recycled from Dragon magazines or other supplements. There were nearly no good PrCs or powers to speak of. There were a handful of good ideas in there, but 80% of it was drek that nobody would use. That's why Complete Psionic was crap.
Is this why I can't read userfriendly or Something Positive this morning? Or is it just some weird coincidental webcomic blackout?
Are we sure that the post is legit? The register is reporting that the post, and indeed the whole site is hoked up. I mean, from TFA: "I know Steve Jobs is a god. Look, I bowed at his feet when the iPod and iTunes was created because HE GOT THE BALL ROLLING. He is as laconically casually cool as Bono and makes really good cartoon movies too." It seems that the post might well be in jest and not written by Rosen.
This is what Help said: "You cannot remove widgets from the Widget Bar or change their order"
And that's just plain stupid. I hope they fix that soon.
Example: you have, in your custody, a person who set a bomb. You don't know where that bomb is, but you know it exists and you know that the person in your custody set it. You also know that it's going to go off at some point in the future and kill people. If it's a nuclear bomb, it might kill millions of people.
Ta-da: torturing that guy is justified.
Really. You know that this person set a bomb somewhere. Maybe, if this were a movie, you'd know that for certain. But in the real world, you probably don't know that this person set a bomb. Perhaps he admitted to it under torture. But people who are being tortured will do anything, especially lie, to escape torture.
The point: torture is not only immoral, it is not even a very good way to get information. It's a great way to make people sign confessions for crimes they may or may not have committed, but it is not a good way to get people to tell you useful things.
I don't use the dock at all anymore, really. I created a folder full of application shortcuts and stuck it in the finder sidebar. So launching an app means using the finder, which I use in column mode, which is very information-dense. The heck with icons in finder windows, they're silly anyway.
My n Button mouse has one button devoted to alt-tab for app switching, and I also use expose a lot to show all windows so I can switch apps that way.
In short, I use the dock to hold minimized windows, but because of expose, I don't actually minimize many windows anymore.
I'm a huge fan of my MX500. Feels just right, and the extra back/forward buttons I have mapped so they switch tabs in my web browser. Of course, I don't know how it compares to the Dual Optical in terms of precision, but in terms of smooth feel and performance, it can't be beat.
Is this different from the University of California, Berkeley? Berkley is in Michigan, Berkeley is in California, and there is no University of Berkeley that I know of.
It's like saying "The University of Ann Arbor" instead of "The University of Michigan". Come on editors.
Yikes! Compare the cost to something like netflix or even your local mom and pop movie rental store (or, i suppose, that really big one). There's no way I'd go this route unless it was $3.99 for unlimited viewings or something like $0.99 for 24 hours. Don't forget software compatibility either. I didn't see anything about a Mac viewer. If they just made the darn thing 4 bux for a big ol MPEG, then they would have something. I'd pay 4 bucks to have a quick download (instead of finding 20 segments on a P2P network and putting them together). Then you don't have to worry about spyware enabled viewers and all that crap.
I'll agree that 400 bux is pretty steep. But CD-MP3 units aren't dynamic at all. For example, you can't easily swap in/out just a few songs to make your playlist much better. Also, the playlist features for the iPod seem to be much more useful than most CD-MP3 units. Plus which, look at the size! CD-MP3 systems can't get smaller than a CD-ROM, unless you go with the 50Mb solution you get from mini-CD format, which is a whole lot smaller.
You betcha. I have been selling my collection Magic: The Gathering cards off on ebay off-and-on for the past year, every time I want to spend some money on a new toy, I sell off an old one. Anyway, I think about 15% of my buyers never contact me (after repeated attempts on my part), and some of my buyers do contact me but give me the run around. In all, I can say about 80% of my completed sales result in me getting paid.
Although one time I got a random money order in the mail, no return address (before this whole anthrax thing), not even signed. I didn't know what it was for, since it was a nice round number (5 bux, no big deal). So karma was on my side that day I suppose.
I sent back a reply which said the following (edited for length)
I got no reply to that. Too bad.I may be going out on a limb here, but as a grad student in a school of education, I thought I'd put out some other stuff to look at if you're interested in learning more about just why we have trouble educating our public.
Check out Liping Ma's book: Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics. It is a great set of case studies of elementary teachers in the US and China. Short story is that Chinese teachers, despite considerably less actual training, end up with a much deeper understanding of math, because they actually spend time thinking about it and a lot of time discussing math and teaching with their colleagues.
Also, for the more pop-educationally inclined, Stigler and Hiebert's "The Teaching Gap" is a quickie and a decent discussion of how the US educational system is flawed.
As you talk about the educational system in the US, remember that reforms and the like are almost always political in origin, and stem from people who don't really know about education. Just because you went to High School and got a 4.0 or whatever doesn't mean you know all there is to know about education, but many politicians would have you believe otherwise (and don't even get me started in on standardized testing).
I can't seem to find anything that relates to hooking up a CueCat to a non-ps2 hookup. It seems given the simplicity of the interface one could make a doohickey (technical term) that would allow me to use my CueCat on a nonlegacy system (no PS2) (Okay, it's a PowerBook, but hey, I like to be cutting edge).