Why are all these companies seemingly looking for exuses to make their web sites incompatible with X browser--the old NS-only sites, the IE-only sites, etc.? Whatever happened to HTML being browser independant? The WWW is starting to stand for Won't Work Well.
No, we're talking about STANDARDS here. All of the technologies mentioned in the article - XML, CSS, XSL - are either current or proposed W3C recommendations. Check for yourself.
If a page written according to these guidlelines won't work well, then something's the matter with your browser. Which is exacltly why I loathe Netscape 4.x. I can write a page with perfect code (according the the w3c validator), and it will look like crap in Netscape due to it's poor CSS support. So I prefer IE. Web designers and businesses are understandably pissed that they can't use standard technology becasue Netscape breaks their pages. The solutions are design for the lowest common denominator or have browser-specific pages, which undermines the whole point of the web.
Mozilla, on the other hand, is even superior to IE in its support of web standards. So I'll admit I'm a fair-weather friend with no loyalites whatsoever - when mozilla/netscape5/whatever comes out, it will be my new favorite browser.
Consumers have several viable web-browser choices, and so if they don't like Microsoft's product, they can use a different one. Microsoft making a poorly designed product is not grounds for antitrust action, and has no place in an antitrust court case.
Did you read the whole thing? (just asking, not flaming)
I'm no lawyer, but I thought that the judge was more concerend with the motivations that lead Microsoft to release a buggy product. They took an existing product (Win98 sans IE) and held off releasing it so they could integrate it with IE4. Not because this would make a better Windows, but for the sake of "applications barrier to entry." MS emails show that they were using browser integration as a weapon against Netscape, and because MS put quashing Netscape's browser share ahead of product quality, the consumer suffered.
As far as using a different browser, MS made it clear that they wanted to make sure that using Netscape in Windows was a "jolting experience." (MS's words, not the judge's.) So they wrote the windows code accordingly. So the consumer gets to choose: IE or Netscape, which doesn't work quite like the user expects because MS wrote their code accordingly. Not really a fair choice, is it?
FYI: I use cultured brain tumor cells and frog eggs in my research. Not becasue I'm an animal rights activist, but because these happen to be the systems best suited for this particular research.
(Besides, if I did decide to use rodents, the little guys would love me. I study opiate addiction.)
For everyone clamoring for more facts, the article hasn't been published yet. It should appear in the November issue of Bioelectromagnetics. It seems that you can get the full text for free at their website, but it's possible that I only had access because my university has a site license or something. There is, however, an older study by the same group that looks very similar: Abstract and full text.
For what it's worth, this test with the milk is a standard measure in learning and memory studies called the Morris Water Maze. I personally know lots of people who use this test on a daily basis. You put the mice or rats in a white chamber with opaque water (that's what the powdered milk is for). There are black symbols painted on the walls of the chamber. The platform is submerged in the opaque water, and the only way the animals should be able to find it is by remembering where it is in relation to the symbols painted on the walls. This is therefore a test for spatial learning and memory. Usually the animals undergo two sessions a day. You can measure spatial learning by noting the decreases in the animals' "search time." You can test for long-term memory by removing the platform several days later, and noting how long the animals spend in the spot where the platform used to be. There are lots of other variations on this theme.
It has been shown that things which disrupt human learning and memory also disrupt performance on this test. Results from these studies also correlate well with another learning and memory test called the Barnes Maze. It's been used so much by so many people, I seriously doubt there is some "milk effect" skewing the results.
The Federation of American Scientists - http://www.fas.org - has a "peace and security" section that many people posting here might find interesting. It has extensive info about the military, disarmament, biological weapons, etc. Although it's an advocacy site (it was started by the manhattan project scientists who opposed dropping the bomb), the information seems very trustworthy.
well... it did say they were reserving it again, and it was allegedly repealed in 1991.
"Reserved" just means that section is empty. At least that's what the johns hopkins university government library librarian told me and a friend when we went in there to look it up four years ago. I'm sure she thought we were nuts. My friend and I were fresh from reading some conspiracy tripe on the internet, and when we saw "reserved" we thought Ha! They're hiding it from us! The librarian calmly flipped to the back of the book where there was a list of changes, and it said that section had been removed. So now that the section is empty, it's reserved.
But computer programming is strictly a vocational topic, much like nursing, accounting, etc. and has no real place in a basic college prep high school program.
I disagree. Computer programming doesn't have to be any more "vocational" than science, math or writing. All of these subjects can lead to careers, yet no one will argue that they shouldn't be taught to high school students. And computer skill is becoming more of a "basic" skill as time goes on. I took several programming classes in high school (BASIC and pascal). Although I enjoyed these classes and seemed to be good at it, I chose science/medicine as my vocation. I am, however, grateful to have had experience with programming, and I still use the skills I learned to this day.
In any case does anyone think that a high school can teach the real meat of computer programming? Tail recursion? Hash Tables? Data Modelling? Not very likely, and without these concepts you are wasting your time.
That's not the point. The point is to expose students to programming, to teach them how to think in a different way, and for them to see if they think it is something they would want to pursue further. For me at least, the most important thing I learned is how to think logically. I think this helped me a lot in math and science and even in seemingly unrealated areas like comparative literature! Plus it helped me pick up other computer related things like html and javascript, but that's secondary.
The point I'm trying to make is that teaching programming can be valuable as more than a vocational tool. At least is was to me.
Maybe at least exposing students to a second language would be a good idea. That way the students can actually SEE that the first language can be a stepping stone to others. Just telling them that won't necessarily get the point across.
In my case, I went to two different high schools. At the first one, I took BASIC and "advanced BASIC" during my freshman and sophomore years. Had I stayed there, that might have been as far as I went. Luckily, I was fortunate enough to go on to a state-wide magnet school for math, science and the arts. A semester of pascal was required for graduation, even for the arts students. Because of my BASIC experience, I picked it up reeeeally easily, even though it looked quite different at fist glance. It was really amazing how similar the thinking was, even though the syntax looked so different. I didn't take any more computer classes (even though my teacher kept pestering me to be the only girl in his C class) because by then my schedule had been booked up with all kinds of other cool classes in other areas (this was a great school). However, since then I have found it easy to pick up html (not a real language I know), javascript, and macromedia's lingo language.
Had I only taken BASIC, I might have believed that I couldn't just "pick up" some foreign computer language, and I would have never tried to. The goal of teaching programming in high school is not solely to create future CS grad students and professionals. Many might end up like me - I'm a student in a completely unrelated field (med school/neuroscience grad school), but I like to fiddle with programming as a hobby (for fun and profit:) Had I not taken both BASIC and pascal, things might not have turned out this way.
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Why are all these companies seemingly looking for exuses to make their web sites incompatible with X browser--the old NS-only sites, the IE-only sites, etc.? Whatever happened to HTML being browser independant? The WWW is starting to stand for Won't Work Well.
No, we're talking about STANDARDS here. All of the technologies mentioned in the article - XML, CSS, XSL - are either current or proposed W3C recommendations. Check for yourself.
If a page written according to these guidlelines won't work well, then something's the matter with your browser. Which is exacltly why I loathe Netscape 4.x. I can write a page with perfect code (according the the w3c validator), and it will look like crap in Netscape due to it's poor CSS support. So I prefer IE. Web designers and businesses are understandably pissed that they can't use standard technology becasue Netscape breaks their pages. The solutions are design for the lowest common denominator or have browser-specific pages, which undermines the whole point of the web.
Mozilla, on the other hand, is even superior to IE in its support of web standards. So I'll admit I'm a fair-weather friend with no loyalites whatsoever - when mozilla/netscape5/whatever comes out, it will be my new favorite browser.
Consumers have several viable web-browser choices, and so if they don't like Microsoft's product, they can use a different one. Microsoft making a poorly designed product is not grounds for antitrust action, and has no place in an antitrust court case.
Did you read the whole thing? (just asking, not flaming)
I'm no lawyer, but I thought that the judge was more concerend with the motivations that lead Microsoft to release a buggy product. They took an existing product (Win98 sans IE) and held off releasing it so they could integrate it with IE4. Not because this would make a better Windows, but for the sake of "applications barrier to entry." MS emails show that they were using browser integration as a weapon against Netscape, and because MS put quashing Netscape's browser share ahead of product quality, the consumer suffered.
As far as using a different browser, MS made it clear that they wanted to make sure that using Netscape in Windows was a "jolting experience." (MS's words, not the judge's.) So they wrote the windows code accordingly. So the consumer gets to choose: IE or Netscape, which doesn't work quite like the user expects because MS wrote their code accordingly. Not really a fair choice, is it?
FYI: I use cultured brain tumor cells and frog eggs in my research. Not becasue I'm an animal rights activist, but because these happen to be the systems best suited for this particular research.
(Besides, if I did decide to use rodents, the little guys would love me. I study opiate addiction.)
For everyone clamoring for more facts, the article hasn't been published yet. It should appear in the November issue of Bioelectromagnetics. It seems that you can get the full text for free at their website, but it's possible that I only had access because my university has a site license or something. There is, however, an older study by the same group that looks very similar: Abstract and full text.
For what it's worth, this test with the milk is a standard measure in learning and memory studies called the Morris Water Maze. I personally know lots of people who use this test on a daily basis. You put the mice or rats in a white chamber with opaque water (that's what the powdered milk is for). There are black symbols painted on the walls of the chamber. The platform is submerged in the opaque water, and the only way the animals should be able to find it is by remembering where it is in relation to the symbols painted on the walls. This is therefore a test for spatial learning and memory. Usually the animals undergo two sessions a day. You can measure spatial learning by noting the decreases in the animals' "search time." You can test for long-term memory by removing the platform several days later, and noting how long the animals spend in the spot where the platform used to be. There are lots of other variations on this theme.
It has been shown that things which disrupt human learning and memory also disrupt performance on this test. Results from these studies also correlate well with another learning and memory test called the Barnes Maze. It's been used so much by so many people, I seriously doubt there is some "milk effect" skewing the results.
Just my $.02,
-margaret
The Federation of American Scientists - http://www.fas.org - has a "peace and security" section that many people posting here might find interesting. It has extensive info about the military, disarmament, biological weapons, etc. Although it's an advocacy site (it was started by the manhattan project scientists who opposed dropping the bomb), the information seems very trustworthy.
well... it did say they were reserving it again, and it was allegedly repealed in 1991.
"Reserved" just means that section is empty. At least that's what the johns hopkins university government library librarian told me and a friend when we went in there to look it up four years ago. I'm sure she thought we were nuts. My friend and I were fresh from reading some conspiracy tripe on the internet, and when we saw "reserved" we thought Ha! They're hiding it from us! The librarian calmly flipped to the back of the book where there was a list of changes, and it said that section had been removed. So now that the section is empty, it's reserved.
But computer programming is strictly a vocational topic, much like nursing, accounting, etc. and has no real place in a basic college prep high school program.
I disagree. Computer programming doesn't have to be any more "vocational" than science, math or writing. All of these subjects can lead to careers, yet no one will argue that they shouldn't be taught to high school students. And computer skill is becoming more of a "basic" skill as time goes on. I took several programming classes in high school (BASIC and pascal). Although I enjoyed these classes and seemed to be good at it, I chose science/medicine as my vocation. I am, however, grateful to have had experience with programming, and I still use the skills I learned to this day.
In any case does anyone think that a high school can teach the real meat of computer programming? Tail recursion? Hash Tables? Data Modelling? Not very likely, and without these concepts you are wasting your time.
That's not the point. The point is to expose students to programming, to teach them how to think in a different way, and for them to see if they think it is something they would want to pursue further. For me at least, the most important thing I learned is how to think logically. I think this helped me a lot in math and science and even in seemingly unrealated areas like comparative literature! Plus it helped me pick up other computer related things like html and javascript, but that's secondary.
The point I'm trying to make is that teaching programming can be valuable as more than a vocational tool. At least is was to me.
Maybe at least exposing students to a second language would be a good idea. That way the students can actually SEE that the first language can be a stepping stone to others. Just telling them that won't necessarily get the point across.
:) Had I not taken both BASIC and pascal, things might not have turned out this way.
In my case, I went to two different high schools. At the first one, I took BASIC and "advanced BASIC" during my freshman and sophomore years. Had I stayed there, that might have been as far as I went. Luckily, I was fortunate enough to go on to a state-wide magnet school for math, science and the arts. A semester of pascal was required for graduation, even for the arts students. Because of my BASIC experience, I picked it up reeeeally easily, even though it looked quite different at fist glance. It was really amazing how similar the thinking was, even though the syntax looked so different. I didn't take any more computer classes (even though my teacher kept pestering me to be the only girl in his C class) because by then my schedule had been booked up with all kinds of other cool classes in other areas (this was a great school). However, since then I have found it easy to pick up html (not a real language I know), javascript, and macromedia's lingo language.
Had I only taken BASIC, I might have believed that I couldn't just "pick up" some foreign computer language, and I would have never tried to. The goal of teaching programming in high school is not solely to create future CS grad students and professionals. Many might end up like me - I'm a student in a completely unrelated field (med school/neuroscience grad school), but I like to fiddle with programming as a hobby (for fun and profit
Just my $0.02,
-margaret