"If everything still worked properly, I'd give my kids some older tech to play on. You know, computers that boot instantly and have a programming language built in. Because today's computers *can* do so much, they insist on doing quite a lot of it all the time for no good reason. That's too much distraction for focusing on the task at hand I'd say."
EXCELLENT point.
When I was in elementary/middle school, my family had a 386 at home. However, the only thing that anyone had showed me to do on it was play games, use Lotus (one of my older brothers is an engineer, and I watched) and look up things on the Encyclopedia Britannica CD. I learned a few basic things about the command line too, but for the most part the computer was used as a tool to teach me non-tech things or for entertainment. We weren't online and wouldn't be until much, much later.
What actually got me started on programming and truly about the inner workings of computers wasn't a PC at all, but a programmable calculator with a form of BASIC built in (I ran into C a few months later when the technology teacher realized I was interested in programming). I spent a large portion of sixth-grade sitting in the back of the class writing simple programs, mostly games and simple unit conversion stuff, gradually learning the basics of procedural programming.
If you want a kid to get interested in technology, don't present the computer as a crystal ball that magically lets them get what they want. Present it as someting that will do what they want IF they're willing to figure out what commands to give it.
I recall reading in an earlier article comparing OS marketshare that UNIX and Linux are generally counted separately because they get more complaints when they mix them than when they don't.
SGI does still sell IRIX last I checked, but I don't think it'd be a very big slice of the pie.
Seriously. There's no way in hell I'd have gone to a college that forced me to spend $600-$1000 dollars on a laptop in addition to $200-$400 on books per semester.
This is a horrible idea. Crime in the area around my first college was bad, I'd hate to think what it would be like with _every_ student carrying several hundred dollars worth of pawnable hardware. I also see plenty of students incredibly pissed at having to allocate hundreds of dollars to a laptop that they need for food. Not to mention that it's a laptop that they, effectively, aren't going to have full control over what they run on.
That's when you write a book and spend the next several years of your life giving speeches at Universities (like Mitnick, Poulson, etc). Being a victim in the United States can be great for your career as long as it doesn't kill you.
Totalitarian regimes always fall. As things get worse and worse, more and more people are negatively impacted, and as a result, more and more people start taking things seriously. Even if they're ignorant and don't really understand what's going on, most people wake up when they realize things are "majorly sucking". Even if they don't know exactly who to blame and haven't really thought it through, they know that they're angry and that, somehow, the people "in control" must be at fault. Eventually there are too many for the oppressors to beat down, no matter what technological advantages they may have.
It's an endless dance. The cycle of tyranny, rebellion, liberty, and decadence will probably continue until the end of time.
The only way they could do that is with nuclear weapons, in which case there wouldn't really be anything left to rule over. Not to mention they'd also be killed by some truly massive fallout.
Let'* **amine this a bit more closely. It'* *** like censorship is going to wind up being one of the Four Hor***** of the Apocalypse or anything. That would be as **** as a pile of acorns.
It seems that it's not a good idea to be too agreeable, because people won't be worried about screwing you over or making you angry like they are about the crazy one-eyed biker in the corner.
Yes, I know they're a business and can make their own rules (within some common sense boundaries), but it's still sad to see them giving in to this sort of crap. For fear or profit, I don't know, but it's still ridiculous.
That's the point. When you try to only use simple words/expressions to express something complex, you will either wind up with an unwieldly sentence like that one, or you'll wind up leaving things out.
The writer could say "This man is good, so people should be good to him", but that would be far too vague to get the message across.
Students would then have to spend much of their time explaining concepts that would best be given their own word.
"This man is good in the way that a man who protects others is good. He should be given good things and treated good so others want to be good in the way that a man who protects others is good."
"This man is heroic, so he should be honored."
The first one uses simple words to say the same thing as the second, but it take forever to write out most of my thoughts like that. It'd be like coding in a language and only using the built-in functions, and never touching the libraries or writing your own.
If the language used by a culture begins to be less capable of expressing intricate thoughts and emotions, it's not a change for the better. A simple language is the mark of a simple culture, which was Orwell's point.
If I understand correctly, plagiarism is taking credit for something that someone else created, not copying something someone else created. I could see why a University might want the first rule you spoke of, but they shouldn't call it plagiarism.
"Maybe in more civilized countries, but not in the USA. Here, we take pride in glamorizing violence as it contributes nothing at all to society, while degrading the reason that we are all here."
What bizarro-land do you live in? The majority of the US seems to glorify both of them. I can certainly walk through the mall and look at posters of all-but-naked women without someone trying to burn them or a guy in a blue butterfly suit jumping in front of me. And violence will be necessary as long as there is _anyone_ willing to use it to their own advantage. Tibet tried pacifism; look where it got them.
Well, during my freshman year in college one of the English professors grabbed a student's laptop and said that plagiarism was equivalent to that (she returned it, of course). They went more for morality instead of legality, which I thought was a pretty good idea. While many college students have anarchistic tendencies, most of them consider themselves moral in one fashion or another.
I think plagiarism is more like lying than stealing (taking credit for others work), but the main point is the same.
I've used shoes for so long that I'm not sure how well I could live without them. Shaking this addiction would probably cause me physical harm. If I hadn't started using them so much, I probably wouldn't need them so much now.
I'm also psychologically addicted to toothpaste. Even though my body doesn't require it to survive, I don't think I could ever convince myself to stop using it without great pressure.
Computers are a tool, folks. They're used so much because they're a tool for a very wide variety of things. Imagine how much you'd use a car that did fifty other things for you.
"Which is as it should be. Because if left to our own devices, programmers would always use the most whiz-bang, untested, unstable stuff out there. It's the technophile nature."
Of course, that's what the home, lab, or combination of the two is for. One of the niftiest things about open source projects is that they give the bleeding-edge "untested" stuff a testing ground and developer community, and often result in useful software. There generally aren't set-in-stone deadlines or things that absolutely "cannot go down", so people are free to use what they like.
It also takes up their free time, sadly. Oh, well.
1. Shadowrun, Sega Genesis. This game had a good storyline and more "player freedom" than most of the games I'd played at this point (I was eight or nine when it came out, I think). I really liked the world it was set in, and a bit of searching around to find out more about it brought me to the Gibson cyberpunk novels it was based on. The first cartridge I played it on had a bad battery in it, sadly, so I had to leave my system on for incredible lengths of time to finish it, but I did.
2. Shining Force, Genesis. These (it was a series) really played on my love of fantasy as a child. I think this was the first strategy game I played, as well, and got me into the genre.
3. Secret of Evermore, SNES. I played through this across many visits to a relative's house. Probably still one of the best action-RPGs out there.
I'm leaving out some great stuff, but I believe these are my "top three most loved".
Slashdot Mirror
Well...At least the name fits it.
I got that ability after playing a few games of GTA. ;)
"- In war, once you die, you come right back to life (or maybe there is a slight delay)"
Yeah, but you lose all but your three best items and all your stackables and money. And if you were the aggressor you don't even get to keep those.
Oh, and if you have enough faith and remember to pray before battle you get to keep one extra item if you die.
Wait, that's a different one...You don't lose anything in WoW. What a horribly misleading game.
"If everything still worked properly, I'd give my kids some older tech to play on. You know, computers that boot instantly and have a programming language built in. Because today's computers *can* do so much, they insist on doing quite a lot of it all the time for no good reason. That's too much distraction for focusing on the task at hand I'd say."
EXCELLENT point.
When I was in elementary/middle school, my family had a 386 at home. However, the only thing that anyone had showed me to do on it was play games, use Lotus (one of my older brothers is an engineer, and I watched) and look up things on the Encyclopedia Britannica CD. I learned a few basic things about the command line too, but for the most part the computer was used as a tool to teach me non-tech things or for entertainment. We weren't online and wouldn't be until much, much later.
What actually got me started on programming and truly about the inner workings of computers wasn't a PC at all, but a programmable calculator with a form of BASIC built in (I ran into C a few months later when the technology teacher realized I was interested in programming). I spent a large portion of sixth-grade sitting in the back of the class writing simple programs, mostly games and simple unit conversion stuff, gradually learning the basics of procedural programming.
If you want a kid to get interested in technology, don't present the computer as a crystal ball that magically lets them get what they want. Present it as someting that will do what they want IF they're willing to figure out what commands to give it.
I recall reading in an earlier article comparing OS marketshare that UNIX and Linux are generally counted separately because they get more complaints when they mix them than when they don't.
SGI does still sell IRIX last I checked, but I don't think it'd be a very big slice of the pie.
Seriously. There's no way in hell I'd have gone to a college that forced me to spend $600-$1000 dollars on a laptop in addition to $200-$400 on books per semester.
This is a horrible idea. Crime in the area around my first college was bad, I'd hate to think what it would be like with _every_ student carrying several hundred dollars worth of pawnable hardware. I also see plenty of students incredibly pissed at having to allocate hundreds of dollars to a laptop that they need for food. Not to mention that it's a laptop that they, effectively, aren't going to have full control over what they run on.
Please, don't be so cheap.
That's when you write a book and spend the next several years of your life giving speeches at Universities (like Mitnick, Poulson, etc). Being a victim in the United States can be great for your career as long as it doesn't kill you.
Totalitarian regimes always fall. As things get worse and worse, more and more people are negatively impacted, and as a result, more and more people start taking things seriously. Even if they're ignorant and don't really understand what's going on, most people wake up when they realize things are "majorly sucking". Even if they don't know exactly who to blame and haven't really thought it through, they know that they're angry and that, somehow, the people "in control" must be at fault. Eventually there are too many for the oppressors to beat down, no matter what technological advantages they may have.
It's an endless dance. The cycle of tyranny, rebellion, liberty, and decadence will probably continue until the end of time.
The only way they could do that is with nuclear weapons, in which case there wouldn't really be anything left to rule over. Not to mention they'd also be killed by some truly massive fallout.
"YWHW"
The secret spelling of the name of "Yahoo"?
The whole point of writing articles like this is so people WILL stop using their services. If no one bitched, most people wouldn't know about it.
Let'* **amine this a bit more closely. It'* *** like censorship is going to wind up being one of the Four Hor***** of the Apocalypse or anything. That would be as **** as a pile of acorns.
It seems that it's not a good idea to be too agreeable, because people won't be worried about screwing you over or making you angry like they are about the crazy one-eyed biker in the corner.
Yes, I know they're a business and can make their own rules (within some common sense boundaries), but it's still sad to see them giving in to this sort of crap. For fear or profit, I don't know, but it's still ridiculous.
That's the point. When you try to only use simple words/expressions to express something complex, you will either wind up with an unwieldly sentence like that one, or you'll wind up leaving things out.
The writer could say "This man is good, so people should be good to him", but that would be far too vague to get the message across.
Students would then have to spend much of their time explaining concepts that would best be given their own word.
"This man is good in the way that a man who protects others is good. He should be given good things and treated good so others want to be good in the way that a man who protects others is good."
"This man is heroic, so he should be honored."
The first one uses simple words to say the same thing as the second, but it take forever to write out most of my thoughts like that. It'd be like coding in a language and only using the built-in functions, and never touching the libraries or writing your own.
If the language used by a culture begins to be less capable of expressing intricate thoughts and emotions, it's not a change for the better. A simple language is the mark of a simple culture, which was Orwell's point.
There once was a geek who was bored
All other systems he'd explored
So he added one more to his hoard
Though against his methods the vendor implored.
If I understand correctly, plagiarism is taking credit for something that someone else created, not copying something someone else created. I could see why a University might want the first rule you spoke of, but they shouldn't call it plagiarism.
"Maybe in more civilized countries, but not in the USA. Here, we take pride in glamorizing violence as it contributes nothing at all to society, while degrading the reason that we are all here."
What bizarro-land do you live in? The majority of the US seems to glorify both of them. I can certainly walk through the mall and look at posters of all-but-naked women without someone trying to burn them or a guy in a blue butterfly suit jumping in front of me. And violence will be necessary as long as there is _anyone_ willing to use it to their own advantage. Tibet tried pacifism; look where it got them.
Well, during my freshman year in college one of the English professors grabbed a student's laptop and said that plagiarism was equivalent to that (she returned it, of course). They went more for morality instead of legality, which I thought was a pretty good idea. While many college students have anarchistic tendencies, most of them consider themselves moral in one fashion or another.
I think plagiarism is more like lying than stealing (taking credit for others work), but the main point is the same.
I've used shoes for so long that I'm not sure how well I could live without them. Shaking this addiction would probably cause me physical harm. If I hadn't started using them so much, I probably wouldn't need them so much now.
I'm also psychologically addicted to toothpaste. Even though my body doesn't require it to survive, I don't think I could ever convince myself to stop using it without great pressure.
Computers are a tool, folks. They're used so much because they're a tool for a very wide variety of things. Imagine how much you'd use a car that did fifty other things for you.
"Which is as it should be. Because if left to our own devices, programmers would always use the most whiz-bang, untested, unstable stuff out there. It's the technophile nature."
Of course, that's what the home, lab, or combination of the two is for. One of the niftiest things about open source projects is that they give the bleeding-edge "untested" stuff a testing ground and developer community, and often result in useful software. There generally aren't set-in-stone deadlines or things that absolutely "cannot go down", so people are free to use what they like.
It also takes up their free time, sadly. Oh, well.
1. Shadowrun, Sega Genesis. This game had a good storyline and more "player freedom" than most of the games I'd played at this point (I was eight or nine when it came out, I think). I really liked the world it was set in, and a bit of searching around to find out more about it brought me to the Gibson cyberpunk novels it was based on. The first cartridge I played it on had a bad battery in it, sadly, so I had to leave my system on for incredible lengths of time to finish it, but I did.
2. Shining Force, Genesis. These (it was a series) really played on my love of fantasy as a child. I think this was the first strategy game I played, as well, and got me into the genre.
3. Secret of Evermore, SNES. I played through this across many visits to a relative's house. Probably still one of the best action-RPGs out there.
I'm leaving out some great stuff, but I believe these are my "top three most loved".