Avira's pop-up can easily be blocked, unless you run a Home version of Windows, which IIRC requires a Safe Mode boot and some mumbo-jumbo. On more functional versions of Windows you can easily disallow the execution of avnotify.exe and you're done.
That being said, I've heard good things about Panda antivirus-in-a-cloud as well as Avast! - along with Avira, they would be my top three of free antivirus programs to install on my family members' computers.
Maybe because it is easier to keep things at the edge of your field of vision?
Just guessing...
Anyway, I already wear contact lenses. I wouldn't mind upgrading, though, as long as they were as easy to maintain as my gas-permeable hard lenses (which I wash in water and soap, not special overpriced solutions).
Not only can you take these lenses out and replace them with common lenses (or nothing, as the case may be); just imagine the dystopian scenario presented above.
Imagine, if you will, a world where there are omnipresent attacks on your eyeballs. No, wait, you don't have to imagine: you live in it.
As far as I understand this technology, it is useless without outside input. And where there is outside input, there are also filters. For instance, you may connect your mobile phone (or a piece of hi-tech jewelery; I am certain there will be some, just as there are USB pendants and rings) to your lenses and have an ad-blocker running on the phone. Just imagine the augmented reality in a world where bulletin boards are digitized and you can block them...
If a technology catches on, each and every one of us who would use it would have to see some benefit in it. And that benefit would have to outweigh the disadvantages, or the technology would have to be abandoned.
Isn't something similar part of OS X copy protection? Text within a kernel module or something such. Can't understand how I can't find it using Google.
This post won't earn me any credits =P, the actual text would had:D
You mean the part where it is said that OS X may only be installed on Apple-branded hardware?
I’ve always wondered whether that was why they gave you those Apple stickers. Instant Apple-branded hardware!
Impressively stupid.
I think I would have switched to such an account, fired several people high up and then feigned surprise that such a thing could have happened.
Anyone who finds a girlfriend through the internet is a fucking loser.
Unlike those who cannot find a girlfriend in any way conceivable, which makes them wanking losers.
I’d rather be a fucking loser, if it’s all the same to you.
Teaching the basic concepts is more important than anything else. The mere fact that computers can be programmed to do what you want them to do is the most fundamental fact most people never learn.
Teach him to understand the basics and everything else, including the language choice, will come on its own.
Curiosity is always there, and therefore so is the incentive to learn.
You just have to find what it is that the kid wants to do. It's motivation that's important; the rest will come of its own, and all you have to do is point at the right tools.
BTW I consider Python a good choice for a programming language because its syntax is basically pseudocode; as of yet, there is nothing more legible that I know of.
I'd been rather pleased with Snow Leopard right until I got hit by the Hoefler Text glitch, which crashes text processors and fucks up a number of fonts. Still waiting for the fix.
I gave up on GNOME completely somewhere around 2.08; I'd hated it ever since the switch from 1.4 to 2.0.
I'm rather pleased with the new KDE, and Enlightenment is promising much as well.
I just got done working on my grandparents machine. They only have dial up, with one phone line in the house. They connect, check their email via POP3, and disconnect. They had 336 viruses that I could find (many of them worms). I don't think connection times matter that much, especially since this was over a 56k modem only connected a few times a week for 10-20 minutes at a shot.
That's why I put Kubuntu on my grandfather's machine. The worst he can do now is unlock the desktop widgets and move stuff off the taskbar.
I think it would be meritorious and ethical for MS to patch every windows machine that comes knocking on their door.
But expecting MS to share the blame that is rightly entirely that of the pirates that are refusing to patch their boxes is unreasonable.
The pirates have no legitimate reason to demand that updates from MS not trash their windows installs. They have unclean hands and so on. By refusing to update their boxes they are aiding and abetting the damage done by malware authors. Whether said updates would cause collateral damage against something they have no right to possess in the first place is immaterial.
So, by refusing to brick their machines, pirates take the blame for not patching?
By the same logic, by refusing to put a bullet through my head I take the blame for failing to protect myself?
Microsoft has benefited greatly from piracy. It helped them build their market share. Now collateral damage from piracy inconveniences legitimate users the most.
Keeping all machines patched is something that would help Microsoft keep their market share and build a better reputation. Their security tools are only as good as the weakest zombie in a botnet - if users are in any way discouraged to run security tools (and even legitimate users may be, because "an update bricked Tony's computer, and he knows more about that stuff than I do, whatever shall I do if it happens to me?"), they will not run them. If Windows Update nags them to restart every several minutes after updates are installed, as it does on the XP machine I use at work, people will turn off automatic updates because they interfere with their work.
Microsoft must choose whether the savings they make on bandwidth and the few converts from pirate versions of their overpriced OS are worth all the shit everyone else has to take. Since it is mostly everyone else who takes this shit, I guess they're just fine with it.
What percentage of the Windows PCs in China are running a licensed copy of Windows?
If Hungary can be used as a base of estimate, I'd say somewhere between 0 and 1.
We just don't give a shit about your licencing issues. I'm not even sure fair use doesn't cover it for personal use, and I have certainly never seen anyone who didn't run a business and cared. And for the people who do, it's just a drop in the bucket in case of an audit (tax evasion is a national sport here: the alternative is bankruptcy).
I see Hungary is in no better state than Croatia.
Do you think we could push tax evasion as the next Olympic sport? I hear the Swedes are great at it, too...
If you believe students are learning more than they did 50 years you're living in an *absolute* fantasy land.
Learning more?
Not at all. They are probably learning less, but there is in fact much more to learn.
And this is despite the increased length of compulsory education.
BTW curious tidbit just crossed my mind: instead of teaching touch typing, Croatian schools recently reintroduced calligraphy. Instead of learning normal cursive script (joined-up writing), first-graders are taught old-style calligraphy. The fact that practically no-one uses a pen these days seems to have escaped the 19th century educators.
Bloody morons.
That sounds like a great idea. Seriously. The children will learn to focus on what they're doing, and I'm fairly sure 11 months of calligraphy and 1 month of cursive will produce better cursive writing than 12 months of cursive.
It is not a great idea. Kids are forced to produce markedly thin up-lines and thick down-lines using writing tools which do not in fact produce those kinds of lines. It is moronic.
Has calculus changed in the last 150 years?
Has English changed (aside from a handful of grammar constructs, a few words, etc.) in the last 50?
Does addition work differently that it did in the 15 century?
No, they do not. And have not.
But the world in fact has changed. If nothing had changed, as your limited examples seem to indicate, why then have we gone from four years of obligatory education to eight, nine, ten or twelve, depending on the country?
The prevailing opinion seems to be (I've asked the question many times) that there is so much more to learn than before.
Now, I don't know how calculus is taught in the USA or Britain, but I do know there are several teaching styles, even at the level of multiplication and division. But once we go past that level, many things have changed: nowadays, at least in Croatia, not even engineering students know how to use a slide rule. Logarithm tables are pretty much a thing of the past; they have been superseded by calculators. Calculating square and cube roots is something I have been taught only as a curiosity, to see how it used to be done in the old days.
Human knowledge has increased a great deal. The level of knowledge of an average human, on the other hand, is a wholly different thing.
Adding new teaching methods is a good idea if they work and help learning. i.e. putting full color 3-D graphs of certain functions in calc. books.
But adding new technology is bad if it isn't used correctly. i.e. putting "smartboards", projectors, etc. in every classroom. No teacher knows how to use them, they are all required to use them, and student learning completely stops. Sitting in class for 20 minutes because the teacher can't get the computer to talk to the projector HARMS learning.
Agreed. But computers are omnipresent in the outside world, and basic concepts, such as touch typing, security and so forth, should be taught in the same way safe sex is taught.
Admittedly, the success rate would probably be as low, but it would be better than nothing, which we have now.
Unfortunately, every time anyone tries to put "technology" into public schools, it fails miserably. Students are much better off taking notes from a lecture written on a chalkboard than watching a presentation bluescreen for the third time this week.
True. But that's actually my point: current, established technologies, such as computers, have not been taught properly. At the same time, a fairly new technology, rather poorly tested and fault- and fool-proofed, such as the smartboard, is being pushed into classrooms.
People are very quick to say "TEACHERS ARE OUT OF DATE!", but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The material being taught hasn't changed because IT STILL WORKS LIKE IT DID BACK THEN!
Some of it does. Some of it does not. But I am not saying teachers are outdated, though in some respects they are. I am saying the school system as it is is completely outdated. Like an overgrown bureaucracy, the school system has overgrown.
The other argument is that classes are "less relevant" to today's students. This is really just another way of saying "students are lazy and without spinning animations on screen every 5 seconds they start to daydream".
They are less relevant because there are more of them than several decades ago. Again, I am not exactly familiar with the American educational system, so YMMV. However, most of the education people get has little relevance to their vocations, and the more education they get, the less relevant it is.
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Avira's pop-up can easily be blocked, unless you run a Home version of Windows, which IIRC requires a Safe Mode boot and some mumbo-jumbo. On more functional versions of Windows you can easily disallow the execution of avnotify.exe and you're done.
That being said, I've heard good things about Panda antivirus-in-a-cloud as well as Avast! - along with Avira, they would be my top three of free antivirus programs to install on my family members' computers.
Oh, great. Now sungazing could actually have a purpose.
Maybe because it is easier to keep things at the edge of your field of vision?
Just guessing...
Anyway, I already wear contact lenses. I wouldn't mind upgrading, though, as long as they were as easy to maintain as my gas-permeable hard lenses (which I wash in water and soap, not special overpriced solutions).
Not only can you take these lenses out and replace them with common lenses (or nothing, as the case may be); just imagine the dystopian scenario presented above.
Imagine, if you will, a world where there are omnipresent attacks on your eyeballs. No, wait, you don't have to imagine: you live in it.
As far as I understand this technology, it is useless without outside input. And where there is outside input, there are also filters. For instance, you may connect your mobile phone (or a piece of hi-tech jewelery; I am certain there will be some, just as there are USB pendants and rings) to your lenses and have an ad-blocker running on the phone. Just imagine the augmented reality in a world where bulletin boards are digitized and you can block them...
If a technology catches on, each and every one of us who would use it would have to see some benefit in it. And that benefit would have to outweigh the disadvantages, or the technology would have to be abandoned.
Isn't something similar part of OS X copy protection? Text within a kernel module or something such. Can't understand how I can't find it using Google.
This post won't earn me any credits =P, the actual text would had :D
You mean the part where it is said that OS X may only be installed on Apple-branded hardware?
I’ve always wondered whether that was why they gave you those Apple stickers. Instant Apple-branded hardware!
Remember: it is only illegal if you get caught. ;)
Impressively stupid.
I think I would have switched to such an account, fired several people high up and then feigned surprise that such a thing could have happened.
Even shorter: just "I".
Anyone who finds a girlfriend through the internet is a fucking loser.
Unlike those who cannot find a girlfriend in any way conceivable, which makes them wanking losers.
I’d rather be a fucking loser, if it’s all the same to you.
Teach him Malbolge. Enjoy the transformation of a normal kid to Sheldon Cooper.
Teaching the basic concepts is more important than anything else. The mere fact that computers can be programmed to do what you want them to do is the most fundamental fact most people never learn.
Teach him to understand the basics and everything else, including the language choice, will come on its own.
Curiosity is always there, and therefore so is the incentive to learn.
You just have to find what it is that the kid wants to do. It's motivation that's important; the rest will come of its own, and all you have to do is point at the right tools.
BTW I consider Python a good choice for a programming language because its syntax is basically pseudocode; as of yet, there is nothing more legible that I know of.
I'd been rather pleased with Snow Leopard right until I got hit by the Hoefler Text glitch, which crashes text processors and fucks up a number of fonts. Still waiting for the fix.
I gave up on GNOME completely somewhere around 2.08; I'd hated it ever since the switch from 1.4 to 2.0.
I'm rather pleased with the new KDE, and Enlightenment is promising much as well.
Unfortunately, it won’t help him. Mono runs on Slack as well.
They had: war victory dance.
We have: teabagging.
Funny, but the real answer is GDI.
As opposed to the Brotherhood of Nod?
I just got done working on my grandparents machine. They only have dial up, with one phone line in the house. They connect, check their email via POP3, and disconnect. They had 336 viruses that I could find (many of them worms). I don't think connection times matter that much, especially since this was over a 56k modem only connected a few times a week for 10-20 minutes at a shot.
That's why I put Kubuntu on my grandfather's machine. The worst he can do now is unlock the desktop widgets and move stuff off the taskbar.
They'd manually edit the Windows Registry with nothing but a cutlass and a corkscrew.
Having worked with Regedit, I now actually prefer the cutlass and the corkscrew.
I think it would be meritorious and ethical for MS to patch every windows machine that comes knocking on their door.
But expecting MS to share the blame that is rightly entirely that of the pirates that are refusing to patch their boxes is unreasonable.
The pirates have no legitimate reason to demand that updates from MS not trash their windows installs. They have unclean hands and so on. By refusing to update their boxes they are aiding and abetting the damage done by malware authors. Whether said updates would cause collateral damage against something they have no right to possess in the first place is immaterial.
So, by refusing to brick their machines, pirates take the blame for not patching?
By the same logic, by refusing to put a bullet through my head I take the blame for failing to protect myself?
Microsoft has benefited greatly from piracy. It helped them build their market share. Now collateral damage from piracy inconveniences legitimate users the most.
Keeping all machines patched is something that would help Microsoft keep their market share and build a better reputation. Their security tools are only as good as the weakest zombie in a botnet - if users are in any way discouraged to run security tools (and even legitimate users may be, because "an update bricked Tony's computer, and he knows more about that stuff than I do, whatever shall I do if it happens to me?"), they will not run them. If Windows Update nags them to restart every several minutes after updates are installed, as it does on the XP machine I use at work, people will turn off automatic updates because they interfere with their work.
Microsoft must choose whether the savings they make on bandwidth and the few converts from pirate versions of their overpriced OS are worth all the shit everyone else has to take. Since it is mostly everyone else who takes this shit, I guess they're just fine with it.
What percentage of the Windows PCs in China are running a licensed copy of Windows?
If Hungary can be used as a base of estimate, I'd say somewhere between 0 and 1.
We just don't give a shit about your licencing issues. I'm not even sure fair use doesn't cover it for personal use, and I have certainly never seen anyone who didn't run a business and cared. And for the people who do, it's just a drop in the bucket in case of an audit (tax evasion is a national sport here: the alternative is bankruptcy).
I see Hungary is in no better state than Croatia.
Do you think we could push tax evasion as the next Olympic sport? I hear the Swedes are great at it, too...
If you believe students are learning more than they did 50 years you're living in an *absolute* fantasy land.
Learning more?
Not at all. They are probably learning less, but there is in fact much more to learn.
And this is despite the increased length of compulsory education.
BTW curious tidbit just crossed my mind: instead of teaching touch typing, Croatian schools recently reintroduced calligraphy. Instead of learning normal cursive script (joined-up writing), first-graders are taught old-style calligraphy. The fact that practically no-one uses a pen these days seems to have escaped the 19th century educators. Bloody morons. That sounds like a great idea. Seriously. The children will learn to focus on what they're doing, and I'm fairly sure 11 months of calligraphy and 1 month of cursive will produce better cursive writing than 12 months of cursive.
It is not a great idea. Kids are forced to produce markedly thin up-lines and thick down-lines using writing tools which do not in fact produce those kinds of lines. It is moronic.
Has calculus changed in the last 150 years? Has English changed (aside from a handful of grammar constructs, a few words, etc.) in the last 50? Does addition work differently that it did in the 15 century?
No, they do not. And have not.
But the world in fact has changed. If nothing had changed, as your limited examples seem to indicate, why then have we gone from four years of obligatory education to eight, nine, ten or twelve, depending on the country?
The prevailing opinion seems to be (I've asked the question many times) that there is so much more to learn than before.
Now, I don't know how calculus is taught in the USA or Britain, but I do know there are several teaching styles, even at the level of multiplication and division. But once we go past that level, many things have changed: nowadays, at least in Croatia, not even engineering students know how to use a slide rule. Logarithm tables are pretty much a thing of the past; they have been superseded by calculators. Calculating square and cube roots is something I have been taught only as a curiosity, to see how it used to be done in the old days.
Human knowledge has increased a great deal. The level of knowledge of an average human, on the other hand, is a wholly different thing.
Adding new teaching methods is a good idea if they work and help learning. i.e. putting full color 3-D graphs of certain functions in calc. books. But adding new technology is bad if it isn't used correctly. i.e. putting "smartboards", projectors, etc. in every classroom. No teacher knows how to use them, they are all required to use them, and student learning completely stops. Sitting in class for 20 minutes because the teacher can't get the computer to talk to the projector HARMS learning.
Agreed. But computers are omnipresent in the outside world, and basic concepts, such as touch typing, security and so forth, should be taught in the same way safe sex is taught.
Admittedly, the success rate would probably be as low, but it would be better than nothing, which we have now.
Unfortunately, every time anyone tries to put "technology" into public schools, it fails miserably. Students are much better off taking notes from a lecture written on a chalkboard than watching a presentation bluescreen for the third time this week.
True. But that's actually my point: current, established technologies, such as computers, have not been taught properly. At the same time, a fairly new technology, rather poorly tested and fault- and fool-proofed, such as the smartboard, is being pushed into classrooms.
People are very quick to say "TEACHERS ARE OUT OF DATE!", but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The material being taught hasn't changed because IT STILL WORKS LIKE IT DID BACK THEN!
Some of it does. Some of it does not. But I am not saying teachers are outdated, though in some respects they are. I am saying the school system as it is is completely outdated. Like an overgrown bureaucracy, the school system has overgrown.
The other argument is that classes are "less relevant" to today's students. This is really just another way of saying "students are lazy and without spinning animations on screen every 5 seconds they start to daydream".
They are less relevant because there are more of them than several decades ago. Again, I am not exactly familiar with the American educational system, so YMMV. However, most of the education people get has little relevance to their vocations, and the more education they get, the less relevant it is.
People really do make themselves look like mindless sheep, by continuing to regurgitate the Gandhi quote. Seriously, come up with something else.
Innovation for its own sake is futile. The shoe fits.