The N800's handwriting recognition is too slow and unreliable. The Palm with Tealscript trained to do the original Graffiti is lightning fast. On the 800, the virtual keyboard is twice as fast as handwriting.
I'd gladly pay for Tealscript on the 800 but in the meantime I carry a Cambridge pad and pencils.
It's all about attitude--and that has to be learned.
Watch dogs; it's not the big dogs that win, it's the dogs with a big attitude.
When my kids were still kids, my son came in the house one day complaining that one of the other kids had pushed him off his bike and taken it away. I asked, "is he bigger than you?" When he said, "much bigger", I told him to find a stick and hit the kid with it until he got his bike back. Yah--I'm a really bad parent.
A little while later he came back on his bike and put a baseball bat back where it belonged. I asked him if he'd hit the other kid. He said, "Nah--as soon as he saw me he left my bike and ran away."
That by itself would be a good story, but the icing on the cake is a few minutes later when an irate father and his bawling eight-year-old appear at my door. Apparently my kid beat up his kid and he wants an apology. So I call my kid to the door. The father takes one look at my four-year-old, grabs his kid by the ear, apologises, and leaves.
It would be a lot more impressive if they'd invent a hearing aid that doesn't need an expensive custom-fitting that has to be repeated every few years.
What's truly amazing is that you understood that abomination of a sentence well enough to respond to it. I must be slipping--I thought sure I could punctuate it into sensibility but I'm stumped.
They didn't look at cell phone use at all. What they did was compare accident rates before and after the legislation. They found no difference.
The point is, if the legislation was intended to reduce accidents, it failed.
That's what happens when you put too much weight on correlation in poorly-controlled studies.
When someone finally does a gold-standard study, I'm going to guess that using a cell phone while driving is a proxy for personality traits that make you prone to get into accidents (the word "klutz" comes to mind.)
It's the end of an era I guess. This story throws me back to 1964, wandering the North Atlantic aboard HMSS Hudson, doing marine geophysical surveys.
When it came to positioning, we left nothing to chance; we had the requisite equipment (pre-computer), tables and charts for LORAN, DECCA, CONSOL and the brand-new, edge of the technical envelope, VLF. Sometimes we used a few of them together, with transparent overlays giving a very small polygon containing, somewhere within it, our little ship. We liked to brag that we could pin down our position within its length.
One of my favourite duties was radar watch and navigation, especially late at night, lights dimmed, phosphorous glow from both the radar screen and the froth on the waves ahead. Transferring readings from the radios and charting our course made me an integral part of the process, acutely aware of the immensity of the ocean around us and challenged to keep us from losing our way. I can still smell the mixture of diesel, coffee and ammonia (from the weather fax machine) that permeated the bridge.
Now, with the retiring of LORAN, it's finally all gone, replaced by an LCD display your grandmother can use. Sad.
On the other hand, contrary to all expectations, the developers might one day listen to their prospective user community and build something good enough.
By "interesting things", we'll assume you mean interesting to him.
Given his age, that probably means something webish, so Javascript is the obvious choice for the kind of instant gratification a 12-year-old will need.
If he's into games, then the language of choice is probably whatever will let him mod his favourite.
If he likes to play with numbers, it's VBA and Excel--or R.
Is he into computer graphics (not digital painting)? Then you want to introduce him to Processing.
This isn't a bad idea. I ran into a systems integrator a few decades ago where the project managers bid margin points that translated to real dollars for the programmers they wanted. The programmers got to decide which bids to accept and which projects to work on. A few of them were making six-figures, and there were no illusions about productivity. The PMs I talked to told me that there was a 50:1 ratio between the best and the grunts.
These towns had councils, reeves and sheriffs and all the machinery of law. They were also armed against the threats of the contemporary version of biker gangs who, as a consequence, behaved themselves in town. As I said, pretty quiet places.
Not to rain on your parade, but you may not have noticed that all the "wild west" stories about places like Dodge City and Tombstone are about federal marshals abusing their power and getting little help from the citizenry.
In fact, the "wild west" was a pretty quiet place that only became wild when the US Marshals arrived and disarmed the townspeople, creating a large supply of victims that in turn justified the federal presence.
The problem here is not a lack of police with the jurisdiction to investigate and arrest suspected hackers. The subject countries have lots of those.
What's missing is a state willingness to prosecute, a willingness that won't change just because the cops are enforcers from Superpol. There is no reason to believe that the US, for example, would let a bunch of policemen from Europe and the Middle East come in and arrest US citizens on the basis of allegations that they broke some Saudi law. They barely tolerate Interpol, and those guys are just librarians.
When you balance the probable damage a "global police force" would do (is anyone naive enough to think that their mandate wouldn't be expanded?) against the damage that expatriate hackers do, the wise thing is to go with the hackers. The proper solution is the one already in place, and that's to have bilateral and multi-lateral extradition agreements.
Sending contract cops into a country that doesn't have laws against hacking may make good TV but the real-life consequences are much more complicated.
Except for the lack of an automatic page-turner, Daniel's device is the same as one you can buy commercially for about $20,000 (http://www.treventus.com/bookscanner_pageturner.html).
Slashdot Mirror
The N800's handwriting recognition is too slow and unreliable. The Palm with Tealscript trained to do the original Graffiti is lightning fast. On the 800, the virtual keyboard is twice as fast as handwriting.
I'd gladly pay for Tealscript on the 800 but in the meantime I carry a Cambridge pad and pencils.
There's a fat, bold, impossible to miss, line between climate science and climate evangelism; the IPCC clambered over it a long time ago.
I hadn't thought of that angle. It must be a real embarrassment working with or for Mundie.
Craig Mundie is making Dick Brass' point about Microsoft losing its competent people.
Good Grief, Alice! They've invented cache!
It's all about attitude--and that has to be learned.
Watch dogs; it's not the big dogs that win, it's the dogs with a big attitude.
When my kids were still kids, my son came in the house one day complaining that one of the other kids had pushed him off his bike and taken it away. I asked, "is he bigger than you?" When he said, "much bigger", I told him to find a stick and hit the kid with it until he got his bike back. Yah--I'm a really bad parent.
A little while later he came back on his bike and put a baseball bat back where it belonged. I asked him if he'd hit the other kid. He said, "Nah--as soon as he saw me he left my bike and ran away."
That by itself would be a good story, but the icing on the cake is a few minutes later when an irate father and his bawling eight-year-old appear at my door. Apparently my kid beat up his kid and he wants an apology. So I call my kid to the door. The father takes one look at my four-year-old, grabs his kid by the ear, apologises, and leaves.
Attitude
It would be a lot more impressive if they'd invent a hearing aid that doesn't need an expensive custom-fitting that has to be repeated every few years.
What's truly amazing is that you understood that abomination of a sentence well enough to respond to it. I must be slipping--I thought sure I could punctuate it into sensibility but I'm stumped.
That's precisely their point.
RTFA
They didn't look at cell phone use at all. What they did was compare accident rates before and after the legislation. They found no difference.
The point is, if the legislation was intended to reduce accidents, it failed.
That's what happens when you put too much weight on correlation in poorly-controlled studies.
When someone finally does a gold-standard study, I'm going to guess that using a cell phone while driving is a proxy for personality traits that make you prone to get into accidents (the word "klutz" comes to mind.)
It's the end of an era I guess. This story throws me back to 1964, wandering the North Atlantic aboard HMSS Hudson, doing marine geophysical surveys.
When it came to positioning, we left nothing to chance; we had the requisite equipment (pre-computer), tables and charts for LORAN, DECCA, CONSOL and the brand-new, edge of the technical envelope, VLF. Sometimes we used a few of them together, with transparent overlays giving a very small polygon containing, somewhere within it, our little ship. We liked to brag that we could pin down our position within its length.
One of my favourite duties was radar watch and navigation, especially late at night, lights dimmed, phosphorous glow from both the radar screen and the froth on the waves ahead. Transferring readings from the radios and charting our course made me an integral part of the process, acutely aware of the immensity of the ocean around us and challenged to keep us from losing our way. I can still smell the mixture of diesel, coffee and ammonia (from the weather fax machine) that permeated the bridge.
Now, with the retiring of LORAN, it's finally all gone, replaced by an LCD display your grandmother can use. Sad.
Oops! Got my languages mixed up. Change that to
I'd guess more like
It's all about the numbers. India's population is so huge that the ends of the intelligence curve are significant.
At one end, India has more super-programmers than the US has programmers.
At the other end, India has more homicidal morons than the US has morons.
Say something someone takes offense to and in the US you'll get picketted. In India someone will burn your house down.
You can't much blame the Indian government for worrying.
You're asking, "Is OpenOffice good enough?"
The answer, writ bold upon the wall, is "No!"
On the other hand, contrary to all expectations, the developers might one day listen to their prospective user community and build something good enough.
So Microsoft intends to compete with open source on open source's turf. In what way is this news?
That's what right-click is for. Oh. Sorry.
There's something to that. It's how I learned.
They put me in a room with nothing in it but a computer no one was using, and a box of manuals. Curiosity did the rest.
By "interesting things", we'll assume you mean interesting to him.
Given his age, that probably means something webish, so Javascript is the obvious choice for the kind of instant gratification a 12-year-old will need.
If he's into games, then the language of choice is probably whatever will let him mod his favourite.
If he likes to play with numbers, it's VBA and Excel--or R.
Is he into computer graphics (not digital painting)? Then you want to introduce him to Processing.
Lots of choices
This isn't a bad idea. I ran into a systems integrator a few decades ago where the project managers bid margin points that translated to real dollars for the programmers they wanted. The programmers got to decide which bids to accept and which projects to work on. A few of them were making six-figures, and there were no illusions about productivity. The PMs I talked to told me that there was a 50:1 ratio between the best and the grunts.
"Pretty quiet place", not "crime-free utopia."
These towns had councils, reeves and sheriffs and all the machinery of law. They were also armed against the threats of the contemporary version of biker gangs who, as a consequence, behaved themselves in town. As I said, pretty quiet places.
Not to rain on your parade, but you may not have noticed that all the "wild west" stories about places like Dodge City and Tombstone are about federal marshals abusing their power and getting little help from the citizenry.
In fact, the "wild west" was a pretty quiet place that only became wild when the US Marshals arrived and disarmed the townspeople, creating a large supply of victims that in turn justified the federal presence.
I'm not sure how that translates to the internet.
The problem here is not a lack of police with the jurisdiction to investigate and arrest suspected hackers. The subject countries have lots of those.
What's missing is a state willingness to prosecute, a willingness that won't change just because the cops are enforcers from Superpol. There is no reason to believe that the US, for example, would let a bunch of policemen from Europe and the Middle East come in and arrest US citizens on the basis of allegations that they broke some Saudi law. They barely tolerate Interpol, and those guys are just librarians.
When you balance the probable damage a "global police force" would do (is anyone naive enough to think that their mandate wouldn't be expanded?) against the damage that expatriate hackers do, the wise thing is to go with the hackers. The proper solution is the one already in place, and that's to have bilateral and multi-lateral extradition agreements.
Sending contract cops into a country that doesn't have laws against hacking may make good TV but the real-life consequences are much more complicated.
Except for the lack of an automatic page-turner, Daniel's device is the same as one you can buy commercially for about $20,000 (http://www.treventus.com/bookscanner_pageturner.html).
He was wise to decide on manual page-turning.
You really should make up your mind. Are they 'hotshots' or incompetent. You can't have it both ways.