The Chronicle Herald has another article on this. In it one of the county councilors (or similar) says that the tower can be avoided by 2 kms of cable, something I find highly unlikely for a number of reasons. This ignores the point of the tower, which is to provide ubiquitous and cheap high bandwidth (I'm talking at least 10Mbps) internet to 99% of the population of Nova Scotia. Around a third of the population lives in the capital area, which along with other urban areas in the province has easy access to high-speed internet. However, nearly half of the provincial population is rural or very rural or extremely rural (like half an hour down a dirt road from just a corner store rural). Now some of these areas have access to digital cable and therefore cable internet (hell, some can even pull a decent DSL connection), and therefore, the towers are not needed. In Victoria Harbour, however, which is 30 km (straight line) from the closest town that could be reasonably classified as urban, is not one of those locations. The cost for Eastlink to ensure that the cable to every house (if it exists in the first place) is capable of carrying the higher bandwidth required for internet would be prohibitive to begin with, not to even mention replacing old and stringing new cable. The tower makes much more economic sense, as the costs associated are stringing one cable (which may already be in place) and erecting the damn thing. This also ignores the fact that many other such towers have been erected in primarily agricultural areas of the province with no ill effect. Some of you may have already eaten blueberries grown not 50 meters from one such tower. Okay, maybe not, but the point still stands. This one farmer doesn't understand the science, let alone the economic benefits to the area, behind the tower. I really hope Industry Canada overrules Kings County Council.
That's not the point ^^ was making. Give us a relatively cheap ($30-40US) app with inexpensive (or even free) map packs. You download only the the maps that you need for the foreseeable future, and save a lot of space on your iPhone. Say you live in Maine, but are taking a trip to NYC. Then you would download only the New England maps. Going across the country to San Fransisco? Download the maps between Maine and California, but not any of the Canada, southeast US, or northwest US maps. You would save a lot of space, and probably some money as well.
Techdirt has a post saying just this. Cuban fails to realize that all his arguments don't apply to only free models, but rather any business that sells a product or service, regardless of the price (free or otherwise).
I would tend to agree with this. There is nothing general purpose about using hardware the way it was specifically designed to be used. Unless there's something that CS4 will be using the GPU for that isn't mentioned in the article, then there's nothing really exceptional for the GPU to do that it wouldn't normally be doing before. You would be expect most of these features to be supported in any 3D game produced in the last 5 years or so. There's nothing really special about using a GPU to do anti-aliasing, after all.
If you are going this route, then include the specs for the power source; i.e. "This frame takes two 1.5V DC batteries placed in series. That's a steady 3 volts for those that didn't know."
I've used it for university assignments (mostly lab reports), and while it's better than the offering from MS, it still doesn't compare to LaTex. Remember that there's a reason that some journals only have a few formats that they'll accept papers in, and that LaTex is usually one of them.
It seems that AOL is censoring the names of alternative IM clients in the linked forum. Everywhere that Miranda or Pidgin should appear, there's... instead. Ironically, iChat and Jabber are not censored (yes, I know that Jabber doesn't connect to ICQ).
Well at least I know why I wasn't connecting to ICQ earlier.
While I generally agree with you, I think that students should have at least one programming language, as well as two or three number crunching languages, such as Matlab, IDL, Maple, Labview, or Mathematica (the last two being the ones that I haven't used as an electrical engineering new grad). You can do a lot with Matlab, but sometimes you need something more along the lines of C++. My sister had to learn Java when she was doing her physics and math degree. She may not have used Java since, but she has used what she has learned in that class.
If you don't want to spend the money to buy a preloaded, and don't want to pay for a windows license, I highly suggest building your own. All of the smaller computer shops that I've dealt with don't force you to buy a copy of windows when you buy a new computer from parts. They'll also install all the hardware for you as well.
This option also usually ends up being cheaper in the long run as well. I spent $1600 on my latest computer that would have cost me over $2000 to get from Dell at the time. In fact, a similarly speced computer from Dell still cost $1400 nearly two years later, although it does have a better CPU and GPU.
I was going to suggest either your local food bank or salvation army. Any other charity would be appropriate as well. Most places just need a computer that can run a word processor and surf the web.
I don't own a Wii (although I'm not be against the idea), but I'm seriously considering buying a couple of Wiimotes just to try out some of these hacks. Johnny has made these so easy that even my Law student roommate could probably pull them off. Okay, maybe he'd need me and my CMPE roommate, but the point is that he makes it easy.
Well, there is the small fact that the Silver Dart flew less than 50km (30 miles) from the planed location of the space port.
Also, as far as the location goes, from what I've heard from press releases and interviews, pound per pound, the Russians use less fuel to send up a Soyuz than the Americans to send up a Shuttle in order to rendezvous with the ISS, simply because of the latitude. I don't know how accurate that is, as I haven't done any research on it, but that's what I've been told.
In Montreal's defense, there is free parking... near McGill University. And probably near Concordia as well. Both are well within walking distance of the location, although granted, I don't think Apple wants their customers walking the kilometre it would take to get the free parking. Not that you really want to try and park on Saint Catherine's, or Crescent near by. The city could remove the "meters" (they aren't even actual meters AFAIK, just signs that indicate which parking spot to pay for at the actual meter 20 feet away) and replace them with less conspicuous signs. Everyone's happy, except the poor schmo who didn't see the less conspicuous sign and now has a parking ticket.
Nowhere in the article does it say anything about the cremated remains falling back to Earth. I think Space.com just got it wrong. The article says that they can't find the rocket components, presumably for the experiments that were on board. In fact, I doubt that the mission would have been a success if the ashes returned to Earth, seeing as how it's assumed that when you say you want to be burried in space, your remains actually stay there for a decent amount of time.
Death by Powerpoint - To cause excessive boredom in a group watching a slide show presentation, especially one made with Powerpoint.
Let me give you an example of a discussion that some fellow students and I might have:
Student 1: "How's that class with [such and such a prof]?"
Student 2: "Don't take it with him, it's death by Powerpoint."
And profs wonder why few people show up after the third week of class.
After reading some of these comments, I have come to realize that a CS, CmpE or preferably a SWE degree would be better. If your cousin is dead set against a four or five year program, then he should at least consider a diploma program in a classroom setting, such as at the International Academy of Design and Technology in Toronto, or some similar institution. Nothing compares to being able to talk to your profs face to face.
The fly by wire computer didn't crash, for two reasons. As far as I know, there is no manual backup to the system, i.e. there is no way to hard connect the stick to the control surfaces. Secondly, without the fly by wire computer (or an accompanying computer, I'm not sure of the system layout), the plane falls out of the sky because the F-22 is an unstable aircraft. Humans simply don't have the reaction time needed to correct the small twitches that grow into huge oscillations. Eventually, the aircraft takes on the aerodynamic properties of a rock with two jet engines. More likely, just the navigational computers (and maybe the weapons systems computers) crashed.
I wouldn't go with the full session, as you're going to need the same amount of memory as you would for a local OS (if not more). Piping back and forth between the server and client diminishes the user experience when the local memory starts to fill up. You can avoid this with a local hard drive, but if you're going to put a hard drive in anyways, why not include the local OS? Piping the apps individually is a good idea (and is what is done at my university), and can allow for a huge number of apps without taking up client hard drive space. However there are some apps that probably shouldn't be piped, namely internet browsers and text editors, partly because they are small and because you don't want your workstations completely dead when the server goes down.
As far as Canadian customers (I don't know how many it effects), this does not matter. A class action against Dell for the same type of mistake ended badly for Dell, having to live with the lost revenue and pay a good portion of the court costs for those that purchased the devices on accidental discount (the case, IIRC went all the way to the Supreme Court). What makes this worse for Amazon is that, according to the OP, they have the right (and responsibility) to check the price of an order before it's shipped and presumably are capable of informing the customer before the credit card is charged. It is the responsibility of the seller to ensure that the purchase price is correct, especially when the sale is on-line. They're much better off just living with the loss, as even a settlement will cost them more in the long run.
Mindstorms is just as flexible and scalable as any micro controller, and you don't have to worry your students with learning low level C/C++. Even if you do find libraries for the controller you use, you still have no choice but to use C. At least with Mindstorms, your students can use a drag and drop GUI, or if they so choose, any number of high level languages, including C, C++, Java, and if they're really daring, assembly. Hardware debugging is much less painful (actually, almost eliminated), and the experience may be seen as more enjoyable by the students.
The only time I would go with something other than Mindstorms is if you find a fully developed board with quick and easy peripheral connectors. Getting your students to wire up everything to a breadboard probably isn't all that desirable. In most cases, you'll probably still have to develop the libraries for any peripherals that you'll use.
Unless your students are much more capable than what I give them credit for, stick them with something that they can actually master in 5 months.
TIs have become the de facto standard because they are the ones recommended for use on AP exams, certain university classes (although some don't allow anything more than a scientific calculator), and are the ones recommended to high school students (like yourself) for calculus and physics classes. I assure you that they are plenty powerful. Hell, TI 89s will give you the solution of indefinite closed form integrals.
As for the resolution, well that's kept low to keep the cost down. I doubt you'll see any graphing calculators that are allowed on AP tests and the sort that have significantly higher resolutions. Yes, the low resolution may cause aliasing, but that isn't restricted to just TI calculators.
You have to decide what is right for you, and what will meet your needs, but I've been using my TI for the past seven years, and wouldn't dream of using anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
The Chronicle Herald has another article on this. In it one of the county councilors (or similar) says that the tower can be avoided by 2 kms of cable, something I find highly unlikely for a number of reasons. This ignores the point of the tower, which is to provide ubiquitous and cheap high bandwidth (I'm talking at least 10Mbps) internet to 99% of the population of Nova Scotia. Around a third of the population lives in the capital area, which along with other urban areas in the province has easy access to high-speed internet. However, nearly half of the provincial population is rural or very rural or extremely rural (like half an hour down a dirt road from just a corner store rural). Now some of these areas have access to digital cable and therefore cable internet (hell, some can even pull a decent DSL connection), and therefore, the towers are not needed. In Victoria Harbour, however, which is 30 km (straight line) from the closest town that could be reasonably classified as urban, is not one of those locations. The cost for Eastlink to ensure that the cable to every house (if it exists in the first place) is capable of carrying the higher bandwidth required for internet would be prohibitive to begin with, not to even mention replacing old and stringing new cable. The tower makes much more economic sense, as the costs associated are stringing one cable (which may already be in place) and erecting the damn thing. This also ignores the fact that many other such towers have been erected in primarily agricultural areas of the province with no ill effect. Some of you may have already eaten blueberries grown not 50 meters from one such tower. Okay, maybe not, but the point still stands. This one farmer doesn't understand the science, let alone the economic benefits to the area, behind the tower. I really hope Industry Canada overrules Kings County Council.
That's not the point ^^ was making. Give us a relatively cheap ($30-40US) app with inexpensive (or even free) map packs. You download only the the maps that you need for the foreseeable future, and save a lot of space on your iPhone. Say you live in Maine, but are taking a trip to NYC. Then you would download only the New England maps. Going across the country to San Fransisco? Download the maps between Maine and California, but not any of the Canada, southeast US, or northwest US maps. You would save a lot of space, and probably some money as well.
Techdirt has a post saying just this. Cuban fails to realize that all his arguments don't apply to only free models, but rather any business that sells a product or service, regardless of the price (free or otherwise).
I would tend to agree with this. There is nothing general purpose about using hardware the way it was specifically designed to be used. Unless there's something that CS4 will be using the GPU for that isn't mentioned in the article, then there's nothing really exceptional for the GPU to do that it wouldn't normally be doing before. You would be expect most of these features to be supported in any 3D game produced in the last 5 years or so. There's nothing really special about using a GPU to do anti-aliasing, after all.
If you are going this route, then include the specs for the power source; i.e. "This frame takes two 1.5V DC batteries placed in series. That's a steady 3 volts for those that didn't know."
I've used it for university assignments (mostly lab reports), and while it's better than the offering from MS, it still doesn't compare to LaTex. Remember that there's a reason that some journals only have a few formats that they'll accept papers in, and that LaTex is usually one of them.
Solar BBQ. No more dependence on propane! Unless of course you enjoy cooking in the rain or after dark...
Well at least I know why I wasn't connecting to ICQ earlier.
While I generally agree with you, I think that students should have at least one programming language, as well as two or three number crunching languages, such as Matlab, IDL, Maple, Labview, or Mathematica (the last two being the ones that I haven't used as an electrical engineering new grad). You can do a lot with Matlab, but sometimes you need something more along the lines of C++. My sister had to learn Java when she was doing her physics and math degree. She may not have used Java since, but she has used what she has learned in that class.
This option also usually ends up being cheaper in the long run as well. I spent $1600 on my latest computer that would have cost me over $2000 to get from Dell at the time. In fact, a similarly speced computer from Dell still cost $1400 nearly two years later, although it does have a better CPU and GPU.
I was going to suggest either your local food bank or salvation army. Any other charity would be appropriate as well. Most places just need a computer that can run a word processor and surf the web.
I don't own a Wii (although I'm not be against the idea), but I'm seriously considering buying a couple of Wiimotes just to try out some of these hacks. Johnny has made these so easy that even my Law student roommate could probably pull them off. Okay, maybe he'd need me and my CMPE roommate, but the point is that he makes it easy.
Also, as far as the location goes, from what I've heard from press releases and interviews, pound per pound, the Russians use less fuel to send up a Soyuz than the Americans to send up a Shuttle in order to rendezvous with the ISS, simply because of the latitude. I don't know how accurate that is, as I haven't done any research on it, but that's what I've been told.
In Montreal's defense, there is free parking ... near McGill University. And probably near Concordia as well. Both are well within walking distance of the location, although granted, I don't think Apple wants their customers walking the kilometre it would take to get the free parking. Not that you really want to try and park on Saint Catherine's, or Crescent near by. The city could remove the "meters" (they aren't even actual meters AFAIK, just signs that indicate which parking spot to pay for at the actual meter 20 feet away) and replace them with less conspicuous signs. Everyone's happy, except the poor schmo who didn't see the less conspicuous sign and now has a parking ticket.
Once I install the new version of MythTV. Knowing that the price should come down in the next couple of months only gives me more reason to do so.
Nowhere in the article does it say anything about the cremated remains falling back to Earth. I think Space.com just got it wrong. The article says that they can't find the rocket components, presumably for the experiments that were on board. In fact, I doubt that the mission would have been a success if the ashes returned to Earth, seeing as how it's assumed that when you say you want to be burried in space, your remains actually stay there for a decent amount of time.
8D 16 F3 5B C4 54 DE 34 1D 2F 5A D9 5F 0C 92 D5
Let me give you an example of a discussion that some fellow students and I might have:
Student 1: "How's that class with [such and such a prof]?"
Student 2: "Don't take it with him, it's death by Powerpoint."
And profs wonder why few people show up after the third week of class.
Okay, so I'll probably forget this by tomorrow morning. But I'm still not happy.
After reading some of these comments, I have come to realize that a CS, CmpE or preferably a SWE degree would be better. If your cousin is dead set against a four or five year program, then he should at least consider a diploma program in a classroom setting, such as at the International Academy of Design and Technology in Toronto, or some similar institution. Nothing compares to being able to talk to your profs face to face.
The fly by wire computer didn't crash, for two reasons. As far as I know, there is no manual backup to the system, i.e. there is no way to hard connect the stick to the control surfaces. Secondly, without the fly by wire computer (or an accompanying computer, I'm not sure of the system layout), the plane falls out of the sky because the F-22 is an unstable aircraft. Humans simply don't have the reaction time needed to correct the small twitches that grow into huge oscillations. Eventually, the aircraft takes on the aerodynamic properties of a rock with two jet engines. More likely, just the navigational computers (and maybe the weapons systems computers) crashed.
I wouldn't go with the full session, as you're going to need the same amount of memory as you would for a local OS (if not more). Piping back and forth between the server and client diminishes the user experience when the local memory starts to fill up. You can avoid this with a local hard drive, but if you're going to put a hard drive in anyways, why not include the local OS? Piping the apps individually is a good idea (and is what is done at my university), and can allow for a huge number of apps without taking up client hard drive space. However there are some apps that probably shouldn't be piped, namely internet browsers and text editors, partly because they are small and because you don't want your workstations completely dead when the server goes down.
As far as Canadian customers (I don't know how many it effects), this does not matter. A class action against Dell for the same type of mistake ended badly for Dell, having to live with the lost revenue and pay a good portion of the court costs for those that purchased the devices on accidental discount (the case, IIRC went all the way to the Supreme Court). What makes this worse for Amazon is that, according to the OP, they have the right (and responsibility) to check the price of an order before it's shipped and presumably are capable of informing the customer before the credit card is charged. It is the responsibility of the seller to ensure that the purchase price is correct, especially when the sale is on-line. They're much better off just living with the loss, as even a settlement will cost them more in the long run.
Mindstorms is just as flexible and scalable as any micro controller, and you don't have to worry your students with learning low level C/C++. Even if you do find libraries for the controller you use, you still have no choice but to use C. At least with Mindstorms, your students can use a drag and drop GUI, or if they so choose, any number of high level languages, including C, C++, Java, and if they're really daring, assembly. Hardware debugging is much less painful (actually, almost eliminated), and the experience may be seen as more enjoyable by the students. The only time I would go with something other than Mindstorms is if you find a fully developed board with quick and easy peripheral connectors. Getting your students to wire up everything to a breadboard probably isn't all that desirable. In most cases, you'll probably still have to develop the libraries for any peripherals that you'll use. Unless your students are much more capable than what I give them credit for, stick them with something that they can actually master in 5 months.
TIs have become the de facto standard because they are the ones recommended for use on AP exams, certain university classes (although some don't allow anything more than a scientific calculator), and are the ones recommended to high school students (like yourself) for calculus and physics classes. I assure you that they are plenty powerful. Hell, TI 89s will give you the solution of indefinite closed form integrals. As for the resolution, well that's kept low to keep the cost down. I doubt you'll see any graphing calculators that are allowed on AP tests and the sort that have significantly higher resolutions. Yes, the low resolution may cause aliasing, but that isn't restricted to just TI calculators. You have to decide what is right for you, and what will meet your needs, but I've been using my TI for the past seven years, and wouldn't dream of using anything else.