being a support technician for a major Communications company, explaining Why is a good way to help customers, but it is one that sadly isn't understood by a great many technicians. Any ISP that gives their techs scripts they MUST follow for every call, is a company not worth being with. I'm happy that my company doesn't give me a script. I NEED to know what the heck I'm talking about to get the job done, and I can trust that 90% (ok, maybe about 80%) of the people I work with know what they're talking about as well. And the ones who don't? well, that's why there's internal escalation procedures.
Training your technicians the how and why is ultimately more useful than giving people a script. If you want to give scripted answers to customers, give it to them on a CD, or in a manual, so they don't need to call in. Make your techs work for their money, by giving them the freedom to answer the obscure.
Its called compensation for stupidity. You can't fix stupid.... It's a human plague, stupidity is... Driving may be a privilege, but it's one that stupid people have ALREADY been granted in large numbers... If you suggest that allowing smart drivers to die at the hands of stupid drivers in the dark is an acceptable trade-off to saving energy by not having well lit traffic areas on busy roads, then I'd say you've caught that plague. I say, that a little electrical waste is necessary sometimes, for the greater good. There's more to the argument than energy waste - yet it still need not be as much of a waste as what it is currently. Use more energy efficient bulbs / lighting technology.
Well-lit freeways are a necessity in my opinion. sure, I think that the lamps could be built more efficiently, with less light pollution... But there are hundreds of thousands of stupid drivers out there, who I don't trust to drive in broad daylight, let alone darkness. Bad drivers can't cope with the tunnel-vision of their own headlights. The lights are there for a reason, and the goal was not to waste electricity. It's to prevent accidents from stupid drivers, who slipped through the cracks of a broken licensing system. Find a way to get bad drivers off the road, and I'll concede to putting in less lights....
Well, it's NOT about the composition of the words, it's about the connotation. The Chinaman slur has the same connotation as if you went to China and everyone called you White-boy... It might technically be correct, but in most connotations it's derogatory. Just because it's less offensive than Chink, doesn't mean it's not offensive.
There's nothing wrong with saying someone is Chinese, or Chinese-American. Asian-American is less correct than that, Because Indians are South-Asian, thus still Asian, thus nondescript. And of course I mean REAL Indians, not native North Americans.
They still tried it though... The Mini-game is all about twitch, which is why we have car chase/track shooting in Sam'n'Max, and it's why we had Astro Chicken in Space Quest 3.... Which is what makes "Super Turbo turkey Puncher 3" in Doom 3 a perfect example of how FPS Development history follows Adventure game development history, even if it was meant to showcase how ridiculous mini games were in FPS....
The biggest thing about the whole realism thing, is that people WANTED more realism than the 8-bit eras. There's a reason adventure games don't get made much any more, and it's because of the lack of realism. Realism is the reason why FPS have replaced the adventure game...
What is an adventure game? A maze, or freeform level, where you collect objects, and use them to progress further, and advance the storyline... What's a modern FPS? The exact same thing, but in a first person view.
The problem that FPS are facing now is the same that adventure games dealt with... Puzzles and themes are overdone and repetitive, stories are too thin, or too far-fetched, and interfaces are too cumbersome to do everything that you want/need to do in order to play your game.
So, FPS and adventure games are similar. they both started out with simple controls. Adventure games were Text based games like the infocom games, FPS were really 2 dimensional with Wolfenstein. More realism was needed to keep interest, and people NEVER STOPPED with pushing realism. Adventure games got graphics with "Mystery House", and then Animation with "King's Quest". FPS got Depth with Doom, and 3D with Quake. Plots for both were simple, and linear. People wanted more Drama. Adventure games got more and more story driven, or more and more rediculous with puzzles. FPS did something very similar - More map complexity, and more movement/jumping/physics puzzles. All the while, the focus on making games "Prettier" than the last, was always a driving force, which eventually overtook as the measure of Quality for which the industry stood upon, instead of gameplay. Doom3 Engine versus Source/HL2 was one useless fight, just like Sierra's SCI1+ interpreters versus LucasArts SCUMM interfaces. Simplification was a key point at several points... LucasArts brought point 'n' Click, just as "Quake 3" did away with ladders, secondary attacks, and other extraneous controls such as leaning, etc... We now sit in a market which is flooded with FPS, just as the market used to be flooded with Adventure games... And everybody is looking for the next "Big Thing" to replace the FPS....
Then comes this game, where you can pretend to be a rock star, and all you have to do is mash 3 - 5 buttons, and flick a switch back and forth. Game play is fun and simple to understand. It doesn't require 100 buttons, and has no plot to worry about. "Guitar Hero" makes a bunch of people realize that fun games are more than just pretty graphics, are more than walking around and shooting things, and are more than just puzzles that don't really make sense... And OF COURSE people are going to realize that in all the hype of "who's prettier?" and "Who looks more real?", somewhere we lost the concept of fun and entertainment as the standards of a good game.
Now, we have a resurgence of old games, neo-retro games, and unique new games which really could have been made 15 years ago, had corporations not had their heads up their Wazoos, trying to cash in on previous Intellectual properties, and jumping on bandwagons to create the prettiest FPS to win the FPS war. There's still the old school, such as the Crysis team who pumps out a gorgeous looking game that's as forgettable as most FPS' on the market. The indy-game developer is still at work trying to get their innovations to market, and finally, there's the new crew trying to resurrect the old and market as new, because it really is new to a whole generation. Net result? An new generation and appreciation for old gaming, which will likely last a short period of time before someone tries to out-tech and out-spec the rest.
Already, we are starting the same progression with Guitar Hero vs Rock Band... Who has the more realistic guitar? Hey, lets add drums, and make them more complex... I'm waiting for the day where you need a webcam and you get scored for how close you dressed up like the band you're playing. Imagine - Dressing up like RHCP in their sock-donning glory of the late 80's early 90's... Good ol' Family fun!
Your traditional VoIP Company (ie: uses an internet connection) may be required to keep your Telephone number active to allow access to 911 services, but they are not responsible for your internet connection. Your ISP likely has no up-time guarantee for residential services. As a result, VoIP customers in an internet outage/service cut, are effectively screwed.
OTOH, VoIP services that qualify as full-on landlines (ie: Managed network-not internet, full E911 service, non-nomadic) may be required to have some sort of up-time standards which are similar to traditional land lines. Having said that, I have seen a few people wait over a week to get a service call out on a traditional land line with no dial tone.
Once again, the internet is a derivative of OSI Networking - not patented - thus not patentable. Communicating between 2 computers is derivative of basic I/O functionality, combined with 1's and 0's. Stick 2.0 is still a fancy stick, with no improvements that aren't obvious.
Speaking as someone who works with teenagers, Instant gratification is the driving force. If your kid likes building web pages - let him build web pages. It has a low entry level of knowledge, and can be expanded to infinite levels.
Making simple games is also a good option (as I mentioned that quote). Modding a game without understanding fundamentals of programming logic is an education in futility.
Basically, take whatever your kid is interested in, start at an easy point, with a way to give instant gratification (C would not be a good choice for most beginners), then have them build their skills at their own pace, offering them challenges along the way to get them to the point of doing it right. If web pages are it, then web pages are it. Flash is a good choice for teaching game programming, because it writes the code itself for simple stuff, but you have to understand the code to do more complex tasks...
Whoever mentioned that OpenGL would be a good start, obviously was either a very smart kid when they did it themselves, or they don't remember what it was like to learn programming as a teenager.
While this is true, the operative concept of a computer is to process 1's and 0's to perform whatever task is fed into it. I can understand patenting a microprocessor. On the other hand, Patenting software always seems that prior art is a substantial factor, and likewise the fact that "If/Then/Else" statements and loops, and other data structures are unpatentable. Either a software patent must be too specific to be enforceable, or someone can claim prior art... Because everything in computers can be derived as a logical and OBVIOUS and natural progression of prior art, this SHOULD make hardware process the only enforceable patent...
In other words, If I were to attempt to patent a baseball bat, whn first invented, someone else could claim prior art with a stick. If I qualify that the baseball bat has a thinner handle, and a thicker hitting surface, the laws of physics make this a logical progression of a stick. A baseball bat is still just a fancy stick. The same is true of a computer program. If you dig deep enough (and in computers it isn't that deep), every program is a series of choices of yes or no, based off numbers stored in memory (yet another series of 1's and 0's). Thus, any program that counts and makes decisions off a series of 1's and 0's, is strictly a logical and obvious derivative of a 1 or a 0. Everything that was ever done with a modern computer is a strict derivative of a yes or no choice. At one point, you may have been able to argue that the method of storing data was patentable (ASCII, EBCDIC characters, and how they convert from letters to numbers. Endianness, and how it is processed by the microprocessor), but because it is now considered prior art, and unpatentable. Along with it, pointers, data types, Functions (concept of), Objects(Concept of), and databases are all prior art.
Compilers could have been patentable at one point as well... But because they weren't patented, they are now prior art. GUI's could have been patentable, but as we've seen, Xerox started it, Apple used it, and Microsoft stole it from apple. When Microsoft was sued, they claimed prior art from Xerox. Once again, graphical representation is now prior art.
So basically, my argument is that every software patent is technically defeated by prior art. Anything that can be done in software is a logical and obvious progression, and as such should make software unpatentable. A piece of software is a set if instructions used to flip 1's and 0's around.As a result, it is just a fancy stick.
Microsoft can buy patents. It owns enough of them to claim that Linux is a violation of several. That's why Microsoft had plenty of Patent deals with Novell, Linspire, etc... To make a quick buck off Linux
Start them programming simple games... You may forget, but learning how to read code and trace it out, even in a mod for a game, can be a chore, and would intimidate the heck out of many teenagers. Choosing a simple language, with some simple graphics commands built in (BASIC, Turing, whatever), and provide some simple examples of how basic data structures work (If/then/else, Loops) would allow them to learn code at their own rate. having commands like drawBox(), drawLine() and drawCircle() to make graphics easy, speeds up the instant gratification you seek.
Reason being, you can teach the person writing it, how files are parsed, which gives some groundwork in basic I/O down the line.
Further, if your teenager is into blogging, etc... You can have them feed off that aspect... This webpage is your blog. It is the ultimate in customization. Unfortunately you need to write it yourself. Add CSS when they get bored of plain HTML layout stuff.
Of course, when he gets sick of editing raw HTML to add posts, you can guide them into PHP/Perl/Ruby/.NET or whatever your fancy is. I'd stick to something more basic, like using PHP, and start off simple, like includes for bringing text files in.
Once they get bored of that, work your way into databases. get them to make an administration page so they can type in things directly into the browser, and have it appear on the page. Basically, it's a place where you can start REALLY SIMPLE, get immediate gratification with the results, and build off projects to infinite degrees.
I've never been one to coddle kids, especially teenagers. Let them have a blog. Just make sure you teach them how to be safe about it. Explain your rules for privacy, and why they're important. Don't just shelter them from all things evil... They will have to learn how to deal when you're not around. Think of giving them this blog space as learning how to cross the street. Likewise, give them something interesting to do, that will challenge them, to push their limits. Not too challenging as you don't want to scare them away. Male it challenging enough to make learning worthwhile for them...
Really, the language they learn isn't that important, if it lets them achieve results. I started sphagetti-coding BASIC on a Tandy CoCo. In High school we used a language called Turing. I made a hangman game and a Connect 4 game in my grade 12 year. Last I heard, people still play that connect 4 game at my high school - almost 10 years later. I spent hours on it, and the more people that tried it out, and enjoyed it, the more I worked on it. That led to College, and learning C/C++... As long as you work up to it, keep challenging them at a reasonable rate, you'll give your teen a good grasp on programming. When your teen comes up to you for help and hands you a pile of unformatted code, tell them that you can't read it, and show them how to format to make it easier to read. Get them working first, however you can, then show them how to do it right.
While this is somewhat true, some Linksys routers have a 4 day cache on these connections.... As a result, the memory gets hosed pretty quickly... Switching to DD-WRT, and lowering the connection cache to around 4 hours tends to make things run a lot longer.....
Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats. Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats. Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats. Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats....
(Where are those pills?)
Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats. Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats. Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats. Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats....
The NDP ALWAYS has the best interests of the people in mind on every individual bill they introduce. The problem is they don't have their other bills in mind, or have any idea on what is required to implement those bills, and as a result, the people go broke, and/or their new laws end up failing once passed.
Competence should not be mistaken for how much someone cares. If the NDP had Competence, I'd probably vote for them.
Laying Cable takes time. It is very expensive and often a time consuming process and usually requires permits to dig, etc, and can get tied up in red tape for a long time. Likewise, routing hardware can be pretty expensive for systems handling ISP-sized loads. If an area has unexpected growth, or is rezoned after the cables are laid, and the permits to lay new cable to upgrade an area don't come fast enough, then how are ISP's supposed to deal with that growth?
The process of throttling traffic is not evil, or wrong. Even throttling specific traffic such as BitTorrent is not evil, providing it can be proven to be the cause of congestion. The evil is Arbitrary, constant and/or preemptive throttling. If an area gets congested, ISP's, like any business' network, should be allowed to shape their traffic, provided said traffic shaping is only a temporary measure, and provided the company can prove that upgrading the system is being done in a reasonable time frame, given the situation at hand for that area.
The unfortunate fact is, sometimes 100 customers in one area don't use one tenth the bandwidth as 100 customers in another area. Sometimes these higher bandwidth areas can't be predicted before the area is populated. Congestion happens on any network, and affects ALL traffic - It can make the internet as a whole unusable, due to only one service causing the congestion. So if there is ONE type of traffic that is causing all the congestion, and slowing it will make the internet useable for everything and everyone else, then it's a fair trade, provided the company in question has plans to upgrade that area. The other option is to add strict bandwidth limits, and cut service once you go over them. Personally, I'd rather have slow downloads for a bit, with working internet for e-mail, web surfing, etc, than to have full speed internet, across the board for the first 15 days of the month...
The issue of course, is how you deem a reasonable manner... If for 1 hour of the day, your area is congested, and the other 23 hours of the day, people have a free ride with unrestricted access, and for that hour, a large amount of the congestion is caused by torrent traffic, then I'd say it's reasonable to curb torrents for that hour. on the other hand, oversubscribing an area and having CONSTANT congestion wouldn't fall into this definition. Lets use an analogy to explain in RL
At a border crossing, sometimes changing the direction of a lane at a makes more sense than spending millions of tax dollars to add more lanes. Sure, you may slow down a few people going in the opposite direction, but if most of the time the flow of traffic is even and steady in both directions through the border, and the reduction of lanes in the one direction is temporary, then it's OK. On the other hand, if there's either a low number of cars going through in each direction, or an equally high number of cars going through in BOTH directions, and traffic is reduced on one side to allow more people to arbitrarily go faster in one direction, then this is where it becomes unreasonable to shape the traffic in such a discriminatory way.
As a result, Some ISPs (Comcast, Bell) shape traffic to always hinder file sharing. Other, more responsible ISPs will only shape traffic during peak times, and will upgrade infrastructure when there is uncontrollable growth in an area, or more equal congestion across the network at all times of the day.
Hub Magazine in Canada has a decent article in this month's edition - The format is kinda nasty (Bitmap for Web viewing - eww) - but the content gives a breakdown of canadian providers. Basically, you are looking at high latency with less than advertised speeds across the board, but you can connect anywhere your cellphone can.
Wouldn't it be better to cut off people with infected computers than to censor the internet
Well, seeing as a majority of spam can be content-filtered, an outbound spam filter that checks content makes perfect sense. The issue is, of course, what values does your ISP hold true, and how ethical are they in preventing spam, vice filtering "questionable content"... If their goal is truly in spam prevention, this type of filtering will hopefully keep grandma and grandpa in blissful ignorance, and will let them go about their daily business without interruption to their service...
Of course for many of us who read Slashdot believe that ignorance is no excuse, and that grandma and grandpa should be taken off the internet until they learn how to take care of a computer... Unfortunately, the market for internet, and the knowledge of the average user is actually very skewed compared to the Slashdot audience. They are also the majority of people online.
Disconnecting customers is throwing money away. Offering free virus removal by trained ISP staff is prohibitively expensive and time consuming, with little Return on Investment. Letting the e-mail through puts the burden on ISP's after the traffic is delivered across major trunks. Filtering actually keeps grandma and grandpa online, while reducing traffic from spam. It makes it a safer and cleaner place for everyone, and it will actually prevent Grandma from sending you a virus, because of her ignorance...
This does of course assume that your ISP is a moral and ethical entity. Your mileage may vary with this type of filtering...
There's always the hard expensive way... If your cable company provides the option, installing a "Long Drop" at your cost may be an option if your cable company is willing to undertake the maintenance of that drop, and put it on a node capable of cable internet. In other words, if you talk to the right people, you can have cable run to your house by a professional, complete with amplifiers for the signal, at your cost (I said expensive). Then have your cable company connect it with a local node that has Internet capabilities. You'll probably have to discuss things with a second level tech or get some sort of permission to get in touch with the local cable's engineering department. As long as the signal's 2 way (Needs 2 way amps, not forward only amps), and run with higher quality line, Internet should not be a problem. Expect to pay in the thousands for this. On the other hand, the real crux of this would be maintenance - if it's all above ground, every bit of weather damage on the line will degrade the signal, which is why you need to make sure the cable company will undertake the cost of maintenance BEFORE you start.....
I work for a Cable company in tech support. TV quality is great. my company is one of few that really does care about quality..... Unfortunately if there's a bad picture (doesn't matter if it's analog or digital) if a cable company is unwilling to fix it, it's the company that's bad, not the technology.
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being a support technician for a major Communications company, explaining Why is a good way to help customers, but it is one that sadly isn't understood by a great many technicians. Any ISP that gives their techs scripts they MUST follow for every call, is a company not worth being with. I'm happy that my company doesn't give me a script. I NEED to know what the heck I'm talking about to get the job done, and I can trust that 90% (ok, maybe about 80%) of the people I work with know what they're talking about as well. And the ones who don't? well, that's why there's internal escalation procedures.
Training your technicians the how and why is ultimately more useful than giving people a script. If you want to give scripted answers to customers, give it to them on a CD, or in a manual, so they don't need to call in. Make your techs work for their money, by giving them the freedom to answer the obscure.
Its called compensation for stupidity. You can't fix stupid.... It's a human plague, stupidity is... Driving may be a privilege, but it's one that stupid people have ALREADY been granted in large numbers... If you suggest that allowing smart drivers to die at the hands of stupid drivers in the dark is an acceptable trade-off to saving energy by not having well lit traffic areas on busy roads, then I'd say you've caught that plague. I say, that a little electrical waste is necessary sometimes, for the greater good. There's more to the argument than energy waste - yet it still need not be as much of a waste as what it is currently. Use more energy efficient bulbs / lighting technology.
Well-lit freeways are a necessity in my opinion. sure, I think that the lamps could be built more efficiently, with less light pollution... But there are hundreds of thousands of stupid drivers out there, who I don't trust to drive in broad daylight, let alone darkness. Bad drivers can't cope with the tunnel-vision of their own headlights. The lights are there for a reason, and the goal was not to waste electricity. It's to prevent accidents from stupid drivers, who slipped through the cracks of a broken licensing system. Find a way to get bad drivers off the road, and I'll concede to putting in less lights....
Well, it's NOT about the composition of the words, it's about the connotation. The Chinaman slur has the same connotation as if you went to China and everyone called you White-boy... It might technically be correct, but in most connotations it's derogatory. Just because it's less offensive than Chink, doesn't mean it's not offensive.
There's nothing wrong with saying someone is Chinese, or Chinese-American. Asian-American is less correct than that, Because Indians are South-Asian, thus still Asian, thus nondescript. And of course I mean REAL Indians, not native North Americans.
They still tried it though... The Mini-game is all about twitch, which is why we have car chase/track shooting in Sam'n'Max, and it's why we had Astro Chicken in Space Quest 3.... Which is what makes "Super Turbo turkey Puncher 3" in Doom 3 a perfect example of how FPS Development history follows Adventure game development history, even if it was meant to showcase how ridiculous mini games were in FPS....
The biggest thing about the whole realism thing, is that people WANTED more realism than the 8-bit eras. There's a reason adventure games don't get made much any more, and it's because of the lack of realism. Realism is the reason why FPS have replaced the adventure game...
What is an adventure game? A maze, or freeform level, where you collect objects, and use them to progress further, and advance the storyline... What's a modern FPS? The exact same thing, but in a first person view.
The problem that FPS are facing now is the same that adventure games dealt with... Puzzles and themes are overdone and repetitive, stories are too thin, or too far-fetched, and interfaces are too cumbersome to do everything that you want/need to do in order to play your game.
So, FPS and adventure games are similar. they both started out with simple controls. Adventure games were Text based games like the infocom games, FPS were really 2 dimensional with Wolfenstein. More realism was needed to keep interest, and people NEVER STOPPED with pushing realism. Adventure games got graphics with "Mystery House", and then Animation with "King's Quest". FPS got Depth with Doom, and 3D with Quake. Plots for both were simple, and linear. People wanted more Drama. Adventure games got more and more story driven, or more and more rediculous with puzzles. FPS did something very similar - More map complexity, and more movement/jumping/physics puzzles. All the while, the focus on making games "Prettier" than the last, was always a driving force, which eventually overtook as the measure of Quality for which the industry stood upon, instead of gameplay. Doom3 Engine versus Source/HL2 was one useless fight, just like Sierra's SCI1+ interpreters versus LucasArts SCUMM interfaces. Simplification was a key point at several points... LucasArts brought point 'n' Click, just as "Quake 3" did away with ladders, secondary attacks, and other extraneous controls such as leaning, etc... We now sit in a market which is flooded with FPS, just as the market used to be flooded with Adventure games... And everybody is looking for the next "Big Thing" to replace the FPS....
Then comes this game, where you can pretend to be a rock star, and all you have to do is mash 3 - 5 buttons, and flick a switch back and forth. Game play is fun and simple to understand. It doesn't require 100 buttons, and has no plot to worry about. "Guitar Hero" makes a bunch of people realize that fun games are more than just pretty graphics, are more than walking around and shooting things, and are more than just puzzles that don't really make sense... And OF COURSE people are going to realize that in all the hype of "who's prettier?" and "Who looks more real?", somewhere we lost the concept of fun and entertainment as the standards of a good game.
Now, we have a resurgence of old games, neo-retro games, and unique new games which really could have been made 15 years ago, had corporations not had their heads up their Wazoos, trying to cash in on previous Intellectual properties, and jumping on bandwagons to create the prettiest FPS to win the FPS war. There's still the old school, such as the Crysis team who pumps out a gorgeous looking game that's as forgettable as most FPS' on the market. The indy-game developer is still at work trying to get their innovations to market, and finally, there's the new crew trying to resurrect the old and market as new, because it really is new to a whole generation. Net result? An new generation and appreciation for old gaming, which will likely last a short period of time before someone tries to out-tech and out-spec the rest.
Already, we are starting the same progression with Guitar Hero vs Rock Band... Who has the more realistic guitar? Hey, lets add drums, and make them more complex... I'm waiting for the day where you need a webcam and you get scored for how close you dressed up like the band you're playing. Imagine - Dressing up like RHCP in their sock-donning glory of the late 80's early 90's... Good ol' Family fun!
Your traditional VoIP Company (ie: uses an internet connection) may be required to keep your Telephone number active to allow access to 911 services, but they are not responsible for your internet connection. Your ISP likely has no up-time guarantee for residential services. As a result, VoIP customers in an internet outage/service cut, are effectively screwed.
OTOH, VoIP services that qualify as full-on landlines (ie: Managed network-not internet, full E911 service, non-nomadic) may be required to have some sort of up-time standards which are similar to traditional land lines. Having said that, I have seen a few people wait over a week to get a service call out on a traditional land line with no dial tone.
Your country's laws and regulations may vary...
Nobody likes being a target, but if you own enough guns, I'll bet you that you've likely fired a couple of them...
Once again, the internet is a derivative of OSI Networking - not patented - thus not patentable. Communicating between 2 computers is derivative of basic I/O functionality, combined with 1's and 0's. Stick 2.0 is still a fancy stick, with no improvements that aren't obvious.
Speaking as someone who works with teenagers, Instant gratification is the driving force. If your kid likes building web pages - let him build web pages. It has a low entry level of knowledge, and can be expanded to infinite levels.
Making simple games is also a good option (as I mentioned that quote). Modding a game without understanding fundamentals of programming logic is an education in futility.
Basically, take whatever your kid is interested in, start at an easy point, with a way to give instant gratification (C would not be a good choice for most beginners), then have them build their skills at their own pace, offering them challenges along the way to get them to the point of doing it right. If web pages are it, then web pages are it. Flash is a good choice for teaching game programming, because it writes the code itself for simple stuff, but you have to understand the code to do more complex tasks...
Whoever mentioned that OpenGL would be a good start, obviously was either a very smart kid when they did it themselves, or they don't remember what it was like to learn programming as a teenager.
While this is true, the operative concept of a computer is to process 1's and 0's to perform whatever task is fed into it. I can understand patenting a microprocessor. On the other hand, Patenting software always seems that prior art is a substantial factor, and likewise the fact that "If/Then/Else" statements and loops, and other data structures are unpatentable. Either a software patent must be too specific to be enforceable, or someone can claim prior art... Because everything in computers can be derived as a logical and OBVIOUS and natural progression of prior art, this SHOULD make hardware process the only enforceable patent...
In other words, If I were to attempt to patent a baseball bat, whn first invented, someone else could claim prior art with a stick. If I qualify that the baseball bat has a thinner handle, and a thicker hitting surface, the laws of physics make this a logical progression of a stick. A baseball bat is still just a fancy stick. The same is true of a computer program. If you dig deep enough (and in computers it isn't that deep), every program is a series of choices of yes or no, based off numbers stored in memory (yet another series of 1's and 0's). Thus, any program that counts and makes decisions off a series of 1's and 0's, is strictly a logical and obvious derivative of a 1 or a 0. Everything that was ever done with a modern computer is a strict derivative of a yes or no choice. At one point, you may have been able to argue that the method of storing data was patentable (ASCII, EBCDIC characters, and how they convert from letters to numbers. Endianness, and how it is processed by the microprocessor), but because it is now considered prior art, and unpatentable. Along with it, pointers, data types, Functions (concept of), Objects(Concept of), and databases are all prior art.
Compilers could have been patentable at one point as well... But because they weren't patented, they are now prior art. GUI's could have been patentable, but as we've seen, Xerox started it, Apple used it, and Microsoft stole it from apple. When Microsoft was sued, they claimed prior art from Xerox. Once again, graphical representation is now prior art.
So basically, my argument is that every software patent is technically defeated by prior art. Anything that can be done in software is a logical and obvious progression, and as such should make software unpatentable. A piece of software is a set if instructions used to flip 1's and 0's around.As a result, it is just a fancy stick.
Microsoft can buy patents. It owns enough of them to claim that Linux is a violation of several. That's why Microsoft had plenty of Patent deals with Novell, Linspire, etc... To make a quick buck off Linux
That's patently absurd!!!!
Start them programming simple games... You may forget, but learning how to read code and trace it out, even in a mod for a game, can be a chore, and would intimidate the heck out of many teenagers. Choosing a simple language, with some simple graphics commands built in (BASIC, Turing, whatever), and provide some simple examples of how basic data structures work (If/then/else, Loops) would allow them to learn code at their own rate. having commands like drawBox(), drawLine() and drawCircle() to make graphics easy, speeds up the instant gratification you seek.
Reason being, you can teach the person writing it, how files are parsed, which gives some groundwork in basic I/O down the line.
Further, if your teenager is into blogging, etc... You can have them feed off that aspect... This webpage is your blog. It is the ultimate in customization. Unfortunately you need to write it yourself. Add CSS when they get bored of plain HTML layout stuff.
Of course, when he gets sick of editing raw HTML to add posts, you can guide them into PHP/Perl/Ruby/.NET or whatever your fancy is. I'd stick to something more basic, like using PHP, and start off simple, like includes for bringing text files in.
Once they get bored of that, work your way into databases. get them to make an administration page so they can type in things directly into the browser, and have it appear on the page. Basically, it's a place where you can start REALLY SIMPLE, get immediate gratification with the results, and build off projects to infinite degrees.
I've never been one to coddle kids, especially teenagers. Let them have a blog. Just make sure you teach them how to be safe about it. Explain your rules for privacy, and why they're important. Don't just shelter them from all things evil... They will have to learn how to deal when you're not around. Think of giving them this blog space as learning how to cross the street. Likewise, give them something interesting to do, that will challenge them, to push their limits. Not too challenging as you don't want to scare them away. Male it challenging enough to make learning worthwhile for them...
Really, the language they learn isn't that important, if it lets them achieve results. I started sphagetti-coding BASIC on a Tandy CoCo. In High school we used a language called Turing. I made a hangman game and a Connect 4 game in my grade 12 year. Last I heard, people still play that connect 4 game at my high school - almost 10 years later. I spent hours on it, and the more people that tried it out, and enjoyed it, the more I worked on it. That led to College, and learning C/C++... As long as you work up to it, keep challenging them at a reasonable rate, you'll give your teen a good grasp on programming. When your teen comes up to you for help and hands you a pile of unformatted code, tell them that you can't read it, and show them how to format to make it easier to read. Get them working first, however you can, then show them how to do it right.
While this is somewhat true, some Linksys routers have a 4 day cache on these connections.... As a result, the memory gets hosed pretty quickly... Switching to DD-WRT, and lowering the connection cache to around 4 hours tends to make things run a lot longer.....
I was leaning for a perfect example of why this kind of drug is needed. My joke was totally retarded :P
Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats. Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats. Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats. Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats....
(Where are those pills?)
Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats. Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats. Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats. Rats? I hate rats! They make me crazy. Crazy? I used to be crazy, Then they locked me up and put me in a rubber room. Rubber room? I hate Rubber rooms! They're full of Rats....
The NDP ALWAYS has the best interests of the people in mind on every individual bill they introduce. The problem is they don't have their other bills in mind, or have any idea on what is required to implement those bills, and as a result, the people go broke, and/or their new laws end up failing once passed.
Competence should not be mistaken for how much someone cares. If the NDP had Competence, I'd probably vote for them.
Laying Cable takes time. It is very expensive and often a time consuming process and usually requires permits to dig, etc, and can get tied up in red tape for a long time. Likewise, routing hardware can be pretty expensive for systems handling ISP-sized loads. If an area has unexpected growth, or is rezoned after the cables are laid, and the permits to lay new cable to upgrade an area don't come fast enough, then how are ISP's supposed to deal with that growth?
The process of throttling traffic is not evil, or wrong. Even throttling specific traffic such as BitTorrent is not evil, providing it can be proven to be the cause of congestion. The evil is Arbitrary, constant and/or preemptive throttling. If an area gets congested, ISP's, like any business' network, should be allowed to shape their traffic, provided said traffic shaping is only a temporary measure, and provided the company can prove that upgrading the system is being done in a reasonable time frame, given the situation at hand for that area.
The unfortunate fact is, sometimes 100 customers in one area don't use one tenth the bandwidth as 100 customers in another area. Sometimes these higher bandwidth areas can't be predicted before the area is populated. Congestion happens on any network, and affects ALL traffic - It can make the internet as a whole unusable, due to only one service causing the congestion. So if there is ONE type of traffic that is causing all the congestion, and slowing it will make the internet useable for everything and everyone else, then it's a fair trade, provided the company in question has plans to upgrade that area. The other option is to add strict bandwidth limits, and cut service once you go over them. Personally, I'd rather have slow downloads for a bit, with working internet for e-mail, web surfing, etc, than to have full speed internet, across the board for the first 15 days of the month...
The issue of course, is how you deem a reasonable manner... If for 1 hour of the day, your area is congested, and the other 23 hours of the day, people have a free ride with unrestricted access, and for that hour, a large amount of the congestion is caused by torrent traffic, then I'd say it's reasonable to curb torrents for that hour. on the other hand, oversubscribing an area and having CONSTANT congestion wouldn't fall into this definition. Lets use an analogy to explain in RL
At a border crossing, sometimes changing the direction of a lane at a makes more sense than spending millions of tax dollars to add more lanes. Sure, you may slow down a few people going in the opposite direction, but if most of the time the flow of traffic is even and steady in both directions through the border, and the reduction of lanes in the one direction is temporary, then it's OK. On the other hand, if there's either a low number of cars going through in each direction, or an equally high number of cars going through in BOTH directions, and traffic is reduced on one side to allow more people to arbitrarily go faster in one direction, then this is where it becomes unreasonable to shape the traffic in such a discriminatory way.
As a result, Some ISPs (Comcast, Bell) shape traffic to always hinder file sharing. Other, more responsible ISPs will only shape traffic during peak times, and will upgrade infrastructure when there is uncontrollable growth in an area, or more equal congestion across the network at all times of the day.
Hub Magazine in Canada has a decent article in this month's edition - The format is kinda nasty (Bitmap for Web viewing - eww) - but the content gives a breakdown of canadian providers. Basically, you are looking at high latency with less than advertised speeds across the board, but you can connect anywhere your cellphone can.
Well, seeing as a majority of spam can be content-filtered, an outbound spam filter that checks content makes perfect sense. The issue is, of course, what values does your ISP hold true, and how ethical are they in preventing spam, vice filtering "questionable content"... If their goal is truly in spam prevention, this type of filtering will hopefully keep grandma and grandpa in blissful ignorance, and will let them go about their daily business without interruption to their service...
Of course for many of us who read Slashdot believe that ignorance is no excuse, and that grandma and grandpa should be taken off the internet until they learn how to take care of a computer... Unfortunately, the market for internet, and the knowledge of the average user is actually very skewed compared to the Slashdot audience. They are also the majority of people online.
Disconnecting customers is throwing money away. Offering free virus removal by trained ISP staff is prohibitively expensive and time consuming, with little Return on Investment. Letting the e-mail through puts the burden on ISP's after the traffic is delivered across major trunks. Filtering actually keeps grandma and grandpa online, while reducing traffic from spam. It makes it a safer and cleaner place for everyone, and it will actually prevent Grandma from sending you a virus, because of her ignorance...
This does of course assume that your ISP is a moral and ethical entity. Your mileage may vary with this type of filtering...
There's always the hard expensive way... If your cable company provides the option, installing a "Long Drop" at your cost may be an option if your cable company is willing to undertake the maintenance of that drop, and put it on a node capable of cable internet. In other words, if you talk to the right people, you can have cable run to your house by a professional, complete with amplifiers for the signal, at your cost (I said expensive). Then have your cable company connect it with a local node that has Internet capabilities. You'll probably have to discuss things with a second level tech or get some sort of permission to get in touch with the local cable's engineering department. As long as the signal's 2 way (Needs 2 way amps, not forward only amps), and run with higher quality line, Internet should not be a problem. Expect to pay in the thousands for this. On the other hand, the real crux of this would be maintenance - if it's all above ground, every bit of weather damage on the line will degrade the signal, which is why you need to make sure the cable company will undertake the cost of maintenance BEFORE you start.....
I work for a Cable company in tech support. TV quality is great. my company is one of few that really does care about quality..... Unfortunately if there's a bad picture (doesn't matter if it's analog or digital) if a cable company is unwilling to fix it, it's the company that's bad, not the technology.