Month: November 2002

I may be wrong on this one

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Laptops for all? ‘Stupidest idea’ makes grade

But the governor compares the critics to naysayers who rose up generations ago when schools talked about sending children home with other learning devices. “They said they could throw them at each other, or dump them in mud puddles and destroy them,” King said. “They were talking about books.”

I have been and continue to be opposed to widespread use of computers in the classroom for a variety of reasons. But this article may answer a lot of my arguments.

For one, there’s no access problem: everyone gets one. For another, I suspect they didn’t cost as much as if each parent had bought their own (Apple would love to get back into education and if I read the story right, some Gates Foundation money funded this: sweet irony). And while it’s early, it seems to be effective at getting kids focused on their work: discipline problems are down, attendance is up. Obviously, some other things have changed to make the equipment useful: the same old “chalk and talk” techniques don’t really leverage a school full of wireless networked laptops, and that aspect of things didn’t get much attention.

For now, I’ll stay with my old position: I still think, given the way coursework is designed and taught, all a computer is really good for is to teach typing or keyboarding as it’s now known.

One of my biggest issues has been that by teaching with a computer, you teach the student about the computer itself: it becomes a distraction. And given the pace of innovation (slow though it is in these monopoly-dominated times), what will a seventh grader learn that will help him ten years later as he enters the job market? Put another way, do you need ten years to learn how to manage files and do basic word processing?

Of course not. And we’re starting to see exciting developments in the interfaces we use (mouse gestures, for example) that make keyboard skills less essential. Funny how the big innovative company makes the only browsers that don’t use this . . . . . .

Mark me down as interested but not convinced.

Open Office

OpenOffice.org I haven’t had any luck building this from source, even through the ports collection, but these packages are supposed to work. So far, all I get are crashes, so I am going to try the Linux packages and run them in the emulation ABI. Of course, I can’t install the Linux version until the I get the FreeBSD one uninstalled: some remnants survived my attempts at removing it all, so I have to now download it again and see if I can uninstall it properly. They’re managing that much MSFT emulation quite well: make it difficult to uninstall or reinstall.

A success story

Waypath Related Weblog Entries

So I have been testing the Waypath engine from ThinkTank23 (you can see the results at bottom right: I think I’ll move ’em up higher on the page) and I have to say I really like the stuff it finds.

The idea is a simple one to understand though not so easy to make happen. Rather than make a user supply keywords to drive a search, Waypath uses the contextual content of the current page and delivers results based on that. Call it keywordless search, whatever you like, it just works.

I need to add it to my individual entries which means some template redesign.

Go here and tell ’em you want to use this on your site.

<UPDATE> I removed Waypath results from the main page and added it to all the individual entries. Browsing the archives is quite interesting now (not just my stale guff, but the incisive observations of others are on display).

decoctions, tinctures, and teas, oh my

So while Frank works his way through the Atkins Diet, I am exploring the world of herbal medicine.

Since the evidence of what causes/prevents kidney stones seems inconclusive or contradictory, I am passing up traditional Western allopathic medicine for stuff that seems to be solidly, if not widely, endorsed. I want to the Herbalist today and bought half a cup each of dried gravel root, hydrangea root, and marshmallow root. The person in the shop seemed to know what I was after: I mentioned gravel root and she asked if I needed the others by name. A good sign. She told me about a few other cures/treatments, mostly labelled as ‘cleanses’ but I had what I came for.

I followed her directions on my first batch of this brew, but I found a page that gave me more details. The first batch was palatable, though not what I would call appealing. I made a second batch this evening with the more complete instructions, boiling it from cold water, which brought out a lot more flavor (bleacgh). A liberal drop of honey helped . . . . .

The same page had instructions on tinctures which take longer to make (2 weeks) but last up to two years and use smaller doses. I’m looking for something I can take forever since I don’t have a lot of hope I’ll find any other solution.

David Pogue explains it all for you

MSFT and Innovation

Beyond Windows and Office, when has Microsoft become the dominant player in a market it covets? It’s either a distant second-place player or a complete loser in palmtops, digital music formats, online services, set top boxes, game consoles, phones, and other areas it’s set out to conquer, no matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars it spends. If Microsoft were truly the quality-driven innovator it claims to be, surely it would have claimed the #1 spot in some of these other categories.

Instead, according to an article this week in The Financial Times, the numbers tell the real story: Microsoft’s Xbox game division lost $177 million last quarter, its MSN online service lost $97 million, its application-software division lost $68 million, and its palmtop division lost $33 million. The only profits at Microsoft, in fact, came form its Windows monopoly money: $2.84 billion. (If there’s any doubt that Microsoft is abusing its monopoly, that’s an 85 percent profit margin.)

There’s more good stuff in this one column. Many people have questioned MSFT’s claim to innovation, but no one has laid out all the pieces for me as clearly as this. This of course underscores why breaking the company into Baby Bills is so frightening: most of them would die quickly.

MSFT annual report: Made with a Mac

Was the Microsoft 1999 Annual report produced on a Macintosh?

Microsoft Word documents are notorious for containing private information in file headers that people would sometimes rather not see get out. An interesting example is the 1999 Microsoft annual report which was released on the Web last week as a Word document. The file headers indicate that the annual report was created on a Macintosh and not Windows!

Hey, at least they used Word: how would it look if they used AppleWorks?

imagine the possibilities

Serious Internet Explorer Defect

A simple way to exploit an unfixed defect in Internet Explorer has been discovered that allows malicious web sites, and possibly malicious email messages read with Outlook or Outlook Express, to take control of a computer. All you would need to do is click a web link and the owner of the web site could take almost any action they desired on your computer.

Simple, working exploit software was recently published to a public mailing list.

There is no patch to fix the problem. Anti-virus and personal firewall software will not prevent an exploit. It is hoped that Microsoft will provide a patch to fix this defect in the near future.

So anyone wth access to content on public webserver could integrate this code into some other page and reformat hard drives, conduct a DDOS attack, whathaveyou.

And will this affect MSFT’s stock valuation, sales, or public image outside the Usual Suspects who never have anything good to say about them?