Yea, butt

Will these young imagineers earn enough to pay for my pension?

Stupid Stick

They need to go find the stupid stick and whack some sense into themselves. Were is the justification that open source software and cheaper, European branded Archos/Arnova tablets won't be just as good?

We can't afford vanity purchases in this climate, we are still paying for the banks after-all.

Whot! No! Exclamation! Marks! ?

Where is my hobgoblin of little minds?

Reading the comments I realize there are some positive aspects to jingoism.

Seems like (another) tipping point. Nothing is stopping ARM/Intel from winning the day.

Swearing is OK though.

They may be prudes in some ways, but not when it comes to the needless use of swear words. (Or has every American had to converse with a person that they had seen fornicating with their mother and, through bad schooling no doubt, decided not to use the word father)?

Hey you! Expand the BBC!

The BBC is doing such a good job on the web it has the paytards reeling. We should be encouraging the BBC to expand its commercial arm and so need less of a subsidy.

Dave is a great channel. Where would I get my daily Top Gear fix without it?

Stop the moaning, or we will just end up with more american media imports rather than exporting our fine culture.

Authors lame flaim-bait

An informative article is spoilt with this:

"Those that consider GUIs bloat and think a good user experience involves green monospaced fonts on a pure black terminal window will not be pleased with the new Ubuntu. Unfortunately, from the looks of things, you are Ubuntu's past. The real world of everyday, dare I say ordinary, computer users are Ubuntu's future."

You do know that people can use console interfaces as well as GUI's.

Fear not!

Google are working on a version of Chrome written in Javascript that turns a Safari Canvas into a fully functioning Chrome browser with "Private Browsing" as default.

Your ability to watch porn on Apple products will be restored!

Fact-lite

But then that is what a rumour is.

More entertainment or news please, cos this ain't it!

Keep 1Xtra

There is so much more for their target audience to be doing. I think it is good to have an "Urban music" channel to attract that audience.

(From someone well over 40 who doesn't mind an an incubator for Dizzee Rascal and Wiley to get mainstream).

And Dynamic,, 4GL, languages go where?

respondents might have been confused.

But then again, its a small sample, bias unknown.

Use with caution :-)

If it doesn't skim then reject

I often skim text and try *not* to give the benefit of doubt to the authos of 'scholarly papers'. If it doesn't skim, then I more often find, that on closer examination, the author isn't trying to be clear.

(It's not only Wikipedia tha may contain crap).

- Paddy.

Wash your mouth out with soap.

The language detracts from the message. Do you normally swear at people you've just met?

(Maybe you do).

Back to the dark ages?

I wonder if the professor would prefer all bibles to be in Latin too?

Gleaning data from books is a skill that has to be learned. Gleaning facts from the internet is a different skill that also needs to be learned. The professor is right to mark down students who don't use the internet well but forcing them to not use the internet is a cop-out. Teach them how to use the internet well, or if you don't know how, get someone who does!

There are a lot of bad books, as well as bad web pages. If a student contributed to a factual web page they would get some idea of how inaccuracies appear and can be fixed (or not), bias, ...

Update your teaching rather than appearing as a Luddite.

Cookbook, CPAN anyone?

It seems to me that scripting languages such as Perl and Python have recognised the benefits of code reuse and their communities have spent time putting together code repositories such as http://www.cpan.org/ and http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Python/Cookbook/ . Searching can still be a pain but people do explain their problem, together with their efforts so far, on newsgroups such as comp.lang.python and receive community help as either original code snippets, or pointers to code .

The process can always be improved, but at least with open-source scripting languages such as Python and Perl, you're not starting from scratch.

- Paddy.