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Comment Re:Holy shit? (Score 1) 950

I do actually remember those tests, sit and reaches, push ups, sit ups, mile time and maybe a couple other things that they would put into a nice graph to show how you stacked up to your peers. Being the fat, nerdy kid my line graphs were always about 1/3 as long as everybody else and well below the marked "standard." I also remember freshman year having to take swimming for 6 weeks too. Maybe my situation was rare, but I was never overly picked on because of those tests, and certainly not by the teachers.

I think heart rate monitors and the such to track students individually and just measuring their own progress instead of sticking them all to the same arbitrary "normal" number is better.

Comment Re:Holy shit? (Score 1) 950

Yeah, it took about 15 minutes for kids to start slacking off and just shaking the thing for the last 5 minutes. You would think the gym teacher would have realized that every class a couple kids were running marathons in 60 minutes every single day, but he didn't and I guess that's why he's a gym teacher.

Comment Re:Holy shit? (Score 4, Insightful) 950

This seems to be what it's for. I'm 21 now, but during senior year we were required to use pedometers as the first step that was leading up to using heart rate monitors and pedometers to track the amount of work we did. The most we did was record the number of steps we took during class on our own personal chart to keep track of progress. The closest the school got to seeing the charts was when the gym teacher checked over everyone's chart at the end of the week to make sure everyone was doing it and to maybe encourage those that had lower numbers to try harder.

Try and find out from the school what data they'll be keeping, but for the most part this program seems to be getting lazy kids to work harder during gym.

GUI

Preview the Office 2007 Ribbon-Like UI Floated For OpenOffice.Org 617

recoiledsnake writes "OpenOffice.org has prototyped a new UI that radically changes the current OO.o interface into something very similar to the new ribbon style menus that Office 2007 introduced and which have been extensively used throughout Windows 7. The blog shows a screenshot of the prototype in Impress (the equivalent of PowerPoint), but this UI is proposed to be used across all OO.o applications. Some commenters on the Sun blog are not happy about OO.o blindly aping Office 2007, and feel that the ribbon UI may be out of place in non-Windows operating systems."
Media

RIAA Says "Don't Expect DRMed Music To Work Forever" 749

Oracle Goddess writes "Buying DRMed content, then having that content stop working later, is fair, writes Steven Metalitz, the lawyer who represents the MPAA, RIAA in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office. 'We reject the view that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works.' In other words, if it stops working, too bad. Not surprisingly, Metalitz also strongly opposes any exemption that would allow users to legally strip DRM from content if a store goes dark and takes down its authentication servers."
Patents

Company Awarded "The Patent For Podcasting" 202

Chris Albrecht writes "VoloMedia announced today that it has been awarded what it called the 'patent for podcasting.' According to the press announcement, patent number 7,568,213, titled 'Method for Providing Episodic Media,' covers: '...the fundamental mechanisms of podcasting, including providing consumer subscription to a show, automatically downloading media to a computer, prioritizing downloads, providing users with status indication, deleting episodes, and synchronizing episodes to a portable media device.'"

Comment Re:Old Snake would never approve. (Score 1) 200

This is my experience. I care less about the frame rate and more about the size of the text. On my 29" 10 year old tv the text on the pitches on MLB 2k8 are so small my friends and I had to get right up near the tv just to read them. It's impossible to read the scoreboard in both NBA and NHL 09. It's not my eyes, I'm 21 and have 20/20 vision and this has never happened any other console generation. I've noticed my other games have smaller text than xbox and ps2 games, but with sports games it's almost unbearable.

Even if I could afford a huge HDTV, I'd have no place to fit it.

The Almighty Buck

Apple Dominates "Premium PC" Market 475

itwbennett writes "Macs made up a whopping 91 percent of the $1,000-and-up computer market in June. Not so long ago, $1,000 got you an entry-level machine. Today the average computer sells for $701, while the average Windows machine sells for only $515. Still, Macs only make up 8.7% of PC sales. But is that really such a bad position to be in? Consider an Apples to Apples, that is, Macs to iPhones comparison: the iPhone takes only a sliver of the phone market but a much larger share of the profits."

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