PC Mechanic, New Article |
- Is Cursive Handwriting Obsolete?
- Was The Social Browser Always A Bad Idea?
- See How Taxes You Pay Are Spent
| Is Cursive Handwriting Obsolete? Posted: 19 Apr 2011 03:00 AM PDT Quick quiz: What letter is this, and is it in uppercase or lowercase? "That’s a number 2!", you may say. No, it isn’t. It is a letter. Okay then, how about this one? Give up? That wouldn’t surprise me. The first letter is a capitalized Q and the second a capitalized Z. When I was a child, I was taught D’Nealian Cursive in elementary school alongside print writing. In today’s world, print writing is considered normal and cursive something which to most people looks like a foreign language, even though it’s English. Has technology sped up the obsoleting of cursive? Yes. Machine character recognition (which most of you know as OCR) has always been for printed letters first and not cursive. It is true there is machine-reading for cursive writing, but the accuracy of it isn’t anywhere near as good as for printed letters. Why? Because there’s much more support for printed letter recognition over cursive. Should the teaching of cursive writing be dropped completely? This has been a question of large debate for decades, but in the last 5 or so years has really held more weight for one simple reason: People type more than write. When you’re writing down something, it is faster to write in cursive than print. The reason is because the letters flow together. If you look at the D’Nealian letter chart, each lowercase letter has a line at the end which connects one letter to the next. With print writing there is no flow from one letter to the next, however it is more legible, hence why it’s meant for print. On a smartphone, nobody handwrites messages as they are typed out. Sure, you could handwrite it using a stylus, but in the end that actually slows you down because the typing method is faster – especially with predictive texting technologies. It’s my personal belief that cursive writing should be dropped from teaching curriculums since kids today have no real need for it. Cursive writing should simply be an elective course. For example, in high school it could be listed as an Arts course for those that need to fill up a few extra credits. Would you support cursive writing being dropped from the standard curriculum? Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.       |
| Was The Social Browser Always A Bad Idea? Posted: 18 Apr 2011 07:00 AM PDT In case you hadn’t heard, Flock, a "social web browser", is officially done as of April 26. Done as is no more new releases or support of it. I’ve never quite understood the point of a social web browser, or any "enhanced" browser to begin with. The first "enhanced" browsers I remember were from AOL and other ISPs. These were browsers that were all IE and stuffed full of crap. Usually boatloads of adware. There are probably more than a few of you out there that remember the bad old days of the AOL, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and other "optimized" web browsers. These bloat-extreme browsers do in fact still exist, but fortunately are far less in use these days. Other than ISP-bloated browsers, the other type of "enhanced" before the introduction of the social browser were skin/feature add-ons like NeoPlanet and Maxthon. Compared to ISP-bloat, these were not adware-infested pieces of garbage but rather offered genuine enhancements to the browser experience. For example, the only way to get tabs in IE back before IE7 was to use something like Maxthon, so they did have their perks. Then came the "social web browser". To the best of my knowledge, Flock was first and for a while the only browser billed as "social". What it did was simply integrate as many popular social media destinations on the internet as possible. What I never understood about a social-designed browser is simply this: What’s the point when you can bookmark and/or use tabs and/or use extensions to do the same job, and usually do it better? The only social media browser left (unless anyone knows another) is Rockmelt. I did actually install that browser and tried it out, but eh.. there’s nothing in it really I can’t do with plain tabs or extensions. Sure, it looks nice and all that, but it takes the lightning-fast Chromium and slows it down quite a bit just to ‘be social’. No thanks. Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.     |
| See How Taxes You Pay Are Spent Posted: 18 Apr 2011 05:00 AM PDT For those of us in the United States, today is tax day. If you haven’t submitted your paperwork yet, you are probably working diligently on getting it finished. Appropriately, if you would like to know where your tax money is going, check out the newly available Federal Taxpayer Receipt site:
Here you can see the well known categories (i.e. defense, education, etc.) broken down into the components that make up the total. If nothing else it is interesting to see what your share of each piece is. Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.     |
| You are subscribed to email updates from PCMech To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar