Slashdot Mirror

i.e., Artima's Ruby Buzz and Java Buzz, Planet PostgreSQL and so forth.

Of course, those become less valuable when folks add RSS feeds that aren't specific to the topic, so that Java posts show up in the Ruby feeds and all that. That can be tricky too, though; does this post go under Jabber or PostgreSQL? Dunno.

Left Wing Dominated Education == Declining Education

Today our education systems are almost entirely dominated by The Left. Also, everyone feels that the quality of education has substantially declined.

I can't help but feel that a poorly educated populous is in the Left's best interests. Often to believe The Left's philosophy you have to believe two or more mutually exclusive things.
For example, consider the two axioms:
a) Homosexuality is an innate trait that one is born with.
b) Homosexuality is a personal and private choice, and society can't question that choice.

Now I don't know or care which, if either, axiom pushed by The Left is correct, but obvious they both are not correct. However, Political Correctness demands that we all recite both axioms as if both are unquestionably true.

This ability to DoubleThink is made much easier when you have a population that is incapable of logical thought. "Who you going to believe me (The Left and Political Correctness) or your lying eyes?"

Political Correctness, which is standard indoctrination in the schools systems of the West, requires that it adherents deny reality when it comes into conflicts with their belief system. This is discussed in a very competent series here.

Our educational system is currently controlled by a biased closed-mined group (The Left) that has little or no interest in teaching people to think rationally or question ideas in a logical methodical manner. Instead they are a group that has a tough time winning in a democracy (hence their retreat to the courts, and judges who act as philosopher-kings), and often resorts to emotional devices such as racial, gender, and sexual politics. During the last elections a street sign in my local town proudly declared "When women vote, Democrats win." It is hard to believe that the appeal to gender politics could be any more obvious. Emotion is what The Left want, not logic. Emotion is what they t now each in schools.

Those currently in control of our education system are not interested in teaching facts or abilities, but are more interested in pushing an agenda. The result of pushing the agenda at the expense of education is what results in our declining education system. No about of money, alone, is going to solve this.

Also, you have less incentive to learn to take care of yourself, when your teacher constantly teaches that the State will take care of you. Self-reliance isn't necessary when we have the Nanny State. It is more important to be a victim than to be competent. The soft bigotry and racism of The Left is on display with the idea of Affirmative Action (or as the British call it "Positive Discrimination"). (Ah yes. That policy based on the idea that two wrongs do in fact make a right.)

Those on The Left feel that black people and other minorities are not capable of achieving the same things as whites. Therefore, there is no need to hold them to the same standards. "You can achieve less, because we know you're not capable of more." The Left (and allow me to paraphrase here) feels that they have a White Man's Burden to give the poor blacks an advantage because they know that blacks just are naturally as capable as whites. It appears that racism is OK , when it is Politically Correct racism.

And, therefore why should blacks achieve as much as they possibly can? Their educators don't expect it of them. In fact, when one of them achieves and shows this Politically Correct racism wrong, they are ridiculed and harassed. For example, they are accused of "acting white," or they get the rapist black man stereotype thrown at them (Justice Thomas), or they get political cartoonist Oliphant drawing pictures of them with big lips and referring to the them as "spear-chucker" (Rice).

When the education system was concerned with diversity of ideas, not just skin color it used to teach facts. Now, it merely teaches ideology. And, we wonder why the education system is in decline.

Danese Cooper's blog entry is our official statement on this matter.
-russ

Seems like Ruby on Rails is competing for web apps too - lots of comparisons are floating around out there. Some large sites are converting over, too, like Derek Siver's "CD Baby" - he blogged on the conversion here.

I've certainly found Rails to be a good fit with interfacing with a Jabber PostgreSQL backend. Good times!

Are here. Not many folks still using IE 6.0! Of course, RubyForge is a pretty niche web site...

I would have posted the stats here, but the lameness filter stymied me. Ah well.

...they've certainly helped me with the PMD JDeveloper extension a couple of times.

Most recently, I was trying to get the "update center" functionality working this past weekend and I got emails from several Oracle guys with fixes for various problems. It's pretty nice to get help right from the core guys...

> they could try and hire all the main developers or something

Right on, yup, that's about the only way they could do that - by hiring Tom Lane or some of the other gurus. But they can't "buy PostgreSQL". There have been some interesting discussions on this on the pgsql-advocacy list recently as well.

> And I'm glad of that as Postgres is my favorite rdbms.

Same here! 3.5 million records and cranking along; PostgreSQL is meeting RubyForge's needs very nicely.

...a Ruby plugin, that is; this one done by Rob McKinnon. It's a good piece of work, although of course all the "code completion is hard for dynamic languages" applies here as well.

For what it's worth, enscript works fine for doing Ruby syntax highlighting if that's all you need.

Take a look at this blog posting to see what the blogosphere is saying about the video ipod. thelaggard

A big question is whether major MMOGs evolve along a two-track path, with commercial and con-commercial servers for each world. The Terra Nova blog has had numerous discussions of this topic.

And his presentation has been leaked:

Slide 1: Hi, My name is Chris.
Slide 2: MS SFU has already been end-of-lifed.
Slide 3: Thank you, good night.

http://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2005/09/mic rosoft_servi.html

I've been using xdb_sql to log user registrations and roster changes and whatnot to PostgreSQL; notes on that are here.

The more Jabber developers and users the better... it'll just keep getting faster and more stable!

Yup, and meanwhile PostgreSQL is prepping an 8.1 release with shared row locking, table partitioning, and better SMP support. Draft press release is here.

Anecdotally, RubyForge got 240K hits yesterday on a GForge site backed by a PostgreSQL 8 database with no problems; good times. PostgreSQL is good enough that our problem is bandwidth, not server load.

I've been using PostgreSQL on a low-end site - RubyForge, 3.3M records - and it's comfortably handling 200K hits per day.

Maybe I can turn on logging for a day to count the queries; that would provide another data point.

...apparently posts on StringBuffer.toString() and XPath engine timing aren't wildly popular. Odd, that...

...apparently posts on StringBuffer.toString() and XPath engine timing aren't wildly popular. Odd, that...

Totally. I've had nothing but trouble from Intel's 'PROSet' utility. I've been having a fight at work just being able to get onto the network on wireless at the moment... Though its given me some excuses not to do much work, maybe this might help someone else too.

Basically its a fault with the power management function on Pentium laptops with the 2200BG card.

[Yet I have no trouble on my own Gentoo laptop with a dodgy PCMCIA Broadcom card... I wish I didn't have to use Microsoft here... *sigh*]

http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2005/08/int el_proset_22.html
References a Power Save Polling problem with the access point.

There's plenty of details on this really hidden page:
http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/ cs-006205.htm

Hope that helps someone else with one of these crappy Intel PROSet cards. Time to reboot again I guess... I just hope I can post this message before the card kills itself again. :)

Dug

...mentions, among other things, Ruby on Rails.

Seems like Rails is turning up everywhere. One thing's for sure, it's one of the main reasons that RubyForge now has (and needs) five file mirrors!

I'm working on a Rails app now that has both an XML-RPC front end and a web front end; it's been pretty fun to learn all the little ways Rails reduces the amount of scaffolding code in an application. Good times!

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

• Protecting Nanos with nanofabrics.
  
• Protecting a Nano with ordinary LCD camera screen protectors.
  
• The InvisibleSHIELD (the best protector I've seen).
  
• Removing scratches from your iPod with GS27.
  
• A review of various iPod scratch removers.

Wondering if you guys ever considered using .NET as the scripting language (potentially using mono for cross platform ... ness). For background, see what the second life guys are doing with it

O'Reilly MAKE magazine editor Philip Torrone has already casually commented that MAKE is thinking of putting out some SL How Tos. Now I'm totally looking forward to something like the O'Reilly Metaverse Developers Conference =D. That's got to be on its way sometime, with an eye to Web 3.0 ;-).

How do I get my blog listed?
            If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven't picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.

So it has a bozo filter, eh? Does that mean that r0ml can't attend?

First of all you say you're working with 10 teams, but whose team are you on? You can't be on 10 teams, you can't report to 10 managers. I'm going to guess you are on one team and have one direct supervisor.

If the teams are trying to make you work within your team structure that's a separate issue to task management. You need to inform them of the task management structure your department uses, and have them submit requests for work under that structure. If your deliverables are project deliverables, they can be tracked, but they need to be tracked as external deliverables, and most importantly you don't need to track them according to the process that team uses to track deliverables. If you do have to act as a member of many teams dear god you and your organization need some serious intervention.

Anyway, so your problem is really "I have many many many tasks, how do I track them?" As someone else mentioned Getting Things Done is a technologistic agnostic task management sytem that is very popular with geeks, for managing many many tasks at once. You can also google to find links and articles like this one to let you try-before-you-buy.

The way to combine these two features is not to make a Gentoo LiveCD, but rather to make a tool within Gentoo that makes it easy to roll-your-own LiveCD. Now that would be cool. I go through and select which software I want on it, depending on the application. For example, maybe I want a media player, so I put on Mplayer and some good media apps. I select which architecture I want it for: Pentium, x86_64, or maybe even PPC (why not cross compile). Then it makes the image for me.

That would be cool. The thing I don't like about Knoppix is that it comes with some stuff that I don't want. Obviously, there are other people who do want it, for good reasons, but not me. And it lacks some stuff that I do want. For example I would like Knoppix with one browser, with Flash and proprietary codecs. If I could easily roll my own I would have that.

-------------------
Every thought about becoming a defense contractor?

Perhaps the most effective PDA on the market. It has long battery life. It is easy to access. Its means of data entry could reach the dozens of WPM. There are various add-on attachments that make this PDA one of the most reliable products on the market. And, the tech support of the company is outstanding.

http://merlin.blogs.com/43folders/2004/09/introduc ing_the.html

The Hipster PDA

To add some tech to it, use GTDTiddlyWiki and print out the index cards.

There is also a D*I*Y Planner

Make backups with a photocopier, or just type them in again and reprint.

You're never gonna convince bloggers that they are a bunch of mindless robots spewing out uninsightful or boring tidbits of their personality. It is just all a game for people to fit in the group.. In this case, blogging about something that everyone else is talking about makes you feel accepted, important, and mainstream. Who cares if no one reads your blog or leaves you comments? At least you feel good that YOU are being an "individual" by spewing out the same group values.

Anyway, I always have a good solution to these people. It always results in anger and laughter.

Take a look!. Obviously the most attention this self-important asstard will ever get. He should thank me.

Wish the interviewer had asked more punchy, specific questions that don't lead to general, global "we are the world" type of answers. I suppose Sir TBL did the he could under the circumstances. His best answer IMHO was to the question what would you want the web to be in thirty years: "When it's 30, I expect it to be much more stable, something that people don't talk about." Reading the interview got me thinking, what question would I have asked him? Mine would be the one I asked on my blog today "What is your most wished for Firefox feature?" * A good blogging question might have been "What's missing in the way blogging is implemented today?" * Answer to most wished for firefox feature at http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/08/s_4.html

It's interesting to see that Yahoo! may have surpassed Google on this metric. Over the past decade, Yahoo! has beaten other "hares" to date, including AOL and Microsoft's MSN. They're doing some innovative stuff, but also have some areas to catch up on. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/08/on_the_merits_o.htm l

Truly hope the landing goes through safely tomorrow. In a broader context, need to take a fresh look at the space program. One of the best things I've read on this subject was yesterday. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/08/on_the_shuttle_.htm l

Invading Iraq was Bush's genius stroke in the G-WOT? Now we're fighting them "over there", so we won't have to fight them over here, because terrorists can't hijack planes and slam them into buildings. Everyone agrees that these Patriotic efforts are making us safer. Don't you feel safer, knowing that the FBI will outsource to China the grunt work of monitoring these backdoors? Then they'll swing into action, and save us all.

It's interesting this is starting to be pushed by schools in the US. So far, the pursuit of low-cost computers for education and other markets, has primarily been a focus for developing countries like Brazil, India, China and other Asian countries. The holy grail continues to be the $100 PC, which is still difficult to attain. However Windows PCs have come down in price to about $500 for a desktop and about $700 for a notebook...low, but not low enough. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/s_9.html

They've got the Black Hat fiasco, this and getting caught actively helping the Chinese police and not giving a flying fuck about it. Is anyone else thinking that Cisco needs to actually do a little bit of institutional introspection and admit the obvious source of their woes: their own damn psychopathic behavior?

Ad-sense is not the only area Yahoo! is playing a bit of catch-up with Google...the other is in the area of blogging. Yahoo! just recently decided to "open up" its blogging network to the broader web, much like Google has done for a while with its Blogger acquistion of a few years ago. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_yahoo_360_pe.htm l On the other hand, the company has also been doing things better than Google, including the recent Yahoo! MyWeb initiative which provides a whole new way to save things off the web and find them later. So the feature and technology race continues...

Great to see another innovative company trying to break through the vertical industry structure of today's global wireless industry. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_wilting_wire.htm l

Serenity definitely looks cool. With a broadband internet, we may be entering a time when cool, emerging shows dont get cancelled because they cannot find a big enough audience on TV or cable. Remember Star Trek was cancelled in the sixties for that reason and brought back via movies because of a core, but economically small audience. With the internet, audiences can be smaller and still allow the producers and distributors to make a profit. The day of broadband doing an end run around cable and TV are near. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_broadband_co.htm l

Great Cingely post. Rupert has been "feinting" on Internet matters with his peers for over a decade. Notable is his speech to his peers a few weeks ago. See http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/04/ss_15.html His recent announcement of a Fox Internet unit also has these elements. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_news_corp_cr.htm l

Great Cingely post. Rupert has been "feinting" on Internet matters with his peers for over a decade. Notable is his speech to his peers a few weeks ago. See http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/04/ss_15.html His recent announcement of a Fox Internet unit also has these elements. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_news_corp_cr.htm l

The "quadruple play" is already a well understood investment play on Wall Street over the last few months. The big battle ahead is cable and what used to be the regional telcos. They're both arming themselves with everything they can think of, including faster and faster, two-way broadband, internet telephony, cellular and broadband wireless services, along with hundreds of content channels...and each side is committing to spend billions to do it. What investors are trying to understand is who remains standing with a semblance of a profitable business at the end of it. Each side is desperately trying not to end up being a "dumb pipe", but have a valuable "walled garden" of services to keep customers paying $50, 100 or more per month per household. Someone is going to end up losing these multi-billion dollar bets. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_wilting_wire.htm l

Can OSS coexist with commercial software?

Sure, but what happens when commercial software companies start hiring up developers of competing open source projects?

For example:

http://secondlife.blogs.com/prompt/2005/07/i_love_ it_when_.html

Fixed link:
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/s_11.html

The GTA brouhaha to me is about video games coming of age. They're no longer just about kids and teenagers, but for adults of all ages...it's a $25 billion business, and bigger than the movie industry...and it's just beginning. Sure, more grown-up ratings might shrink the market a bit, but the industry needs to be more creative about expanding the market. Besides figuring how to handle Easter Eggs, and adult content within games, the industry also needs to figure out how to meet the time constraints that adults have in playing games. Yet, most games are in a time warp, with limited ability to save, locked levels (you gotta earn it mentality!). It takes 2-3 hours to see a movie on a DVD and at least 20 hours to play a game. As a decades long gamer, I know it's there's fundamental difference between the two forms, and a totally different experience, but... If I'm springing close to $50 for a game (vs. say $20-25 for a movie DVD), and I don't feel like investing the 50 plus hours to play/replay segments to earn the right to see all the levels, and understand the story, I should be able to have an "auto-play" or "fast-forward to the next level" feature. This could significantly expand the market for games of all types, as more grown-ups can fit a game into their lives in terms of time. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/05/on_playing_pcco.htm l

Russell Beattie makes an interesting hypothetical case for the Sony PSP to be an interesting "video ipod", IF Sony were to take certain actions, in addition to upgrading the browser. In my view there are business considerations that are larger than the technical issues that need to be considered. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_sony_psp_tur.htm l

How about creating or buying a ready-made "computer on a stick"? That is a USB memory stick...there's a fair bit of open source software, OS, apps, utilities etc., that can boot from a USB drive. You can put this together or buy one from third-party vendors. Another inexpensive alternative would be to pass around a "how to" sheet to your group after you give them a demo off a USB drive. On it you could also include the PCmag reviews of OpenOffice reassuring Microsoft Office compatibility. If you want to go the extra mile, you could even set up the Mozilla browser with all the open-source resources bookmarked like wikipedia, Wikinews, imdb, openmedia.org etc. It's an eye-opener for those not familiar with open source. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_computers_on.htm l

Not sure I understand this, and it seems to be a relatively old story (last month already)...it seems to be more Michael Robertson's disappointment rather than Apple, with a tinge of sour grapes in the air. Anyway, the world is rapidly changing to make the whole Windows vs. Mac box competition to be relatively less interesting. With more applications and services moving off the desktop and into the network, the battleground is increasingly shifting online. Apple has already leveraged this move by becoming the number four vendor of personal computers, right behind Gateway on the recent numbers. Now they just need to start to race Microsoft to making more of their applications web-optimized and OS-agnostic. iTunes is a basic step in that direction. The portals are not standing still though...Yahoo!'s acquisition of Konfabulator is in my view a move toward making this new reality happen faster. More on that here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_yahoo_acquis.htm l

This is pretty interesting...when you go into to personalize your Google homepage, you get these various sections like "News", "Lifestyle" etc., that you can add to your page. If you click on the "Fun" section, you get three content options to add...and number two is "Ask Yahoo!" I guess they're returning the favor Yahoo! did them to get them to the top, much like what IBM did for Microsoft. For more on that historical review, go to: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/s_9.html

What's different this time are the sheer numbers. Japan, though the second largest global economy in the eighties, did it with a population of about 125 million. The US is about 300 million. The Indians and Chinese are collectively at a touch over 2 billion today VS. a 6 billion world population that is forecasted to be about 9 billion by 2050. Their (India and China) respective per capita GDP incomes are about $3300 and $5600/year compared to about $40,000 for the US TODAY. At 9% a year growth, which is roughly what most economists peg the growth for these economies, China will achieve US GDP by 2027 and India by 3033. That would put their collective GDPs at over 100 trillion compared to 55 trillion for the WORLD and 11 trillion for the US today. The growth could slow down for a few years and a number of other things could change, but barring global catastrophe, the numbers are the numbers... and it's VERY different from worrying about Japan in the eighties and "tiger" asian economies in the 70s. Plus, both India and china are serious about their kids learning English...the japanese have and still are a lot more insular on that front. For more on the language stuff, take a look here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/06/on_the_importan.htm l

well said...now there's a different kind of homesteading going on...on intellectual property rather than good ol' dirt. The other thing to keep in mind is that India and China are equally focused on giving their kids an education in English as much as in Science. The anecdotes are interesting...Again Friedman had a column on this...more here on "The Importance of Language" in all this: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/06/on_the_importan.htm l