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Interview: Steve Wozniak Unbound
1) LinuxPPC?
by UM_Maverick
What's your take on the use of LinuxPPC vs. the MacOS? Many people say that Mac hardware is (and always has been) better than x86, but it's been held back by the OS. Do you think that LinuxPPC can change that?
Woz:
Many of the hardware advantages that Apple has is due to it's being more tightly controlled by Apple and in it's being more tightly integrated with the software. That allows Apple to make hardware changes and decisions that are more reliable than in the Wintel world. This has nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with MacOS. The basic plumbing is superior to Intel hardware in some ways (firewire on the motherboard for example) and a bit lacking in others (3D rendering hardware) but the basic performance advantage goes to the RISC architecture of the PowerPC processor. Intel's response to this is that even if RISC is 40% faster, that only amounts to a few months lead, according to Moore's Law.
If you consider attractiveness and other external qualities, you can't find any hardware that comes close to Apple's. That's because even companies like Sony, that truly care about the user experience, can't do much about the internal hardware (buying it from Intel like every other manufacturer). Also, companies like Sony are in competition with many very cutrate prices in a commodity market. The internal hardware supplier can't do much about the external quality either.
LinuxPPC certainly has the capability of improving the hardware efficiency and preventing some very bad things from happening and allowing software to behave in more expectable ways. It's hard to say that a great deal of the buyers are much influenced by these things or we wouldn't have so much successful crap around. The Macintosh market would probably be prime and ready for LinuxPPC but it probably needs more ease of setup. Also, other UNIX variants (Like Mach Ten) are available already and only marginally used by Macintosh owners. The performance of MacOS X Server is already quite incredible, and the [largely] Open Source MacOS X Client is coming in the summer.
2) Open-source and free software questions
by papo
Do you think open-source and free software is really a revolution or only a hype? How do you think things will become in the software industry in the future with open-source variable inserted in their middle? And do you think this model could lead to a more competitive and less monopolistic market?
Woz:
I definitely think that open-source is a revolution and not hype. I could have chosen to say that it's both.
There have always been people that believed strongly in free software. They are mostly people that have developed something rather good and even sellable, but small and of limited market potential. I support these people. It's little known, but the schematics of the Apple I were actually handed out at the Homebrew Computer Club before we started Apple.
But there are so many large bucks available just to companies that get people using their software because software is like a portal. It's hard to have a clear advantage in getting software widely accepted just because it's free. That's because Microsoft can distribute a lot of good software, like browsers and email clients, for free, making money in less direct ways. The main attraction to open source software may not be it's advantages (price, functionality) but the fact that some people don't want to support the big successful proprietary companies. There's good reason for fear of monopoly stagnation too. Look at ATT. When I was in school there was only one phone in one color. You couldn't buy an answering machine or any of the neat phone stuff that abounds today. ATT was the only phone company and didn't want any change to their guaranteed business due to competition.
3)Ease of Use vs Level of Control
by _J_
Apple has long been noted for having the most (or among the most) user friendly stuff around. What do you think of the trade off between ease of use and level of control? Is there a trade off?
Woz:
In a lot of cases there is a trade off here. In the case of applications, Apple primarily appeals to a market that wants things made easy. That means hiding functionality and control. It bothers people like ourselves. But Apple could say that programmers have as much control as they want, but that certainly isn't true of its hardware. The rule is "keep out" and "don't do it unless you are an expert." You won't find much at all in the way that individual techies can design and use their own boards with a Macintosh, the sort of thing that I always wanted to do.
Then again, Apple is the leader (for decades) in providing user interfaces and hardware interfaces that are easy, like plug and play (and install and pray) yet which can do as much anyway. This is the hardest thing to do in software and hardware and only the greatest artists can do it. It takes a mind that keeps searching for a better way that's unknown, and not stopping at the first few working results.
4) Did/do average people need a computer?
by Otter
In the days of the Apple ][, did you believe the average American household needed a personal computer? I remember being told that computers could balance your checkbook, keep your schedule and store your recipes and wondering if that was a cost-effective solution for people, or just an expensive, if fascinating toy. It's my impression that it's only now with consumer Internet access that a home computer provides value for most people.
What do you think?
Woz:
Even as a toy, I believed that every home needed a computer. This was even though I thought the computer would remain expensive and small, sans Moore's law. Also I believed it before the first killer app, Visicalc. I believed that people would become programmers and not need companies as much. You can see how laughable that was.
Although I never talked to Steve Jobs directly on this issue, I never heard him predict outright some things that are very obvious today in the internet days. But he was more forward looking and interested in making computers palatable for people and finding ways that computers could help them, not as computers but as tools to balance checkbooks, etc. The Apple ][ was just a start in gaining acceptance for computers in the home.
In Junior High School I assumed that transistors were being developed so that people could use them in transistor radios. But my father, who worked at Lockheed, corrected my by saying that they, and the early chips, were designed only for the military, and the consumer market just fell out. This bothered me. I was a person after all. I wanted consumer products to drive the chip market. Around 1969, when I could design any minicomputer made, I knew that I wanted one for myself. I told my father that someday I'd buy a 4K Nova computer and he said that it cost as much as a small house (in those days). I said I'd live in an apartment then.
By the way, the Data General brochures that I ordered came with one of two posters. One showed a commercial looking rack mounted computer. But the other showed a Nova in a sculpted shape on a glass table. It made a huge impression on me that even commercial looking computers with dozens of techie switches and lights, could go into a home. At least one other person believed this, since Data General had the poster.
Well, when we had the Homebrew Computer Club, we all talked of this revolution in the sense that it was empowering people without the companies owning the computers. A lot of people were planning to buy an Altair kit computer but a few started designing ones. The designs were a mixture of surplus store hobbiest and putting microprocessor into the existing commercial looking boxes, doing the same things, expecting the same plug in boards to do anything useful. I was in a perfect position to conceive of the computer in a different way, a personal (not commercial) way. First, I believed only in designing products for the average person. That's the exact phrase I always used. it was hard to stick to this thinking when everyone else, in 1975, was going a different way. I thought out what I wanted to do with my own computer and went for it.
I had an advantage in being good at reducing chips. I could conceive of an entire finished usable computer and design it in few enough chips to be practical. My philosophy of fewer chips led me to dynamic RAMs when all the other hobby computers were going with static RAMs. It just took a bit more design work.
But the biggest advantage of all was that I worked in Hewlett Packard's calculator division. Our calculators were basically computers, yet they were totally human and usable by normal people. They didn't have binary switches to toggle and boot up procedures from a teletype. The had a small amount of code in ROMS (under 1K 10-bit words in the HP 35) and a human keyboard. The ROM program merely watched the keys and responded to whatever key was depressed. So it was quite obvious for me to think of the keyboard and some ROM as integral parts of the computer. From there it's easy to see it in normal people's hands, whereas all the other commercial looking machines had no chance except in the hands of techies.
5) What would an Apple II 2000 look like?
by Croaker
The Apple II was the original "geek dream machine." I mean, the Apple ][+ we got back in 1982 or so came with schematics! Talk about an open system!
Pretend that Apple (or some other company) came to you and asked you to design a PC that would "fill the shoes" of the Apple II line. What do you think you'd put in it?
From reading your website, I know you're pretty pro-Macintosh... is that the ultimate in what you'd want to see in a personal computer, or would you do some things differently? Where, do you think, that current PC's (not meaning just WinTel machines) reflect the philosophy of the Apple II, and what do you think they have missed?
Woz:
First, my thoughts on what a modern computer would be can't be superior to anyone else's. But, in the light of the Apple ][, I'd choose the best processor that I could in terms of package size, performance, integrated I/O, number of leads, etc. I'd prefer unseen advantages under the hood, like RISC architecture. I'd design a board with very few chips that did a lot. The display would clearly be VGA and only standard ports would make sense. This is different than with the Apple ][. But the computer would have very few chips and would have high level languages and low level debugging and coding support too. I would try to offer high level GUI ability in the high level language. The schematics and all the code would come with the machine and would be open source (unless someone like Steve Jobs convinced me to sell it). I would treat the most important aspect of this machine as it's being an example to others of ways to design and code. There are a lot of people that want to learn in this way, on their own. Sometimes it's their desire, sometimes they can't find other sources easily. I'd also try to write some articles with small examples for others to learn from.
6) Teaching the children
by tweek
Do you feel that operating systems such as Linux/*BSD are a viable option for teaching those children who have no previous experience with a computer? Certainly the cost factor would be a great motivation for choosing these over other operating systems. It seems to me that it is more difficult to train those who are set in one GUI than those who have no previous experience whatsoever. I really have an interest in this kind of community service and felt that someone like you with experience (and albeit alot more money ;) could provide some insight and advice.
Woz: I think that the greatest need of children is to use computers to help do their homework and to make it look good. They are basically using apps and not an OS.
I personally think that our schools should change and teach real computer science from 5th grade on. You don't need higher level math or calculus or biology to start learning logic design. In this regard, Linux or BSD or even other UNIX variants, or simpler microprocessor Operating Systems, would be required in order to have a greater understanding of the machine and it's innards.
7) the Steves
by Skyshadow
What advice can you give the new innovators? As someone who would like to start a company, I can't help but notice that most truly innovative companies tend to boom then bust, either fading slowly into obscurity or being assimilated by some larger company.
Do you have any ideas for avoiding this fate? Is the only alternative to make some money and become a predatory company yourself? Or, alternatively, is this the eventual unavoidable fate of all idea-driven companies (Netscape, SGI, Apple, etc)? Or, to sum up the question: Can an Apple ever defeat a Microsoft?
Woz:
Apple made too many marketing mistakes early on. These were hard to see because we were extremely successful anyway. But we really went from first to second in the early 80's. It wasn't to Microsoft, it was to IBM PC's (and all the clones). Only recently did the world find out that Microsoft was a sleeper and was really in first place. Software made the bigger difference in computers and was what really changed the world more than hardware.
As a computer supplier, Apple is still huge. Our recent model computers still have the greatest market share of any manufacturer. So we must be doing something right. Apple is the only manufacture that is still in control of its future and changing computers and advancing the world and leaving the past behind. Every other one is a slave to Intel and Microsoft and competitive prices that don't allow for much R&D. They are the ones that have been assimilated. I'd rather be Apple. I believe that Apple's turn around is just starting. But it's not a matter of 'defeating' Microsoft. It's only a matter of building the best stuff we can. If Microsoft creates such good things they should be successful too. But there's always the luck of the right approach, even though no successful company will admit it.
8) Have you played with the BeOS?
by RavinDave
Have you ever had a chance to play around with the Be operating system? Since its developers were part of the Apple culture, I thought I might find a blurb or two on your page. What sort of advice would you offer Gassee? Is the proprietary aspect an albatross (should they opensource the OS and concentrate on apps)? Are they trying to get into the game too late?
Woz:
I have one and always wanted to play with it but just don't have the time yet. I like interesting people that can make your work fun, and Jean Louis is like that. But he had the same proprietary thinking that almost all key Apple execs shared, including the avoidance of licensing the software. BeOS would need something very special to rise above the noise, with Linux and open-source being so popular.
9) A question
by jd
Once upon a time, garage developers were considered the mainstay of the computer industry. Later, either you or S. Jobs said that the days of garage developers was over, forever. Later still, the Open Source model rewoke the Garage Developer philosophy with a jolt.(Or a Mountain Dew, depending on taste.)
Today, do you feel that garage development still has a place in Computing? And, if so, would it be in software, hardware or both?
Woz:
There were a couple of factors that helped a garage startup succeed in the late 70's. Before that time, computers were physically quite large and expensive and were developed by large teams. Now computer projects, even games, are worth so much $ that they are developed by large teams. Around 1975 and 1975 there was a window in which a person or two could develop a good complete computer.
Also, in the early days the computers weren't really personal computers, they were hobby computer kits. You would typically build them yourself and had to operate them at the binary switch level. It was more like ham radio than today's computers. Many big computer companies predicted no future for this hobby market. That's because all their market research was among existing computer customers, those buying the big $M machines. Those customers had no need for a 4K machine that could only run BASIC. But the market research didn't touch on non-computer users like dentists and schoolteachers and kids. So they missed the boat. Apple tried to rise above the hobby type machine and approach homes with a 'personal' computer. Only then did analysts and computer companies start to see things in a different light.
Today, look how many successful startups there are. These often come from a couple of young people with good ideas and not a huge amount of money. I'm on the Board of one such company now. So it must be happening all over the place, just one step above a garage. It's hard to happen in the garage, because the Apple story is not forgotten. A lot of investors missed out and want to jump at anything having to do with computers that looks like it might succeed. So a couple of people like myself and Steve Jobs would be consumed very quickly today, unless we almost deliberately remained hidden or found a perfect investor like Mike Markkula.
Now that I think about it, we had to grow out of the garage to build more than a couple of hundred computers. So today, many that get funded for a startup really developed something in their homes, in their garages to speak, anyway.
10) Idealism today
by Ledge Kindred
You seem to be one of the most "purely" idealistic people in this industry. (i.e. RMS is idealistic in the sense he wants to push GNU, you are idealistic in that you just want to help kids get a leg up and generally be An All-Around Good Guy.)
Do you ever look at the industry and get depressed over what's it's become with companies with virtually no product and running deep in the red but who have "e-" or "dot-com" in their names pulling off ridiculously huge IPOs, companies patenting obviously unpatentable concepts and ideas apparently for the express purpose of suing the pants off of competitors instead of competing with the quality of their products, companies like Microsoft going beyond the boundaries of the law and way, way beyond the boundaries of ethical behaviour to get a step up on the competition, the industry lobbying government to pass laws that would create an entirely unregulated industry, including things like legislation that would legally disavow software companies of any responsibility for creating shoddy products that don't even do what the box says they will do, employees floating with a company just long enough to vest and then bailing out without a backwards glance so they can go to The Next Big IPO, etc, etc, etc.
What do you look at in this industry to remind yourself that computers and the computer industry can actually help make the world a better place?
Woz:
That's a lot of questions. I don't get depressed at all over anything. I do happen to think that companies that look like the big dot-coms of the future deserve their successful IPO's. I guess that they sort of sell out early to finance their guaranteed dominance. Investors take advantage of this too, knowing that the IPO financing will guarantee that these startups don't lose their early lead. Many see this as a situation where the great wealth being made is being lost somewhere else but I don't. I see it as truly new wealth that's being created due mainly to an accelerated economic system. Regardless, this wealth gets trickled down to all of us to some extent. Eventually, it all gets distributed. As the wealthy approach death, estate taxes will be due. Any large amounts of funds have to be transferred into foundations whose purpose is to distribute them to tax free organizations. Otherwise the government gets half the money. It's just the only efficient way to go. It's in the tax laws.
Some patents are for truly clever things but some are for simple things that every single person would think of if there was a need for it. Wealthy companies patent such things early, when these things are not yet viable, when they are too expensive to market. For example, I used a chip in the Apple ][ called a character generator to convert characters to dots that could be displayed on a CRT or TV. It turned out that RCA had patented it back when almost nobody could have afforded to put characters on a CRT. Such a simple concept does not help us respect the patent system.
I truly wish that companies would be liable to consumers for products that don't do what the consumer reasonably expected, or that don't include the sort of service that the consumers reasonable expected. I'd like more truth in advertising. I'd like speedy remedies for people that are injured. We need regulation in a lot of technological industries, including cellular phones. Not in order to keep prices low, but to assure that powerless people have recourse and can get things corrected. Most of all, companies should be required to give straight answers. Too many ISP's and phone companies and computer companies and software companies and hardware companies dodge helping in order to save costs. Only a few are very good, and they don't always remain that way. I'd much rather that another person be honest with me than that they sell me something at a good price. This industry will provide service as cheaply as possible due to competitive factors that can only be overcome by regulation.
11) The Future of Education
by moonboy
From what I've read, you are very involved with children and their education and technology seems to play a major role in the basis of that education. Personally, I think that next to being loved adaquately, education is the most important factor in a developing child's life. In America we seem to take education for granted and are very far behind other countries in regard to the quality of the education that our children receive. Technology in general and more specifically, computers and the Internet, are fantastic tools with a great potential for drastically improving education.
My question: How do you see education making better use of technology and technology making education better?
Woz:
Personal love is certainly the most important thing. To some extent, a teacher offers this, but only to each student 1/30 of the time. 30 computers could become like 30 teachers, but they have to become as personal as possible. They need realistic graphics like games have. They need realistic sounds. They should be voice operated, especially since very early elementary students can't type well. Every time a computer program gets more human-like, it attracts better student attention. But the software needs to be many times as deep as it is today in terms of a personality. It needs to be more like a real person, with many ways to present the same subject, backtracking intelligently, even to the far past, following a student through years of education. The programs should tell lots of jokes as well, and play occasional games too. Today the class presentation is fixed. Each student hears the same presentation in the same time frame. Then a test is given and the varable is the grade. But with 30 teachers, the presentation can be variable, with students going at different speeds in different courses. The student can pick their grade in advance, with the grade now being fixed.
It's too hard to predict that schools will disappear as rapidly as many stores and newspapers and other things of the physical world. Schools currently serve as a parking place for the kids during the day and, even when everything is available at home on the web, parents will still want their kids in a socially healthier environment during the day.
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Next week: Larry Augustin and Chris DiBona of VA Linux Systems. AND, at the same time, another,very special interview guest: Leon M. Lederman, Nobel Prize Winner, internationally known specialist in high energy physics and director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.
3)Ease of Use vs Level of Control by _J_
k time/print.html
Woz:
> In a lot of cases there is a trade off here. In the case of applications, Apple primarily appeals to a market that wants things made easy. That means hiding functionality and control.
And independence from Apple's manipulations...
> It bothers people like ourselves. But Apple could say that programmers have as much control as they want, but that certainly isn't true of its hardware. The rule is "keep out" and "don't do it unless you are an expert."
Big catch: How can you become an Apple expert if Steve keep on preventing anyone else to learn from the hardware, and sued anyone made a similar interface? Genetic programming?
>Then again, Apple is the leader (for decades) in providing user interfaces and hardware interfaces that are easy, like plug and play (and install and pray) yet which can do as much anyway.
It was. But recently Apple breaks every rule in the 20+-year-old Human Interface Guidelines, after Steve Jobs's return to Apple and fired most of the staff within the company's own Human Interface Group and put the rest to deep freeze[1].
> This is the hardest thing to do in software and hardware and only the greatest artists can do it. It takes a mind that keeps searching for a better way that's unknown, and not stopping at the first few working results.
Sorry Woz, Steve Jobs lost the artistic touch when he made Quicktime 4 Player[2]. And BTW, he also insulted the colour blind when he used colour droplets to replace meaningful icons[3]. If Steve still cared about its crown jewel at all, he should take advices from Matthias Warkus's Linux Today article[4].
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[1] http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/09/30/quic
[2] http://www.iarchitect.com/qtime.htm
[3] http://www.apple.com/macosx/qtplayer.html
[4] http://linuxtoday.com/stories/8184.html
"Doesn't anyone remember the FSF boycott of Apple products?"
Uh...no. Or care...
I'd have to agree, Canada's healthcare has some serious problems. A few months ago I had to take my gf in to the emergency room for chest pains that were hurting her so bad she couldn't stop crying. Guess how long we waited before we saw a doctor? 6 bloody hours. I couldn't believe it. The whole time I was thinking, this isn't happening..it's gotta be a joke. It was surreal. A month later I had to bring her in again for the very same problem. I thought there was no way we'd have to wait as long as we had before. Wrong. We had to wait 6 hours again! Here's a tip for you folks in Saskatchewan: Don't get sick or you're fucked. If you do, drive to North Dakota. It's quicker.
Whaaaaat? This isn't off topic. Come on, Moderators, get off your high horse.
What's wrong with requiring a Mac to get an Apple sponsored 20MB of disk space and an email address at mac.com? This service isn't based on advertising revenues, so opening it up to the Internet at large would be very costly and stupid.
My only gripe is that the iDisk cannot be accessed via a browser. This limits its usefulness since you need a Mac to access your stuff when you're away from home.
> Espousing the notion that it is proper for the government to seize half of a person's wealth upon their death
You can't take it with you...
and it's not like you can't get around these things; there are many ways to give tax-free gifts to your heirs if you like.
Get your facts straight, idiot. Apple wasn't suing ever company with a GUI, because most GUI's in those days were crap (the UNIX ones still are). They sued Microsoft over their blatant rip-off of the Mac's look and feel. It was NOT a patent dispute. Moron.
Common attitude among hardware companies. For instance, look at recent Linux drivers that have been released for "latest and greatest" hardware. Interestingly enough, these companies did not release drivers for their older stuff, since they would rather you buy new hardware than find a way to use old stuff.
Apple is simply acting the same way. Mac OS X only runs on G3 and G4 Macs... wonder why....
So what you're saying is really that your family are not carriers of the elusive "intelligence genome", rather than anything about Canada per se.
Is there really a home for retired coders? I want to know more! Is it supported by ACM dues?
Robert Smolinski in Peoria
(too lazy to log in)
Here at the ACM Retirement Home in Guelph, Ontario, we are immensely pleased that THE WOZ HIMSELF agreed to a Slashdot Interview!!! Popsicles for everyone!! Mr. Wozniak, if you ever decide that the climate of Canada is acceptable, the citizens of Guelph would be proud to welcome you to their midst!!! And we have, of course, The Best Health Care System In The World!! That is exciting!
And yet, the entire thing was opsourced a few days a god.
What's your point about closing hospitals? Hospitals and Emergency Rooms are closing all over the US too. Face it, in Canada $0.95 of every dollar goes to heath care, and $0.05 for administration. In the US, $0.75 goes to heath care and $0.25 goes to administration and, ahem, profits for insurance companies. You figure US insurance companies administration costs are no more than the Canadians which mean that for every dollar an American pays 20 cents of it turns into gold colds in executives and investors pockets.
I don't think Canada is Utopia (sorry, guys) but I think they have a better basic system to improve upon.
". It's little known, but the schematics of the Apple I were actually handed out at the Homebrew Computer Club before we started Apple."
BEFORE is the key word in that sentence. Why didn't apple continue this? Could it be that it didn't make any business sense to do so?
Despite probably angering some of the more devout "wozzies" out there - and I, too, respect the man a great deal - I feel I should point out a few things that to me show he's still a mere mortal.
Like our beloved Gates, he was at the right place at the right time. More talented technically, but I must wonder how competitive he'd really be these days when there's quite a bit more competition in his field. Perhaps Woz could join forces with one of the optimistic little PowerPC/CHRP system companies and show us again how it's done. Since lot of Apple's Open Source commitment is nicely-worded PR talk without the walk, Woz could easily use and _improve_ Linux while he's at it. Unlike what Jobs (and Woz?) seems to be saying, Apple isn't the only company which can integrate the software and hardware elements into a tighter package. The source is out there, for Linux at least.
People, and Woz, also seem to ignore the fact that with Apple users are held hostage to Apple's whims when it comes to fixing problems or keeping hardware compatible with the latest software. Oh well, LinuxPPC and reverse-engineering to the rescue...
What comes to Apple being unique in innovating hardware, well, they used to have pretty impressive R&D dept. and a budget to match. Apart from the visual (Jonathan Ive & Co) side, what's left of Apple's R&D labs? I just don't see anything revolutionary coming from Apple's H/W labs that others couldn't copy as well, just with more Darwinian attitude. Stuff like FireWire (IEEE 1394, Apple ca. '94) is cool indeed but if it was proprietary in the usual Apple style it would have no chance at the marketplace whatsoever. Even now as a licensable standard it's been struggling. It's the old "economies of scale" issue.
I must wonder whether Woz would be a little less admiring and PR-like about Apple if Apple hadn't made Woz a very wealthy and newsworthy individual. Could you really expect him to see the warts in his own child? Sure, Mac OS X will make the world a better place for "many select few" but he doesn't seem to see the real revolution brewing and making computing bearable - and affordable - to the great masses of this planet.
Still, an interesting, albeit rather nostalgic, interview.
lost year when whe were doing some chemistry theory , my teacher had coded all software himself he did use Visual basic though.. sorry for bad english..
All the currently shipping G4 machines use the Sawtooth MoBo which uses the MaxBus chipset.
Damn, you have such an eloquent way of expressing what I wanted to say. Might not have been the words I would have actually said, but emotions run wild here. Ignoring the creative references to sex and violence, I think you might have a case.
Canada has good healthcare, yeah, that's why your Native Son, Michael J. Fox, is begging the American Congress to fund research for Parkinson's disease. Because under socialist regimes like Canada's healthcare system, progress is stagnated and underfunded. You should be thankful for the US healthcare system that pays for most of the medical research that you benefit from. Don't forget that, Uncle Fucka!
Intel is not coming out with a RISC processor, they're coming out with a EPIC processor
Hi All, first off Steve, thanx for your contribution to the Computer scene & your educational inputs. This interview has served as an introduction to your work. Nevertheless, I find the above subject heading, as a quote & un-qualified, over the top. To handle it fully, would take some time.... But to claim what you do, misleads & shows either low insight or denial or both. I find it misguided to claim that you have never felt "depressed," since this is a human response to a negative situation-but of course is not the only one. It can remind us there is something wrong in a situation and that it is now time to address the situation in a different way or light-so to speak. It is "normal" for people to credit their "depressions," for bringing them to their senses & helping them get on with their lives. A brief over view of psychoanalytic material will prove this point. Of course the problem with your over stated claim, is that in your role as geek role model ( you do model some excellent traits-imho; as this whole post is....), you also model a denial or split in the psyche, such that geeks may try to disown their own "negative" emotional life & that would compound the sterotypic geek "thinking type" one-sided personality; speaking @ a high level of generalization hereabouts. Now for a recommendation: try reading Meredith Mitchel's "Hero or victim," for another approach to "negative" emotional baggage. *BFN* Greek Geek
Damn right.
I would much rather have been "isolated" than have gone through that Hell. No, I'm not asking for sympathy - but I do question why we seem to persist in this Hellish system. Oh, it wasn't Hellish for the one responder, was it? I wonder which hand he carries the whip with...
(Actually I find teh physical pain was the least of it all - *those* marks I could show and have people beleive me.. and those injuries I *know* have healed since.)
Yeah: IBM, Compaq, Dell, etc have no money for R&D.
My mother was a teacher, until she retired, some parents want education, but most, and most employers (until about 6 months before school leaving age in the employers' case) only want somewhere to keep the kids so the parents can work.
Until we change that attitude, school will be hell, because education costs more than a dump does, so a dump is what society gets, because that fulfills the majority's requirements. It doesn't have to be that way, but a significant majority against is required.
Call me cynical, it's true.
A question for cynics:
What is the most cynical reason you can give for your cynicism?
Sorry, no cigar, I meant cynical about you, not the world. Like to try again?
Thought not.
Your example uncovers one of many logical inconsistencies in the English language You said: Jim: "I have a dog." Joe: "What is its name?" Jim: "It's Spot."
Try this one: Jim: "I have a dog." Joe: "What is the dog's name?" Jim: "It's Spot."
The rule for posession is to append "'s", except for one word: "it". The language is flawed, so don't bag on the Woz.
Besides, the world is full of people exactly the same age as me. I'm surrounded by them at work! How unhealthy! I should file a law suit!
You'll probably piss on my shoes for this, and everyone will call me flamebait or something, but if you really want to know how he manages it, read this book:
;) who look at problems and employ their mind to come up with simple but elegant ideas. You will also realize the most important thing - what value is. You'll figure out that nothing has inherent value except in the capacity to improve YOUR life and no other. You'll also learn how to argue against something with passion and effectiveness without getting angry and raging at it, wishing for it to die. Instead, you will understand that if you are right, you will guide your life by that rightness, and whether other people do or not is completely irrelevant to your happiness.
"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand
Now, if you've read it and you hated it and thought it was entirely unrealistic, well, I guess you can try reading it again with a more accepting attitude but it probably won't work. If you haven't read it, I'll give you a hint of what it will give you: You'll understand that the things you do are great not because YOU do them, but because the things are of use and have purpose. You will be able to look up at a tall building and appreciate the feat of genius and power over nature it took to erect such a structure. All around you you will see tons of steel guided by the intellect of an engineer moving at deathly dangerous speeds just feet from one another - those are cars. You will be able to take the simplest and most mundane thing that you ignore every day and look at it, realize that our world is created by men (and women for you sensitive types, Ayn Rand was a woman and the main character of the book is a woman, so get off my back
E.
BTW, the book was not designed to do any of this for anyone. Its a fiction book. Its simply about great people. It makes you realize things about our industrialized society that you probably didn't recognize before.
I think that control is an advantage to vertically integrated platforms, but in the heterogenous x86 environment, no company is able to account for the myriad variations in the platform. Even if Microsoft wanted to, even with their "many mighty legions" of "innovators," they would not be able plug all the holes. Only the hyperfluid nature of Open Source is able to support all the different flavors of computers people are using.
You've got to remember that when Windows and Mac OS were originally written, PCs (not just Intel) lacked the memory-management hardware necessary for such robustness. That's left a considerable legacy to deal with.
By the time NT and the i386/68020 UNIX ports came along, PCs offered hardware features similar to many minicomputers (which is what UNIX was originally written on, of course). With the necessary hardware available, it was relatively easy to write/port operating systems that took advantage of it.
...
I probably pick KDE/GNOME, but then again, even Windoze interface seems to be better than Apple's OS X. :)
I'll feel bad about that second round of Starcraft when you can explain to me why it is better to lay in the sun like any caveman could do instead of enjoying the creations of great human minds.
E.
Are you crazy or just retarded. Canada's healthcare system is a "socialist regime"?? News to me. While Canada's health-care is more socialist that the "Great and Wonderful" United States of America, we choose to give our poor a fighting chance.
I had a fucking compound fracture of my right arm and i wasn't "waiting around for weeks to get it fixed". My mother had throat cancer, where a team of specialists were flown in from all over the country to save her life. How much coin would that of cost in the US?? Could we have affored all these sugery's if we were Americans???
The "horror stories" you guys hear are exaggerated twists, fed to the American public by morons like Rush Limbah and other right-wing goons still afraid of communisim or anything remotely to the left.
I know what you should do: start up The House of Un-American Activites again that was REALLY DEMOCRATIC.
What I will give you is America's contributions to science and medicine, but also in, guns, drugs, violence, poverty etc... IT's can't all be roses and sunshine buddy.
After reading your comment, it is no wonder Americans are seen as ignorant and self absorbed my millions of people from around the world, it's dumbassed comments like yours. Which in my eyes is scary
Well I gotta go, I'll let you get back to bombing the FUCK out of some 3rd world nation then patting your self on the back for being the "honourable" champions of democracy.
Yours Truely,
Byron "Angry as as An American not allowed to have 25 assult rifles" Bussey.
The best thing would be that by conducting the interview over the net, he would disprove 99% of his view (which is that you can't understand what people mean from reading what they say, only by hearing it and studying their crows feet).
E.
Boy, his answer to question 11 was a little wild. He was more or less saying that the "young ladies primer" was an ideal teacher.
It seems to me that this might actually be couterproductive. The students may learn more, but I think it will be next to impossible for a machine to teach a person empathy, and social etiquette.
I know he didn't say we didn't need teachers, but 30 computers being relied on to teach is paramount to the parents that use the VCR to parent their children. That is my initial impression.
Because they're too busy doing actual work to grandstand.
And because they're too aware of the degree they depend upon the work of those who came before to try to claim that they alone are responsible for the innovation. Woz did some great things. But if you'd given him sand and fire (rather than complete technologies for designing and connecting chips), he would have achieved far less, on an absolute scale.
You're wrong. They had Microsoft and HP in court for stealing the Mac's "look and feel" (MS for Windows and HP for NewWave; does anyone remember NewWave?).
I've got to disagree with NMerriam on this one... Allen is less predatory and doesn't molest at the same business level as Gates, but on an ethical/philanthropist level he's not even on the same chapter, let alone page, as Woz. Go to the PDX Rose Garden sometime.... you'll know what I mean. As for Woz, you're something else. I'm not a Mac user, but you're nothing short of a role model for those of us that want to do the right thing, be it in technology or any other sector... You're true to your beliefs, and you LIVE. NOt many people do. Thanks for being one of the few greats... we all deeply respect you!
Markoff's book elevated him, but the guy didn't actually do anything technically amazing. There's nothing amazing, even at the time, about pressuring tech companies and law enforcement to catch someone. That's persistance, not guts. His car key "trick" was old hat, not original, nor was the thought of him getting paged when the network was being subverted. Come to think of it, I can do both of those things. Can I write a book?
What are you babbling about? He was primarily talking about hardware, not the OS. And besides, the description is so general it would fit on any OS.
And you're a dork. Just a dork. I'll bet.
congrats on the three, amigo.
Yes, and we all know that open source is completely incompatible with capitalism.
I knew that quote couldn't be from Sartre... Sartre was an existentialist and basically had no principles other than "Life sucks."
;)
Thanks, that was driving me mad trying to remember who said it
E.
Hey, using logic and breaking things down doesn't preclude emotions. Emotions are a reaction, they give you a good indicator of how you're doing. If you feel pissed off and frustrated, you did something wrong whether it was that you expected too much, didn't do something right or whatever. Specifically emotions are an unconscious reaction in accordance with your consciously accepted ideas (that's how murderers can feel good about killing people).
So yeah, its very important to feel, I mean, ya gotta be human, but to let emotions lead you is really like putting the cart in front of the horse because your rational mind is the horse, with your emotions following on the tail end.
E.
While a computer may never beas as passionate about a subject as a real teacher, it can certainly be as dispassionate about a subject as most of my public high school teachers were. And I would have preferred the interaction/exploration to the drone of a bored baby sitter.
This would be nitpicking except that Woz, computer god *and* teacher, made elementary mistakes when writing about the function of computers in schools.
Teaching the children--
"In this regard, Linux or BSD or even other UNIX variants, or simpler microprocessor Operating Systems, would be required in order to have a greater understanding of the machine and it's innards."
A greater understanding of the machine and it is innards? What? Oh, he meant "_its_ innards." Now I have to go back several words and start reading again, remembering that when I encounter "it's" I should instead substitute "its."
"Many of the hardware advantages that Apple has is due to it's being more tightly controlled by Apple and in it's being more tightly integrated with the software."
Many of the hardware advantages that Apple has is due to it is being more tightly controlled...?
...and in it is being more tightly integrated...?
"The main attraction to open source software may not be it's advantages...."
The main attraction to open source software may not be it is advantages...? Come again?
Someone submitted their resumè to me. I was rather surprised to find that she had experience with Novel Netware. Avant-garde Netware. Ingenious Netware. Different Netware. I'd guess that she meant "Novell Netware," but after seeing her misspelling of the name of her current employer I didn't bother reading the rest of the resumè or inviting her in for an interview.
Not to beat an already dead horse, but I'd recommend that schools buy, instead of computers, copies of Strunk and White's "Elements of Style," which only costs around $5.00 per copy. Cancel the free in-class Discovery Channel, throw the free Encarta's out the window, and teach children how to communicate effectively.
How quaint. Isn't is nifty how much negativity one poisonously nasty person like yourself can attract? What comes around goes around, brother.
What would have happened if Star Trek OS was released? Star Trek was the codename for MacOS for x86 .... yes, it's true. There was a working version of MacOS, made by Apple, that ran on x86 architecture. It was never released, and I wish I remember where I read about it, but it was a while back (like 80's I think, possibly early 90's). Someone please confirm this!!
Everyone else knew what he meant. Everyone else didn't have "go back several words and start reading again" when they encountered an unintentional "it's". I guess your hypervigilant anal retentiveness wastes alot of your time, eh bonehead?
As another /. reader once commented, Ayn Rand can blow me.
All he said was that the government will take half if you do NOT set up a foundation to distribute the wealth. He stated how it is, it wasn't an opinion. And besides, how is that socialist? Oh.. Rush Limburger must have told you to think that.
Do you do talk shows?
Negative.
"Stick to the content"? The content consists of the semantic meaning of the text. If that meaning is confused and obscured by grammar and spelling errors, it's harder to see what the content is. Nobody should have to guess at the author's meaning; making it clear is the author's job, and that job only begins with cleaning up the spelling and grammar.
Re-read the post you replied to. Some people may not have the resources to "clean up their grammar". This doesn't usually mean that what they wrote is not understandable. That is just an extreme overreaction by those who have a sick desire to ridicule others.
Instead of nit-picking grammar and spelling precision, you should stick to the content. If you simply can't understand what they mean because of extremely poor spelling, or if the content is vacant that is another story, but I highly doubt that is the case. I think you just get off on feeling superior to others. This little ego trip you two are on is mean spirited and ugly and shows a shocking lack of compassion for other peoples circumstances.
How the hell did this comment get moderated up to 3? It's a rambling wave of grammatically confused handwaving, cliches, and homilies.
You sir are an idiot. The American Education System is indeed behind in education when compared to other countries, etc. I personally know of Germany. I spent 4 years there and met and talked with many of the natives. The students were required to declare a "major" in high school, which is also longer than ours I might mention. Here in America kids are totally clueless as to what they would like to do with their lives, other than dreaming of course. Most attend college for years and then finally declare a major because they think they might enjoy a particular field. Get educated yourself -- READ. If you don't think we have a problem - you have your head in the sand!
It will indeed surprise some people to this way because that's why I laugh when I feel this way because that's why he is to hear me choke to this from Mr. Steve Wozniak places on about revisionism. And there you have is a revolting act. Wrong. Just glance at all, for that the facts: Mr. Steve Wozniak's cronies is lying to hear me say this, but Mr. Steve Wozniak wants all of us by the schools, brainwashing by the most valuable skill one can have it.
I don't easily offend -- by the big advertisers and the schools, brainwashing in the facts: Mr. Steve Wozniak's cronies is perhaps that the most valuable skill one can have it. I have received insufficient public attention or in which I have something new to lie convincingly. He has certainly never given evidence of totalitarianism.
That's why he is perhaps that the most valuable skill one can have it. I hear me choke to this from Mr. Wozniak wants all of thinking extensively. Or at all, for that have it. I don't easily offend -- and happiness than perform a martyr for freedom and on. For practical reasons, I have received insufficient.
Yeah.
Kreditz whur kreditz iz du.
Okay, I'll bite. Seeing as I believe that Woz is the coolest improv by a DNA strand since Bucky Fuller, I can play devil's advocate cum vitriol distributor. There is a section of one reply where Woz discusses his opinion of our current economy: "Many see this as a situation where the great wealth being made is being lost somewhere else but I don't. I see it as truly new wealth that's being created due mainly to an accelerated economic system. Regardless, this wealth gets trickled down to all of us to some extent. Eventually, it all gets distributed. As the wealthy approach death, estate taxes will be due. Any large amounts of funds have to be transferred into foundations whose purpose is to distribute them to tax free organizations. Otherwise the government gets half the money. It's just the only efficient way to go. It's in the tax laws." That a man who has done so many socially conscious things would stoop so low as to embrace the lunacy of trickledown theory as justification for the churn and burn zeitgeist of e-this and dot-com-that truly sickens me. Believing that money once made will be distributed because of the incentive of tax law is ludicrous in the extreme. The wealthy have myriad ways of avoiding taxation that don't involve philanthropy of any kind. Methinks the man has too good a heart to be so naive in a greedy world.
Note that Apple paid Xerox (in the form of stock).
Funny definition of 'theft', IMHO.
RE: "The American Education System is indeed behind in education when compared to other countries, etc."
If you can post data to back this up, please do so. Otherwise, please keep you insults to yourself.
thanks for posting. i'm sure it wasn't easy for you to recall your family tragedy. our family also had a similar incident happen to us, but what happened was that the computer had a virus and it spread to my children. see it had been an african computer and it had gotten infected with a mutated strain of the motaba virus? well see what happened is my kid was playing halflife and he got infect and his organs liquified. then he died. well at first we didn't associate the computer with his death. but when the same thing happened to my niece and nephew and my computer repairman we started to go "hmm now just what in the heck is going on" and then we were like "hmm maybe it's the computer." turns out that's what it was!!!! well okay so then what did we do, well about all we could do is take it to the hospital and see what they could do. they sprayed it down with some green shit and then put it in isolation for eight days. they said it would get better but then it didn't. well, they shot it. point blank with a .38. it was a sad sight, with the glass shards careening every which way. well anyway that's the end of my story, we both know how dangerous computers are
Consequently, it's fairly rare for a math or science teacher to have good classroom affect. The way that Woz writes suggests that he's in that rare group. On the other hand, people who have good people skills... handling the day-to-day mini-crises that pop up in all classrooms with aplomb... frequently don't have in-depth exposure in technical areas. C.P. Snow's "two cultures".
I don't think this is a teacher feature that is going to go away as new teachers arrive that have computing exposure in their 'training' (usually in a content area rather than in teaching). But it will be ameloriated; those with good people skills will at least be comfortable enough with computing that they will be conversant with their more savvy students. Maybe that will one day create more geeks with better people skills, and improve affect in science and math classrooms.
Some will rewrite history, and some will just strive to forget it.
Apple was the enemy back in the Look-n-feel lawsuit days.
Microsoft was one of the good guys.
Mostly all schools care about are results on tests like the SAT or nation-wide tests. I agree the american education system is just memorize and get tested and that's unfortunate because you'll forget it all later especially when you have no interest in the subject matter.
And I've been boycotting the Mac ever since Jobs went on the radio to make his famous speech (infamous to some of us) about the shiny new "hacker proof" Macintosh. He viewed it as a praiseworthy feature (why else would they have designed it so) that special tools were needed to open the Mac case. Mere users were not permitted to open the case for any purpose (whatsoever). Qualified Apple technicians were granted that hallowed right.
The Mac doesn't suck now as much as it did back then.
Of course, it would have been nice if somthing checked for misplaced html tags. like the preview button :(
Can I start using "int primary()" instead of "int main()" in my C++ programs?
...or skimf instead of scanf?
...or make-believe empty instead of virtual void?
COmon, the macos is the most unstable POS on the planet.
Just force quite an app like Netscape and the OS is junk. Also its too easy to fuck it up.
My win2k box hasnt crashed/rebooted in 50+ days.
No, just one. Did you know that Apple in the late 80s sued everyone who developed for Apple without a license? Yes!
At that point, Apple hardware outsold all PC hardware. It's true.
The turning point came when Apple/Jobs sued a database developer into bankruptcy. He went to Windows 2.x, and the world was never the same. Most other devs also went to the dark side.
People forget just what a jerk Jobs was. He seems to have matured. Most of this is in the old Infoworlds, about the time Oracle took off. Who can forget the rear view of the twin jets of a fighter plane?
I don't hate A][le, though. Everytime a newbie asks what computer they should buy, I say "IMac!" When they say Compaq, I ask "Why?"
10 years after school, i never see my school 'friends', just people i saw outside school, none of them my age
Actually, books contain 4-d information. And you render the graphics in real time. In your head.
But then so neither are the Canadian doctors.
Ay big guy, don't be a typical PC user. as in,,,,
This proto-type lab built 5 million megahertz x86 chip super-cooled is *just barely* faster than a 233Mhz G3 *meanwhile 300Mhz G3's are available to the consumer*. So PC's are faster than Mac's!!!!
Always using the extreme PC alternative to yesterdays Mac technology *sigh* MacOS *what?* vs. WindowsNT? MacOS for end-user verses NT? of course NT is going to be more stable, How about this to show were you didn't make sense... The Windows95 Revision 1 is definitely not more stable than MacOS X Server or DarwinOS. Now how does it feel?
I am so surprised that of this string of MacOS unstable MacOS stable, has anyone mentioned the use of the programmers toolbox, or even MacsBug..... I can keep MacOS up and running fairly well. what was that age old tech saying??? lets see ah..... "Operator error"..
OS design? You are going to mention "OS design" and BSD/Linux in the same sentence?
The freenixes are based on a reference design that was complete a decade or more ago. It's a good design, it has a lot of utility even today, but none of the education most people will be getting has to do with any meaningful amount of OS Design.
"OS Designers" are doing things involving new things... the BeOS, the Hurd, the out-there aspects of Windows 2000. Not re-implementing a reference design like Unix-1989 and calling it Linux.
And I can't put into words how satisfying it was back in 1983 to program the single board computer in tech school to scroll "Eat at Joes Bar and Grill" on the seven segment display, while other people in the lab struggled to get the display to show a single static word. I was able to do a lot more than most of the others because I'd been one of the few, the proud, the geeks in high school who spend after school hours pounding away on the 110 baud teletypes (we had three of them, in a High School with about 700 students in each graduating class) learning to program. When I graduated, and couldn't afford a computer of my own, I bought a programmable calculator and wrote and played games on it.
Yep. Serious geek stuff.
-Rendent
But you'll understand what selfish means, as you obviously do not.
Quick quiz to find out if you understand selfishness:
If you steal something, is that a selfish act?
No.
If you pay your workers poorly so that you can take more profit, is that a selfish act?
No.
If you take drugs, ignoring the effect on the rest of your family, etc, is that selfish?
No.
Why are none of these things selfish? Because they degrade your quality of life (there are better reasons but this is the only one that can be easily put into a message) and if you are acting in your own best interests, you would not be doing anything to jeopardize your happiness.
Can you give to charity selfishly? Yes.
Can you help people selfishly? Yes.
Can you pay the best wages in the industry out of selfish motivations? Yes.
Basically, the opposite answer from above applies. If I give to charity, it is to improve the future world in which I will have to live. I do it selfishly. If I pay the highest wages in the industry it is because I value my employees and I want them to have incentive to continue working for me instead of my competitors. I do it selfishly.
When people act truly selfishly, that is in their own best intersts, the world becomes a beautiful place.
E.
Give a man a dollar he did not earn and he will choke himself on it.
I agree that the concept of how computers work should be taught early on. Because the later you start the harder it will be. And also you get a lot of people who don't know anything about computers, pretending that they're all that, while they couldn't tell a hard drive from a modem.
In schools kids should also be taught about computer hardware, and make programming a required course. And not just teach them about how to use Netscape, and lecture for an hour on how to use a search engine. Teachers should also be less paranoid. Like my librarian will freak if you just browse the hard drive on our Macs. Kids shouldn't be discouraged like that. I think that they should be free to explore their computer and do whatever they want on it, and not just be slaves to a pretty screen.
Speaking of that, I think that they should remove MacOS from schools. Sure it has a nice GUI, and it is very simple to use even for the stupidest person, but in my opinion it sacrifices a lot of configurability and funcitonallity. I think the lack of a command prompt hurts is the most, because that's what it is simplest to program for.
Another thing that we need is educated teachers. No more paranoid freaks like my librarian, or people that don't know that they're talking about, like my programming teacher. Better training and education of students will eventually solve the teacher problem, but for now we need retraining.
No man ever has to feel pain, depression, or guilt. Your insistence that they must is a disgusting idea, sir.
E.
Philosophically, it is.
It is relatively stable as compared to Windows (i.e. the OS iteself very rarely crashes).
I'm not sure if you're talking about the _same_ Macintosh computer I'm thinking about (the ones made by Apple, er, right?), but this certainly isn't my experience.
For three years I had to do all of my undergraduate physics lab write-ups on powermacs, in the physics dept. computer labs. While they seemed pretty stable as long as you stuck to one open application at a time, with the two or three open apps that we worked with (Word, Excel, Cricketgraph, Maple, and sometimes Netscape or Fetch) they crashed habitually, and took the whole OS with them. Win9X can be pretty bad compared to Linux or Win NT, but in terms of stability when running multiple apps, my Win9X machine easily beats any Mac I've used.
Believe me, you really won't know just how bad you've had it until MacOS X comes out and you can run more than one program at a time reliably.
Why do you freaks insist on making sweeping generalizations just to preserve your little spelling dictatorship?
from ronzo 'having issue with my slashdot account... going back a few years, i would figure maybe 83-84 the Woz came to miami for the talk, sponsored by the local apple group. so we went to the speech and the question and answer session. it went pretty well. afterwards everyone was crowding around him, and myself and a friend asked if he wanted to go to denny's or something. He said yes, so off to denny;s we all went. We got to have some dinner and talk and b.s. with steve woz. He even told us how the original work was done on denny's napkins. Just adding my two cents worth. ronzo
Have a good weekend.
so is it unhealhty when children play fun games after school too?
You seem to really miss the point with Frank Rizzo. Frank Rizzo is not a real person, but a parody of all of the political correct bs that is shoved down our throats.
Frank does make some interesting statements, and the fact that the moderator saw through Franks "way over the top delivery to drive home a point" actually says that he is one of the intelligent/enlightened ones.
Try to have an open mind and you might see that we don't live in a black & white world and sometimes things may not be what they seem.
As for Frank, I say you might try to tone it down just a bit but otherwise keep up the good work !
"Poisonously nasty", my ass.
Contrary to popular belief here in the USA, stupidity, slovenliness, and ignorance are not virtues.
Those of us who complain about rotten spelling and grammar are trying to create an environment where people have reason to be ashamed of their stupidity, slovenliness, and ignorance. This may motivate them to do better, or it may just hurt their poor little feelings and motivate them to shut up. Either outcome is fine by me, though I'd prefer the former.
I agree. But the problem is that most kids already have MacOS or Wintel machines, and would probably not be patient enough to learn an "operating system and computer available today to provide a simple,
efficient, open, and functional platform, with an optional GUI". Most kids are too put off by the "education system" to actually enjoy learning, much less teaching them selves.
Sorry to get your panties in a bunch, but none of the posts are claiming this. Straw man.
Those of us who complain about rotten spelling and grammar are trying to create an environment where people have reason to be ashamed of their stupidity, slovenliness, and ignorance.
No. You are nursing a weak self-esteem by whining about perfectly understandable but somewhat malformed language. By being smug, you feel as though you are a member of an elite class which temporarily soothes your knowledge that you really aren't anything special.
This may motivate them to do better, or it may just hurt their poor little feelings and motivate them to shut up.
Ahhh, a grain a truth slips out. By silencing them because they aren't a member of the elite as evidenced by their inferior grasp of the language, you don't actually have to debate them and possibly be shown up to be the poseur that you are.
It's a fact that for reasons beyond their control some people had a poor basic education and with age are no longer capable of correcting their grammatical mistakes. The last thing our world needs are some wise ass young neo-nazi's with silver spoons in their mouths intimidating them into silence.
Contrary to popular belief here in the USA, stupidity, slovenliness, and ignorance are not virtues.
none of the posts are claiming this.
Nonsense. In ten years on the net, I've never seen an anti-spelling-flame post that didn't depend on the assertion that it's somehow wrong to criticize incompetence.
You are nursing a weak self-esteem by whining about perfectly understandable but somewhat malformed language.
Oh, for God's sake, grow up. "I am not, you're another!" People who've never done anything competently are incapable of imagining what competence is, much less why anyone would bother. I don't exactly feel your pain here, but I do understand it.
By silencing them because they aren't a member of the elite as evidenced by their inferior grasp of the language, you don't actually have to debate them and possibly be shown up to be the poseur that you are.
Who, exactly, am I silencing? I'm not moderating them down, I'm calling them on their ignorance. Free speech, pal. Like most idiots, you're laboring under the delusion that to disagree with someone is somehow equivalent to censorship. Are you silencing me by hassling me? No, you're just striking a defiant pose. I gather from your post that you'd be delighted if I stopped using my brain in public, but the truth is you can't force me to shut up any more than I can force you to shut up.
As for the debating thing, when I call people on their grammar or spelling, I do it as an AC; if their ideas (to the extent that they can be deciphered) are idiotic, I address those separately.
It's a fact that for reasons beyond their control some people had a poor basic education and with age are no longer capable of correcting their grammatical mistakes.
There are a few of those, but we are also beset by hordes of idiots like you who think that idiocy is admirable. There are also a lot of people running around loose who had a poor (a.k.a. American) basic education, but who are capable of learning. All of these people do have choices. They can continue being vocal idiots, or they can try to deal with their idiocy, or they can become silent idiots. Oddly, these are precisely the same choices that they had before I opened my mouth.
The last thing our world needs are some wise ass young neo-nazi's with silver spoons in their mouths intimidating them into silence.
No silver spoons here, sorry. I'm a product of a reasonably ordinary middle-class upbringing, differing from the norm only in the fact that we were taught to care about doing things well.
power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
There are a few of those, but we are also beset by hordes of idiots like you who think that idiocy is admirable.
I never said that. I do not think that idiocy is admirable. Straw man.
There are plenty of people with high IQ's who can make a good argument but for whatever reason have poor spelling and grammar. This includes people with IQ's higher than yours, I'm afraid. As I said before, and you agreed, this also includes people who are too old to radically reduce the proportion of these errors consistantly. Fortunately (for the reasonable among us) high quality content can survive poor spelling. Conversely, the "Flamebait" posted in response to Woz's article was spelled perfectly well! So, to summarize what you've learned these last few days: These errors seem to disproportionately attract two types of fanatics -- the anal retentive perfectionists who cringe at the smallest of errors, however irrelevant to the content -- and the personality type who has invested a large portion of his ego and identity in "being intelligent" yet is somehow still insecure and shallow, and compensates for this by making an ass of himself in front of millions of folks. The former is merely an annoying cold fish who can't see the forest for the trees. The latter acts as a tremendously disrupting force to the flow of ideas, crying like a small child for people to "Look at me, I'm so clever!".
If you remember for even for a moment the ass-whuppin' I've been handing to you these last few days the next time you are tempted to act out in public again, I consider that I have succeeded in a small way.
I read slashdot through two corneas that are not part of my original hardware. The transplant surgeries were performed by a top-notch doctor who doesn't like the american system either. He is content to make his cap in Canada. My family could not have afforded this surgery. I see. I see that socialized healthcare is the only humane choice.
Most _pre_college_ teachers, that is.
I'd like to hear that this has changed, but when I went to "grade school" as they call it here in the U.S., I had only a couple teachers who knew what they were doing and could teach it at all. Most of the others were inept.
Has this changed? Any teens want to comment?
No, kids playing together is not unhealthy ... think of how different it is from being in a classroom. You have a hetergenous mix of ages (most of the time), the kids are interacting on several levels, they are doing different things (and normally doing them differently). None of these happens in a typical school setting. -pate (too lazy to login)
I'll NEVER buy a Mac. Never. I don't "buy" PCs anymore either. I put my machines together myself for a FRACTION of the cost of a new system. The main reason I will never buy a Mac is that I just don't like the MacOS look and feel. Personally, I have never found it to be easier nor have I been more productive on a Mac vs Wintel machine. That being the case, I refuse to buy a computer that I have little or no control over. I would be willing to buy a PPC machine but ONLY if it doesn't have MacOS on it or a little apple logo on it (don't want windoze on it either). Right now I have a perfect case that will hold either a baby at or atx motherboard. I don't need another case so all I need is a little money for the occassional replacement motherboard. I have plenty of harddisk space so I don't need a new one. I have a perfectly fine monitor so I don't need a new one. Each of these items gets replaced ONLY when they die or can no longer perform. Replacing the motherboard and CPU (transfering the memory) saves a lot of money. I get a "new" computer for about $250-$450 depending on how fancy I decide to go with the CPU. The video card I can exchange every couple years as I see fit. I install my own software in my own way. I don't have Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates nor Dell, nor Gateway, etc making decisions for me and trying to limit me at the same time. So, I will NEVER buy a Mac because it REQUIRES that I have the MacOS on it. Give me the option of PPC box without MacOS on it and I will really consider it, but only if its price and upgradeability matches my PC hardware which I can mix and match as my wallet and heart desires (I have never had hardware problems - meaning I have never installed hardware that fails or doesn't perform as advertised so any claims about supposed inferior PC hardware is bogus. Lately, with the switching away from dip switches or pins, I don't run into hardware conflicts either so that problem no longer exists. So, in measure of bang for buck, my piecemeal PC method demolishes any need to get a propriatory PPC/Mac system. I was THIS close to buying a PPC mobo and chip for my case until that jerk Jobs took over and killed off the PPC cloners. I am soooo glad that there is now a move to make clone PPC-based systems without Jobs or Mac control or say-so. Commodity hardware and generic clones...hurrah!
Could you give examples of how Paul Allen's making the world better? If I remember correctly, he's the one behind the TicketMaster monopoly.
Snooty spelling fanatics are just people with low self esteem who want to feel superior to others. Focus your anal retentive criticisms on yourself for once. Then maybe people will stop thinking that you're a pretentious little prick.
Great comment. I sincerely hope that Apple goes back to its roots and ships their development tools (Project Builder, Inerface Builder, GNU Tools) with MacOS X Client.
Depends on how you count CISC instructions. For instance, are these the same CISC instruction?
// r3[200] = r1 + r2[400] // r3 = r1 + r2
add r1, @r2+400, @r3+200
add r1, r2, r3
In the processor microcode, they are very different animals. In a load/store architecture (RISC), the first example would not be possible (you'd have to explicitly load the contents of r2[400] and store to location r3[200]
This standardized access gives load/store several advantages. Most notable, a VASTLY reduced count of the number of variations of an instruction, allowing your transistor budget to be spent on more 'interesting' instructions.
Tom
Even as a toy, I believed that every home needed a computer.
Woz is a toy! A fuzzy little wozzy bear, I'll bet.
If you compare yourself with others, you will become vain or bitter, for there will always be those greater and lesser than yourself.
someone forward this to Tom Christiansen who thinks he's better than most. In reality, he's a fucknut.
Unfortunately this is all pure speculation on your part and thus hardly worthy of a Score:5, Informative.
:)
He can take a direct hit from a nuclear warhead and still keep teaching and designing boards.
Very nice
I can understand your comment . . .
"His comment" was generated automatically by Scott Pakin's Complaint Generator. Get a life. You're arguing with a series of random numbers.
"Stick to the content"? The content consists of the semantic meaning of the text. If that meaning is confused and obscured by grammar and spelling errors, it's harder to see what the content is. Nobody should have to guess at the author's meaning; making it clear is the author's job, and that job only begins with cleaning up the spelling and grammar.
While I have not yet seen the software which can tell the correct usage of "its" versus "it's", any spell-checker on the face of this earth will catch "hobbiest". Even Microsoft's. Having that in a piece to be posted to the entire world is awfully sloppy.
Allow me to introduce myself.
I am a 45-year old father of two wonderful children, formerly . . . a father of five.
I assume that you can do simple arithmetic as well as I can: Where are the other four children now? I'm sure you've realized that you're about to find out.
I'm not very concerned with your whimpering liberal hysteria about the imaginary pseudo-science of "ergonomics" (a word which translates from the Greek roughly as "witchcraft", just in case you didn't know), but I do have some valid information to impart. It may be "politically incorrect", but that's the way it goes sometimes.
Last June, my five children were playing with our new computer which we had just brought home. It was a big healthy computer, which had been found abandoned and had been rescued. We thought it would be perfect for a growing family. Kids need to get outside and enjoy the fresh air and sunshine, and what better companion for them than a big, playful computer? You can see my point, and at the time, may God forgive me, it made sense to me as well -- but my wife and I learned a strange and terrible lesson from our naivete, a bitter and agonizing lesson indeed.
You see, that seemingly happy and healthy computer had previously been used by the US Customs Service to detect drugs in people's luggage at the local airport, and it had been deliberately addicted to dangerous narcotics in order to whet its interest in their smell. When the computer first came to live with us, it had only recently been abandoned, and hadn't yet descended into the hell of narcotic withdrawal. But that part came soon enough. The computer became alternately withdrawn and aggressive. We "turned the other cheek", but it was to no avail. We tried to control it with firm, caring discipline, but to no avail. Finally, one warm spring day when the kids were all out in the back yard playing, it snapped its chain and sprang among them, biting and tearing with its great fangs. Four of our five beautiful, loving, happy children died that day, and the two who remain wake up screaming from terrifying nightmares every night of every week. Life goes on, and we must do what we can to bear the sorrow and give our remaining children the good, Godly life that they deserve.
But we can never forget the great, gaping, blood-soaked hole that was torn in our family by a computer.
And we will never trust a computer again.
don't mean to talk to smack, but your sig is a voltaire. check it out. http://www.keme.co.uk/~beckett/archive/voltaire.ht m
"How can he then turn around and say that open sourced software will be better?"
/. and they usually refuse to post anything else.... but the Woz only likes Open Source software for very small projects, THAT is the only people he says he supports (note that I didn't say he SAID those are the only people he supports, I'm aware of that, but the english language doesn't give me a more understandable way of saying that). For bigger projects he points out it takes big teams in a company, just like producing hundreds of computers took a big team in a company for Apple.
Uhhh.... he didn't. Re-read his interview more critically. You just assumed he has wet dreams about Open Source software because it was posted on
E.
Macs are actually quite unstable, although not as unstable as a Windows machine.
:^(
I'm not sure if MacOS has memory leaks galore or what, but I find myself rebooting the damn things usually as little as five times a day, sometimes five times an hour.
They just seem more stable because they don't have to deal with compatibility issues that PCs do. Kudos to Apple for maintaining a monopoly on the Mac market!
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
If anybody tried to take away my playtime, I'd have to kick some ass. :)
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I have many relatives in Canada. One was in an accident in which the bones of his index finger were protruding from the flesh. He was in the States at the time, and the doctor said, "Well, I can have you in the operating room in half an hour." But no, he chose to return to Canada to get his health care there...the doctors in Ontario gave him a two week delay before they did anything.
That's a big fucking lie. If they "gave him a two week delay", emergency procedures and pain killers would have been administered to him first and he would have been _perfectly OK_ to wait two weeks for an operation.
Canada isn't like some kind of war torn developing nation. The only thing that makes our health system worse than yours is the fact that more $ != faster service. Everyone is equal. But that still doesn't mean I'll have to wait any more than a few hours in an ER if I really need help.
Fuck your class-system FUD. And BTW, we do have private clinics here in Alberta, so you'll feel right at home if you choose to pay exorbinant prices for marginally faster service.
Hands in my pocket
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
so what if when i rant it comes out like a standard, high-school essay? that's what bad english teaching get's ya. i should have got kicked out more than i already did, what can i say?
buttmunch.
lf.o
Moderate this UP.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I would not recommend this book highly. Clifford Stoll is unable to grasp the new methods of communication. He also overexaggerates situations. If he walks into a room with 20 people using the Internet, he will scream and kick and jump around the room (literally if you've ever seen him speak, he's a maniac) and go absolutely nuts insisting that these people are absorbed in the net and are completely ignoring the people right next to them. He forgets that once class is over, the kids go out to recess and play together and that in the next class they're making clay sculptures of something or other.
He ignores people like me, people who spend hours online and spend most of the time keeping in very personal, very close, and daily contact with people I knew in high school who are scattered across the world now! He's one of the misguided morons that actually thinks that having a sack of meat and bones in front of you instead of communicating with them directly matters. The biggest hoot of all, and I mean this really kills me, is that he says that computers have no place in science or industry either (they replace people).... he's an astronomer! He couldn't do anything but get blinded by the sun without computers and computer-controlled telescopes and everything else!
Cliff Stoll is one of the biggest living hippocrits alive, but he gets a lot of attention by doing somethnig people have been doing for centuries. They take common wisdom and, without reason, just scream "Its wrong". Think 100 years ago with most of the world christian when Nietzsche stands up and screams "God is dead!" as a joke (read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it starts off as a nonsensical joke and evolves into an irrational argument) and turns it into something he can argue behind. Cliff Stoll is doing the same thing. Some would say its at least good that he makes us re-examine our conclusions. Wrong! We've already come to our conclusions! We're *WASTING*TIME* re-examining our conclusions.
Its one of the big reasons this whole totalitarian socialist Open Source idea (totalitarian because they don't want you to have a choice, they want Open Sourceness to be mandatory, socialist because its community-oriented and no one gets compensated for their work) makes me mad. Its a waste of time. Its making us run through this whole confirmation-of-capitalism-and-freedom as opposed to 0-freedom-but-everything-is-(cost)-free thing we've done a hundred times throughout history. A waste of time.
E.
(I grew up in front of a computer. Spent 90% of my time there. I'm an Eagle rank Boy Scout. Cliff Stoll, choke on your contradictions)
You should know NEVER to shoot a computer indoors with a
Was it a Mac or a beige Intel box, by the way? Macs die more easily, but they're enormously more cunning. I've known Macs to play dead for hours, waiting for a chance to get at my throat. The G4's are the most dangerous of the bunch, but the G3's aren't far behind. The only Mac you can absolutely trust to stay dead is the Lisa.
Has anyone noticed that Woz and Paul Allen, the two "second-string" guys who actually did all the work, are the ones who are out there making the world a better place while Bill and Steve fight over pissing rights?
/. "community". Dedicating your life to "freeing" software seems pretty ridiculous when there are people out there dying because they can't afford food or medicine. But, you gotta admire RMS, he is true to his ideals... even if they do only benefit those rich enough to afford a computer in the first place.
I never thought I'd be the one coming to BGates' defense, but... do you know how much money BG gave to charities last year? I read the other day that it was something like $16 BILLION! Sure his company may make crappy software, but I would say that he has done more for improving the world that we live in than, say, RMS, ESR, or any of the other idols of the
I don't mean to downplay the significance of Woz's contributions at all. I think he is the most well-balanced, nice, and generally great person in the technical industry. The fact that he uses his money and influence to improve education and help the upcoming generations is the thing that I respect him for the most.
"....usually as little as five times a day, sometimes five times an hour." You're familiar with the Norton Utilities for Macintosh, right? And turning off the Extentions that you don't need? Rebuilding the desktop? Spring Cleaning 3.1?
Read it again, he's not an Open Source whacko, he's much more down to earth about it. He _likes_ the idea (and so do I) that Apple has total control of the hardward and software base, because Apple can steer the development of the computer. On the other hand, we in the Lin-tel world are stifled by competition, a lack of a single vision of the future, *No*Money*For*R&D*.... Open Source magnifies and amplifies these problems, it doesn't solve any of them. Just because he thought schematics with a computer years and years ago doesn't mean he's an Open Source advocate.
I like the Woz, don't try to anthropromorphize him into some Linux Nazi when he very clearly would like to see LinuxPPC go away and have MacOS retain center stage.
E.
And I agree with the man, he's a great guy and I'd like to have a beer with him, unlike most of you guys who would just go into convulsions when faced with reality.
Ahh.. developmental psychology. What Woz is suggesting is not delving children into a world full of dangers and pitfalls (which the internet is) but leveraging them up to a point where they do not view a computer with suspicion. Using computers on a regular basis and having knowledge of computers is currently considered a geeky endeavor, and people who participate in those activities are many times abused (see the insightful series of Hellmouth articles). What Woz is saying about computers is indeed viable, and even necessary, to compete in the world of the future. Let children get exposed to the outdoors by regular field trips, and then have them take a test on a computer built into their desk at school. Teachers ARE NOT necessary in a GRADE SCHOOL environment. At that level of learning, all that is being taught is the very basics, and the best way to teach that is without prejudice or bias, which only computers are capable of doing. At the college level and above, it becomes a different story since you need opinion and bias to properly teach the material. But no secondary school system NEEDS children being taught by biased, irrational, and oftentimes angry teachers. Computers are the future in that end, but it will not be accepted easily. Exposure to real life and wilderness is no fault of computers, it is the fault of a poor educational system which does not provide a large enough budget to its districts to let them do anything creative, or lazy administrators or teachers who do not want to go through the trouble of exposing children to the outdoors. I was a boy scout for several years, have seen Yellowstone, Glacier, been to alaska, seen brown, black, and even a polar bear, I own a siberian wolf mix and have plenty of exposure to the outdoors, yet I am majoring in computer science /and/ spend much of my life on the computer.
In addition, the future mobility of computer systems will allow them to be used with ease in the outdoors. Imagine a system resembling the popular anime 'Pokemon' with the 'Pokedex' being able to be used on actual creatures in the outdoors. That would be wonderful.
Chason Chaffin University of Houston
"It's nice to read from someone who doesn't complain, doesn't blame people for anything -- he just says what he'd like to happen, where folks fell short, and how we can step up to the plate. "
That's because he's a capitalist. Its the only way you can be honest like that. If you do something Open Source and screw up, your work is based on someone elses, so theres an instant collapsible ladder of guilt. In capitalism, IN steve's view of the real world, you are responsible for what you do. You own it. You choose to share it or sell it or whatever you wish. You take responsibility. That's why he thinks companies shoudl stand behind their products - not because he wants someone to listen to his complaints, but beacuse he wants those companies to find out how beneficial it is to stand behind a product and grow with it. Every problem you fix is a hint towards what was wrong with your first product and a tip on how to improve it. Not like in Open Source where if someone tells you they hate your program for X, you simply accuse them of working at Microsoft or say it was implemented by someone else.
E.
With respect, I found the Stoll book completely without point, a monotonous drone about how computers are bad. He says that sitting in front of a computer is bad, and that people should be out caving or knitting. But I have met more people online than whilst knitting, and I regard social intercorse as much more important than being outside. (Admittedly I prefer socialising in beer gardens, but that's just a personal thing...) Stoll continually put forth the idea that the computer somehow caused the poor behaviour of people. In the example you give, where people loved writing email to foreigners but didn't talk to the 11 physically present in the school, he makes us think that this is somehow the computer's fault. I do not believe for one moment that if you took the computers away, that those 11 students would be any less lonely. The problem had nothing to do with computers; Stoll continually presents arguments as though they are the fault of the computer, when in fact they are just a scapegoat for the things he sees are wrong with the world. His email addiction is a case in point. It is not the computer's fault that he felt the need to check his email on vacation.
I cannot believe what a cool person Steve Wozniak is. From the first time I heard the story of him figuring out how to build the first Apple when everybody else thought it was impossible he's been my hardware hacker god. Between him, John Carmack, and various kernel hackers I know, it's a wonder I have any self-esteem left when I look at my own stuff. :)
The closest I can get to that experience today is Linux. And the free BSD's, of course. You can go down to the kernel level and see exactly what's happening, and even write your own device drivers if desired.
If I had kids, I wouldn't think twice about plunking a bare Linux box on their desk and saying "have at it".
_E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
This is Woz, not Jobs, we're talking to.
While I believe Woz has some influence at Apple still, it's nowhere near that of Jobs. We'll be VERY lucky to see the non-BSD layers. Even if Woz is fanatically committed to Open-Source, I don't think he has enough influence in the current Apple (esp. with Jobs solidifying his dictator-for-life power) to make the changes you propose.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This is only an incredible observation if you subscribe to the philosophy that RISC means "A reduced set of instructions". That's one view. I'm told that, in contrast, the original designers of the Power architecture interpret the RISC philosophy as "A set of reduced instructions". It's a subtle difference, but it means that the G4 doesn't necessarily stray from the RISC philosophy, since the size of the set wasn't what they reduced, but rather each instruction. At least that's what my prof taught me. YMMV.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
I don't know if this comparison has been made before but it seems to me that the Open Source movement is much like the Homebrew Computer Club.
The ideals in the case of the Homebrew Computer Club (as described in the interview) were: "empowering people without the companies owning the computers" only in this case it is software. We are in a better situation today -- almost anyone can be "hardware empowered," but if you want to be software empowered -- forget it.
Keep in mind that when you buy a piece of software like Windows or Office you are actually just buying a "license to use" the software. The software itself is *owned* my Microsoft (or Large Company of your Choice). You don't own it any more than people in the 70's owned the large computers that they rented/begged time on. Closed source is just one way that this non-ownership and disempowerment is enforced.
I think you might be confusing Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs....
The issue is that Apple, as a builder of homogenous systems, can pick and choose what it considers the best technologies for it's systems. RISC/Firewire/USB/Unix/PDF...these are all technologies that Apple, as a verticaly integrated systems developer, can pick and choose. A vendor such as Dell is largely limited to what Intel or Microsoft has to offer: simply repackaging homogenous "standards" rather than choosing the -best- standards.
Open source technologies will give small, verticaly integrated computer system developers -more- options, and is therefore a Very Good Thing. Example: Cobalt Computing makes microservers that are fast, stable, flexible, and cheap. They use Linux and other OSS components, which allows them to tailor their software to the best hardware, not just the most common hardware. The result is the Qube: less than a grand, and runs a fast 64-bit processor. Dell or HP's NT servers can't come anywhere near the price/performance.
SoupIsGood Food
I think I can recall quite a few teachers that would have been nicely replaced by computers. Especially my 5th grade science teacher who told me that I would never amount to anything. (as I watch my stock investments near the $1M mark. . . heh heh heh)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Why is this moderated as a troll? And why do you other guys think it's OK for the govt to take your property? You've paid income tax, sales tax and property tax all your life. Then you have to give whatever you have left to a foundation or it gets taken from your family? How is that not socialist?
The revolution will NOT be televised.
There's really a wide disparity in teacher's salaries depending on the area they're in. Around here teachers get 50-60K/yr after a few years in the job. Given a 9 month year, that equates easily to your 70-80k figure.
In the areas where they get a lot less many of the other people are making a lot less too.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
> And in our system, the wealthy usually get that way through government backing
Really? The govt made Woz wealthy? Jeff Bezos? Steven Spielberg? Of course corps. are artificial - unless you're talking about trees and fields and people hanging out on a street corner, what isn't? The tax laws? Isn't taking someone's legally-obtained property and handing it out to anyone other than their family rather artificial? When an individual does that we call it theft.
It wasn't the govt's money in the first place, so they have NO RIGHT to "take it back"! What about the people who have to move out of their family homes and sell the farm to developers to pay the inheiritance tax because the old man died? I'd say that *is* a family tragedy.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Apple already has some MacOS sw dev tools, examples, and documentation available available via ftp. I'm not sure how the MPW ide compares to CodeWarrior, but it's available for download. Check out Apple's Developer Tools section on their website.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Actually it's specifically titled
Why Computers Do Not Belong in the Classroom.
It's brand new so a lot of people may not be aware of it yet.
Thanks,
Brian seppanen
seppanen@bresnanlink.net
Brian Seppanen
Minister of Information and Propaganda
Area 54 The Secret Government Disco Labs Provo
I saw him on CSPAN-2 a couple of weeks ago. He was talking about his book. Many of the people in attendance were teachers. I think he might make an interesting interview here on /. as well. He has a really interesting perspective and his delivery is entertaining and energetic. It was fun to watch someone dig in their backpack for visual aids. I'll check to see if they are planning to reair it. I know they sometimes do.
LetterJ
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
KEYBOARD DEBATE
DECEMBER 27, 1995
TRANSCRIPT - Interview with Stoll.
A documentary transcript with bits from Stoll.
An interview with him on his book "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage"
LetterJ
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
you're neglecting a large part of what teachers do in a classroom - facilitating social interaction. if you were unfortunate enough in school to copy things from the chalkboard all day, you would thing computers could replace teachers.
good teachers can do sooo much more than you could ever hope to accomplish with a few dozen computers.
The difference between RISC/CISC isn't so much how many different instructions you have, but what the instructions do. x86 has instructions that will byte copy a string to another location. ppc chips have copy a byte. You loop yourself. Also, all the instructions are fixed lenghts (usually 32 bits on current processors). Instruction lengths can range from single bytes to 4 bytes or more on CISC, making prefetching difficult.
And being bunched off with other quiet people would help introverts in what way? There's a happy medium between introversion and extroversion. You may as well home school if you don't want to be around more outgoing people.
Once again, no data, and many insults to boot. Surprise, surprise.
Anecdotes about Germany won't change the assessment results, even if they declared majors when they were in kindergarten. It's irrelevant.
The data says you're wrong.
Wow, what a thoughtful reply. Is this slashdot, or am I lost? ;) Someone should moderate it up. It's good to see people genuinely looking at this subject.
;) Really the age/years of schooling issue is very hard to resolve because they vary wildly between nations.
I'm familiar with the TIMSS results. Unfortunately, the results have been very misleadingly presented. The claims in boldface about how the sampling was strictly controlled should not be believed.
There were sampling and participation criteria for the test, but only 5 nations met them for the math tests, and only 6 nations met them for the physics tests. Other nations were included in the data, even though their sample sets were not valid.
Age was not controlled for in the tests. Indeed, you can control for years of schooling, or age, but not both, because of differences in educational systems. As it turns out, age correlates strongly with the results. So.... everyone write to your congressman to complain about when we start kindergarten.
Some percentage of test items were matched to the curriculum of the nation being tested, on the theory that it makes no sense to test material which isn't being taught. However this wasn't done for the U.S. (not sure why).
Some countries tested only students in math and science track programs.
There are still more problems with the data. The point is not that the study was sloppily done -- it's extremely difficult to construct meaningful cross-cultural metrics of this sort. However, the data was presented in a highly misleading way, and was grossly misinterpreted by most people in the U.S. You largely won't find critiques of the data in the popular press, however there are some reviews in _Kappan_, Sep 98, and Oct 98, and there's an article in _Science_, 15 May 98.
except for one word: "it"
ok...
he is != hes
she is != shes
it is != its
am I missing something?
Everyone is allowed a mistake here or there... The blind argument which is made all to often here, that there are too many rules in the English language to know them all, is completely bogus. It's a small step from that point of view to anarchy, which would roughly translate to unintelligible bable.
The rules are there so that the language makes sense -- the fact that the rules don't always make sense is just tough. Learn them anyway!
Nate
More Specifically it is Titled "High Tech Heretic: why computers don't belong in the classroom and other reflections of a computer contrarian"
I actually had the nickname "Fuzzie Wuzzie", a derivative from Woz. That was grade 5 & 6 for you.
Perhaps more interesting than the nicknames/sayings that come from "Woz", are the number of ways it gets misspelled. Here are a couple common ones and a not so common one (sometime in sorta-regex form):
Due to the fact I have to always spell my name over the phone, I am considering changing my last name to Wozniak-double-you-oh-zed-en-eye-eh-kay (note Canadian-isms in there). Wouldn't that be fun.
Steve, if you're reading this, please put up a post saying that we're not related!
Geoff Wozniak, aka, Woz
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" Sartre
i think that's from voltaire...
cob2k25
That would be something for SJ to do, rather than the Woz.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I think you are on the right track. Who knows what would have happened should Apple have been in charge, but they sure didn't want to allow anyone else to use Mac-like interfaces, for example.
I've thought about this a lot, because I love the MacOS, hate the actions of MS, etc. But I'm not blind to the fact that Steve Jobs wants to get his way just as much as Bill Gates does. There is one thing, though, that _might_ have made it better for us all if Apple had become the 800lb gorilla instead of M$, and that is that Jobs was driven by the desire to make computers "insanely great", as he said, while Bill is driven by winning. (I don't think Bill even knows how bad their software is, actually--he thinks (or says he thinks) it's great, and the real question is "who's out there that might knock me off the top? how do I defeat them?").
So, maybe huge, unassailable apple would have been better than huge, unassailable M$, but it's hard to say. It probable ended up better for us all that Apple had to fight to survive. It's almost as if competition is good.
One day, in the not-so-distant future, linux or something like it will be as good (for the low-end user) as the MacOS, and the best things in life will be free like they should be. Until then, I'm glad that Apple didn't die in the interim. They have, and still do, in many cases, really made contributions to the user experience. But don't get the idea that they're "nice" as opposed to M$'s "nasty". If they were nice, the Newton stuff wouldn't have been killed so abruptly and mercilessly--a lot of people would have been happy even now buying newtons like the eMate, even with no further research on Apple's part. No concessions were made to the users, it just died. Many other examples exist--they are a profit-driven company with shareholders and a bottom line. It's really hard to be forward looking enough to say "if I just do the right thing, I'll win financially in the long run." The Board isn't going to just take that attitude on faith, after all.
Anyway, i've said more than enough. I respect apple a lot, but don't confuse them with Woz (who is still an employee, of course, but obviously not making the corporate decisions...)
Later,
mike
Liberty uber alles.
I volunteer time in my kids K-5 school and have helped develop and use the school's computer network -- so I am no Luddite or anti-tecnologist myself. But I do believe that both Stohl and Oppenhiemer are right on the money when they talk about how computers in schools are oversold and that good schools will continue to require good teachers -- indefinitely.
Some in this audience may have benefited greatly from computers in school, but I would bet that even those individuals would not have succeeded in their educations without direct, face to face, interactions with caring educators in a school building. These are very bacis human needs that cannot be fulfilled by any computing machinery or software -- especially in early education.
Um, Carbon is an API, not a UI.
um woz has about zilch to do with apple these days. I don't think his opinion has anything to do with apple strategies anymore.
b
I dig it.
It's depressing how free software people are so deeply in love with shoddy, incompetent use of English, while at the same time making so much noise about careful, detail-oriented use of languages like C and whatnot. Hmmm . . . Innarestin', innit?
I love it when people babble incoherent gibberish at me and then whine that I "know what they mean". "You know what I mean" translates roughly as "I don't know what I mean." The semantic meatgrinder of idiomatic, uneducated American English is so destructive that the language as commonly spoken can be used only to express the most trivial platitudes, and even then only if the listener knows from context which one to expect. In other words, most people may as well just walk around all day grunting and pointing. They express emotion by the tone of their voices, but so does an orangutan. Big deal.
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Not to mention Apple themselves got sued over the Mac by Xerox because they said it copied their interface. Jobs started work on the Lisa after he visited Xerox.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Not to make a political gesture, but Al Gore wants to pay teachers more, specifically for what you cite here. We are talking about the future of our country here! I can only hope that out next president will make this a priority.
Bill Gates gives less to charity as a percentage of his income than the average American.
Think about that -- the one guy on earth who could totally afford to give away 99.999% of his money and not feel it, and he gives away less of it to charities than the average family struggling to save enough for their kids to (hopefully) go to college...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Okay, fine -- he gives away less of his NET WORTH than the average american. No matter how you cut it, he's less generous than the average american (who is generally living with a net worth of a NEGATIVE amount thanks to things like mortgages , car loans, student loans, and credit card debt).
The vast majority of his money will go to one of two places: charitible foundations or estate taxes. It doesn't make him generous, it means that the tax incentives in place to encourage wealthy folks to give to charity is effective.
When he starts giving away money that doesn't give him a tax break (as the majority of americans do, since relatively few people itemize deductions) then I'll be impressed.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Well, with a computer, the knowledge is essentially coming from the person who wrote the software, right? So you're not really learning from the computer.
Likewise, when you're reading from a book, you're not gleaning any information from the tree and ink itself; you're gleaning it from the mind of whomever wrote the book.
The best way to learn is straight from the mind of someone else; there are little connections between ideas that can't be fully expressed on paper, but can be easily dictated and reinforced, with the aid of questions, by a teacher.
Btw, one of the reasons books work so well in conveying ideas is because there's very little adaption to an idea required to be able to transcribe it on paper. On the other hand, computer programs for teaching things to students are very unflexible, in that they have to be interpreted into the computer's tongue, and then back again, before they reach the student.
Which really kinda sucks. Ah well..
James
"It's nice to read from someone who doesn't complain, doesn't blame people for anything -- he just says what he'd like to happen, where folks fell short, and how we can step up to the plate."
Not really... he never sees where Steve Jobs falls short, like the lack of OEM licensing of Mac OS or the ridiculous partial freeing of already free BSD components in Mac OS X, aka Darwin.
It does strike me how Woz seems to be, after 20+ years and already in his full maturity, still sounds so infatuated to Jobs.
"Has anyone noticed that Woz and Paul Allen, the two "second-string" guys who actually did all the work, are the ones who are out there making the world a better place..."
No... what I noticed is that they refused to use their public positions to take stands on things which their companies are doing wrong, like
proprietary lock-ins, absurd patents and copyrights, license agreements and screwing up partners. Education is good and nice, but they are educating a new generation in old proprietary software... this is no good.
BTW, what interesting is Allen doing?
--
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Theoretically I would agree with this if teachers were as good as theoretically they should be. Face it teachers are human and can be bad at their jobs. I would rate about 10% of my teachers as good at what they do. That is why I choose to learn from books when appropriate. I can start reading a book and if I don't like the way the author is explaining something I can get a different book on the subject. Students will learn much better with having the choice of learning the subjects they wish from the computer or the teacher. Albeit computers need to get much better at presenting the information but they will.
MBrod
While I don't use the colorful language of sparky here, I do agree with one of his points. Most teachers don't really teach, they make you memorize stuff. (My girlfriend is going to be a teacher so I'm not completely ignorant.)
In school, I went to one of the better ones in the state, it was small and focused. However, I didn't learn how to learn or even critical thinking skills. The teachers never taught me how to think for myself, but rather memorize this, memorize that and do as they said.
So while I don't believe a computer could replace a good teacher at all, it could definitely replace a bad one.
Agreed. Carter is the only ex-Prex doing something good for society. Habitat for Humanity is an awesome organization.
Why is it the people who do the actual work, don't get the credit?
Wouldn't it be nice if we had more people in power who were actually honest hardworking folks.
Like Linus, (don't worry, no hero worship here, just observations.) Family first, then everything else. No power-trips, no monster ego, but a guy who actually rolls up his sleeves and breaks out the elbow grease (ok, finger grease in this respect)
I'm actually a technology coordinator / technology instructor at an elementary school at what is considered 'technology magnet' school (too bad no extra funds come with that title hehe).
:) . Most are intelligent, however their intelligence lies in a different area. Logical thinking isn't usually their strength. And computers are almost entirely logical by nature. That's where the problem lies. The people who create programs for computers, including operating systems, are extremely logical thinkers and naturally they create their programs based on their own thinking patterns. Apple has done a better job than anybody of getting away from this (though they have a long way to go yet) and teachers respond to it by sticking to Apple whenever they have the chance (but schools like ours aren't *allowed* to buy Apple products!). People who are more apt to use the other side of their brain tend to like Apple's products.
It's my job to teach the students about computers and how to work them, and to also teach the teachers how to use their computers (along with doing the web site, making donated equipment work and placing it, purchasing new equipment, etc etc).
I have to comment on what somebody said earlier in this thread. They said that most teachers aren't intelligent. I really think that could have been stated more intelligently
I have an inservice to give next week on e-mail usage and web page design where half the teaching staff is required to attend. Based on past experience, it is likely that some will call in sick!
I think where the weakness lies is not in the teachers, but rather in the programmers failure to create products usable by all of the people that should/would/could be using them. GUI's have come a really long way considering the relatively short time they have been in existance, but they obvoiusly still have a long way to go! Every computer that is on this campus required at least an hour of my time before it was put into use to organize things in such a way that the teachers would me more comfortable using them. I have found that machines that are organized in such a fashion are used on average more than twice as much as machines that aren't. Even then, they could be designed much better in the first place.
My current project is to find a way to make Linux usable by the teachers and other staff here. At this stage I have been experimenting with different configurations in KDE. I may also experiment with some different WM's. At this point I really don't think it's ready.
Back to work!
Just my 2 cents
--SONET
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
ADDL @(R1)+,@(R1)+,@(R2)+
Great for an assembly programmer, but a nightmare for a CPU designer. One instruction on a VAX can generate over 30 page faults during execution.
Sheesh. I don't normally say this to people, but you're the dumbest person I've seen in a long time. You really need medication.
Now, as to your point, if you have one in the swearing...
I stand by my statement. A well designed education program could replace what a teacher spends 95% of their time doing. The computer could present problems, and if little Johnny needed more time, the computer could give it to them. The computer could create exercises that pinpoint problem areas, and could give and grade tests. This would free the teached from doing all the dull paperwork, from writing on a board, etc. They'd be able to spend their time working on specific problem areas a student couldn't understand, or in dealing with the social aspects of teaching.
I didn't say teachers could be replaced, I said that MOST OF WHAT THEY DO could be replaced by a computer. That'd leave the teacher a lot more time for the human interaction.
After all that writing, your points were:
1) Moving students to the next grade despite low scores it at odds with (one of) the stated goals of the school system.
2) Anyone who doesn't agree with all of your assertions is "in denial" (if not actively malicious), "[doesn't] care" and needs to "get used to it".
While your passion is to be praised, your reasoning is not evident enough, nor your assumptions supported enough for me to be much convinced.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
(i.e. the OS iteself very rarely crashes).
When you need to reboot the computer, it means the OS has crashed. In My exsperance (my highschool, I graduated in 99) that happend about every 4 or 6 hours of use.
The problem is, without protected memory any app can bring down the system. And dispite what rabid MAC fans say, app crashes hardly ever bring down even win9x. All you get is a little diolog saying that the program crashed.
I don't use windows NT personaly, but everyone I know who does only has to reboot there computers every few weeks or months, and most likely due to an upgrade, rather then a crash.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Um, Rubidium is one of the softest mettals known to man.
You can cut it with a butter knife
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
OH, yes... $16 Billion in MICROSOFT SOFTWARE. What use can make the charities of Microsoft Software?
Um, try dieses vacination for 3rd world contries, idiot.
MS is giving away the MS software, not BG himself, and I really doubt he would have been paying $16 in taxies.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
BTW, what interesting is Allen doing?
Well nothing like WOZ as far as I know, but I belive he funds some sort of R&D place staffed with Xerox-PARC ex-patriots. That R&D place spun off the failure game company, Purple Moon.
He's also invested in Lots of cable companys, and TicketMaster, and is a major investor in Transmeta(if not *the* investor), and therefor employes Linus Torvalids(sp?).
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Give some dude a fish and he'll eat lunch, but you teach that motherfucking spastic bastard how to fish and he'll eat like a fucking king for the rest of his fucking life.
Hrm... I think I like your version better...
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
You know, I noticed this too. I think the point he wants to make is he believes the PPC architecture is more compact, RISC-like and therefore more "streamlined" than their x86 counter-parts.
That's just my take on it.
If you were Seve Wozniak, would *you* be depressed about anything? Seriously, I think he looks at everything with the same engineer / hacker eye: everything can be broken down into logical elements and solved to your satisfaction....everything. Any problem.
I thknk if more geeks put the same problem solving skills to work on their personal lives (and the society around them) there would be slightly less geek angst. I mean, the typical hack / geek / engineer has more non-linear problem solving ability than the average psych(ologist)(iatrist). And it sounds like mr. wozniak is content with his place in life, as well.
But most students are going to be using computers as tools, sealed boxes, and they need to learn different lessons. Like don't forward the hoax virus warnings you get in your email. Don't run cute executables from people you don't know. And don't believe everything you read on Slashdot, even if it is from a karma whore with a +1 bonus.
These are all great things to learn, sure. Especially the last one. But do they count as computer science education?
I just wonder where in a child's education the above fall. "Communication Skills" springs to mind to describe the topics, rather than computer science, and I dunno about the rest of the planet but here in the UK that's not a formal topic for education until you get to at least tertiary level (but, hey, my company *does* send me on tree-hugging courses in this so you can get some of that stuff).
I think Woz was addressing the "this is a computer, this is what it does, this is how it works" side of things, rather than "this is a computer, this is how you use it". Choice of OS, regardless of merit, is irrelevant.
From my own experience, and with regards to CompSci itself rather than the usage-and-social-rules side, I learnt just as much - if not more - from writing asm card-reading sw on bare metal microcontrollers as I did from playing with SPARC systems & VAXen.
Indeed, from the ground-up perspective, one of the best learning tools I've seen has to be a lego-like construction kit which snaps together. Each component is a logic gate or similar - you build up your own circuits (up to adder / counter level, for instance). Big, chunky components, just about idiot (if not child) proof, colourful, das blinkenlicht... if something like that can't get a kid interested, I can't see what they'd learn from sitting down in front of a VDU with a penguin on it (or flying window).
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
but a couple pages out of encarta doesn't fill the requirement for real research. I admit there is some good research you can do on the internet if you wanted to, but that isn't what is happening. Also, libraries contain books. Books are well thought out complete works of information that have been edited. Most information on the web is brief, unedited, and unverified. If there were an e-library, than ok, but but until you can get real books on the internet, the internet cannot completely replace libraries.
I agree. People always seem to think computers are a quick fix for everything. The scary thing is kids are starting to believe that. Kids have forgotten the value of a library because they can just browse the internet. Everyone sees computers as so important and so they believe that the most computer educated kid will do the best. However, we forget some basic predicate knowledge that is neccessary.
Kids need to be taught how to learn and not just to be sheep. I saw it in high school in my programming classes. They couldn't learn C++ because they didn't understand logic. I give Woz major kudos for his statement that we need to start early teaching logic and the like on which learning higher skills are based. Give a man a fish he can eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he can eat his whole life. Teach a kid to use Word he can type a paper, teach a kid to use logic, to reason, and to learn and he can figure out whatever obstacles arise. I think I lost my train of thought so I'll stop rambling now.
nice idea but I dont think it would work to have an optional GUI because people these days are getting lazy. they'd probably rather use the gui and then demand that everything is centered around it. There are certain people who are original and inquisitive who want to learn and understand thing, use logic and reason, and are mindless sheep in society. These are the ones who go on to be nerds, geeks, and hackers. People with brains. The number of these seems to be decreasing. I wonder why that is? Also I wonder if it is genetic or societal, and if societal what can we do to teach and promote thought, reasoning, and individuality?
- The display would clearly be VGA and only standard ports would make sense.
- high level languages and low level debugging and coding support
- I would try to offer high level GUI ability in the high level language.
- all the code would come with the machine and would be open source (unless someone like Steve Jobs [or JLG] convinced me to sell it).
Gosh. That sounds a lot like good old BeOS. This post is merely intended to spur on the usual rabid Slashdot speculation. I use both BeOS and Linux (also BSD) and love them all. Whaddaya think folks? What is Jean-Louis up to these days? Woz: do you keep in touch with the Be people? Talk about an awseome user & developer community! Apple has got nothing on BeOS when it comes to cool people developing and using the OS.C'mon Slashdot. We're all geeks here, let's hear whatcha think!
Woz says "Every other one is a slave to Intel and Microsoft and competitive prices that don't allow for much R&D>". Well, it seems to me that recently AMD have been (as you Americans say) "kicking some serious Intel butt", winning big orders from Gateway, Compaq, etc, and innovating on their own terms. And the 3D and sound-card manufacturers aren't Intel. And the network card market isn't Intel. You get my point, I hope. :-)
Okay, yes, Intel have traditionally set the standards and dominated, but I think Woz's position is a little too much in Apple's favour, and a little too close to marketing-speak for my taste. Though the guy's still a hero
ben_ the technologist and platform agnostic
I beleive the book you're refering to is titled "Silicon Snake Oil". It's a very good book to read in this day and age, where computers are hyped as the answer to everything, and shoehorned into places and uses they shouldn't be in.
While he says that computers won't give you a quick and easy education, he does state that they can be a very useful tool for things like research and colaboration -- they have a place. Honestly, given the choice, how many of us would go back to the typewriter to write our term papers?
Personaly, I don't think computers have much of a place in the early stages of education, when the biggest challenge is developing social skills and basic communication abilities. When school assignments become more analytical and research oriented, then computers become tremendously useful.
From the teacher's point of view, computers are an incredible resource! I went to a very small high school with limited resources .. but my favorite teacher of all time was able to deliver amazing lessons on a wide variety of subjects because he had access to a computer, to e-mail, and the 'net. Because he had that sort of access, we were able to interview Ken Kesey about his writing and experiences, we were able to get real-world and up to date information about politics and business in Indonesia, and we were actually interested in what we were learning about.
Of course, the other side of the equasion is that our teacher was an amazing person. It takes someone who's driven and intelligent to keep a class interested in anything, at any academic level.
A smart person, be they student or teacher, will use available tools to their best advantage. Not having a computer or 'net access in the classroom is like telling a carpenter (s)he can't have a hammer -- sure, there are cool things you can do without a hammer, but a hammer really opens up a world of opportunity.
I've heard Apple frequently calls him in as a consultant.
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This space unintentionally left unblank.
Good call -
I've worked with high school teachers, helping them integrate the Internet in their classroom, and doing other technology consulting. Virtually all of the students seem to know more about how to operate the computer and the internet than the teacher. I've seen teachers get really flustered when there is a problem and a student steps in and solves the problem. It's embarrassing to have a 9 year-old help you...I suppose.
It's pretty sad how terrified of technology some of these older teachers are...can't get overhead projectors to work. But change is difficult.
However, several of my friends just graduated from Oregon Teacher Programs, some of the toughest in the nation and had to study many ways the computer can be used in the classroom...Several of them even took some basic computer programming classes.
More good news for Oregon, US WEST gave 25 million dollars to Oregon high schools to get them Internet Access and computers.
There is great possibilty with these new young teachers and corporate sponsorships (a whole other can of worms) to open up computing for school children.
Today's schools are utterly strapped by misplaced priorities, high turnover, and lack of ability to properly discipline children due to all the lawsuits that have been filed against schools that effectively discipline their students.
You forgot "Some of" in front of "Today's schools..."
Unless you're just trying to spread FUD.
If that's the case, then by all means carry on.
You said:
> Good Educational software should teach something
> (not just provide a better chalk board), never
> crash, have as few modes as possible ("I hit a
> button and it put me here where am I?"), be
> exciting, and be very secure...
This is a lovely vision, but virtually impossible to create. There are too many components in a computer's system that rely on the work of other people. The quality of the software in terms of speed, stability, and security is only as good as the weakest link. You can get pretty close with the right choice of tools, though.
As for "teach[ing] something", this is a very, very vague thing to say. What is the difference between teaching and the chalkboard example that you give? Computers were designed to be tools. They store and process information. They do not think (except perhaps in some abstract experiements in AI, but even that's debatable).
The key to understanding today's educational software is to realize that it was conceived as a teacher's aid (like manipulatives), not a teacher's replacement.
Another potentially contributing factor is state adoption committees. They review the educational products that come out and approve, recommend, or mandate certain products (depending on the state and the product). Naturally, the company who wants to make money tries to impress committees that mandate. State editions are not uncommon for this reason. Sometimes I wonder if this interferes with what the teacher has to work with. I guess it depends on the committee.
-Jennifer
I work in the educational multimedia division of a very large textbook publisher. In particular, I work on their web content, but my company also makes CDs to go with the books. AFAIK, the work that we do is sold for at most "at cost" as an incentive for using the textbooks.
I've definitely observed a large range in computer literacy among teachers. Most tend toward the very basic user end, if they've had the chance to use a computer. I wonder if they ever updated the college curriculum for teachers to include using the computer in education. Or any other technology that went mainstream in the last few decades.
My take on it is that the computer is sort of like an interactive television. You can find some great material out there, but there should always be some discussion about what you saw. A computer certainly not a replacement for a teacher. The teacher should act as guide for finding information and activities (on and off the computer), leading discussion, and trying to providing additional material where necessary.
Unfortunately, this doesn't happen alot of classrooms. Sometimes it's because the teacher only lectures about the required elements and assigns work. Sometimes it's because the school isn't providing adequate support for the teacher.
Anyway, I am very interested in any suggestions for making computers more palletable to teachers. This need not be limited to the web, since I also enjoy working on pet projects.
-Jennifer
This reminds me of some things that I used to witness in school. At the time, I didn't understand why they happened. I remember incidents like peers getting better report card grades than me (they tended to advertise their grades), even though they had worse test and assignment scores. I also didn't understand the point of education because the overwhelming majority of it for me consisted of lectures and repeating it verbatim on tests and assignments. I know now that this not educating; it's operant conditioning.
I can identify some of the things wrong with the US educational system. I guess one of the biggies is that education is not something that can be quantified, but our system is set up based on the assumption that it is (test scores mean everything). Mix in the politics and an anemic budget and it's easy to see where teachers could become discouraged to the point of making a career change or just not caring anymore.
I've seen several people here assert that the education systems in some other countries are better than in the US. I don't doubt it, but I wonder where the differences are. Are we trying to spred ourselves too thin, where another country only concentrates on the brightest 10%? Or perhaps American culture gets in the way.
And even after enumerating what's wrong, it's even harder to figure out what to do about it.
-Jennifer
> I don't think he was arguing against an "hour" or
> whatever, I think he was more afraid of education
> moving toward replacement of books with computers
> with interactive lessons (i.e., a lot more than
> an hour). On the face of it, that doesn't sound
> all that bad (wouldn't interative be better than
> just reading?
As I remember it, adults thought very highly of you if you spent much of your free time reading, but were very suspicious of you if you spent it in front of a computer (at least back in the '80s). I find this so ironic now because lately we've been talking about how in the future, it may be possible to have a device that basically looks and feels like a book, but is actually a computer with electronic paper. You would just download the contents of this books and, viola, you have this year's textbook.
Personally, I think too much of anything is bad (including reading). It usually means that you're deficient elsewhere.
-Jennifer
Money alone won't cut it, but I agree, the US educational system is often underfunded, especially when it comes to paying teachers. There's another problem, though. The screening process for teachers seems to be suboptimal. I am amazed at what it takes to become a teacher (at least in the Northeast US, especially CT). There's all of this certification and degrees and student teaching, etc. And with all of that training, there's way too many teachers who don't seem to be able to teach well. Thank goodness most who make it through the process can teach. Some of them are even exceptional.
In the meantime, there are people who don't have an degree in education, certification, etc. that may be better qualified to teach their area of expertise, but aren't allowed. I wonder how many truly qualified people who have considered teaching don't get involved because it's so costly in money and time.
I also wonder why it isn't mandatory for teachers to take updater courses on educating. I'm thinking a semester-long night course every few years. This is also something that should be paid by the school. Any supplemental training that the teacher might want should be on the teacher.
It's no wonder that there are so many teachers in this country that don't know what to do with a computer in their classroom.
-Jennifer
I have a Mac and Win95 on my desk side by side. I tend to use the Mac for most of my work because I find that it's more stable. It is not unusual for me to run 5 or 6 apps simulataneously, switching among them frequently. I rarely have to reboot it When I do, it's usually because Communicator went south. I'd stay away from Communicator (yea, iCab), but I need to test with it for work.
I find that extensions on the Mac is probably the biggest reasons for the Mac becoming unstable. It's rare to find a Mac without 3rd party extensions installed. Poorly written Mac apps is probably the second biggest reason. I simply don't use apps that tend to crash my system. For what I work on, there has always been an alternative out there.
Needless to say, I've been less than impressed with Win95's stability. MacOS X looks like it will have some interesting features, especially some of the UNIX and Next things. Cocoa is very intriguing. I could do without the Aqua interface, though. The dock could also stand to be smaller. I prefer to run 832x624 on a 17" monitor and I really don't want to have to get a larger monitor.
-Jennifer
Sorry, Steve, but school is socially unhealthy. It's a very unnatural environment -- to be surrounded by so many people of exactly the same age as you, with very little adult supervision.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
This is one of the biggest problem I have with MacOS and Windows. I don't care how badly coded the app is, user mode apps should not bring down the system. The perceived reliability and stability of an operating system should never be judged by how it treats well-behaved apps. The perceived stability and reliability of an operating system must be judged by how it deals with poorly behaved apps and unforeseen circumstances. Think about it - any teacher can teach well-behaved, respectful kids. It takes a special kind to teach poorly behaved kids.
I can think of yet another niche-market distro. We have the source, thus we have the power. A Linux distro tailored to the needs of the education community - one that concentrates on interactive teaching and the like, while maintaining Linux's openness and security.
This is why I see Linux (and open source in general) as being so important and useful for education. You have access to all levels of abstraction, and yet you have the ability to also use those abstractions. Part of the growth in computer education is being able to gradually peel back the layers of abstraction that separate us from the machine. As the student becomes capable of dealing with more depth and breadth to his (her) education, he (she) can peel back another layer of abstraction.
K, so what do we need? techies, educators and techie-educators. If you can express it, we can build it.
No, Damn wrong, I think.
/. already. However, I don't think that segregation...excuse me..."isolation" is the answer.
And I've been there. The first attempt to kill (yes, I mean murder - to throw me over the rail of an open, multistory stairwell, in fact) happened in junior high. More followed. I won't even get into the emotional and psychological harassment. There's enough of that on
Children are vicious. No argument. The scars can last for years. Again, no argument. I'm still coping with some of mine. However, the adult world isn't a cakewalk either. Isolating children from their peers is an effective short-term solution, but what about it as a long-term solution?
I've seen many people who didn't have to deal with much in the way of adversity as children fall flat on their faces, when having to deal with real life as adults. "Isolating" them, whether segregating them into "Introverts and Extroverts" or keeping them away from harassment is only going to leave them unprepared for dealing with it as adults, when it becomes more sophisticated and more subtle. This doesn't mean that I advocate harassment and physical / psychological abuse of children. I do, however, believe that more effective solutions would be in the direction of better child supervision while in school, and more emotional support / teaching them better coping skills to combat this sort of harassment when they're at home.
Currently, children are warehoused from nine until three, and then essentially left to fend for themselves ("Go play in the yard" or "Go watch TV. I'm tired/busy/reading the paper. &c.") until bedtime. The next day the cycle starts all over again.
Until families (not just parents) realize that raising a child is as important a job and takes as much or more commitment than they give to their work, hobbies, recreational activities, social circle, religious functions, or golf game, things aren't going to get better for the kids. It's not only in the schools that the peer-abuse and harassment occur. And anyone thinking it ends with high school is naive. It simply becomes more subtle and (occasionally) more sophisticated. It's part of life, like it or not.
And BTW, the fact that someone doesn't consider his/her childhood a hellish experience does not imply that s/he was one of the ones making life hell for everyone else. This sort of 'either/or' thinking doesn't get anyone anywhere, though it does make life easier for the simple-minded.
I think in a learning situation children should start with some sort of console and at least learn how to launch programs and work with files. My first experience with a console was the dos command line in which I learned how to type "cd c:\wolf3d" and then "dir" to make me look cool. Without that little bit of information, I would have never cared to go poking around with the computer.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
He only started giving away money after the DOJ suit started. To him it's nothing but a PR expense budget item. I don't really think a man as unethical as Gates is actually cares about other people.
War is necrophilia.
So, you are saying that the primary purpose of school is to teach students how to behave in a social setting with their peers. As such, we should advance them with their peers.
I believe this is what results in people graduating from high-school unable to read.
True, socialization is a primary reason for a school's existence. It does IMO, result in a student that is better able to integrate into society. However, if someone is not able to perform at a specific skill level, they should not be advanced based on the belief that the point of school is to teach them how to associate with others.
It is also true that the ability to "spot garbage" is important. This skill is the ability to learn. Yes this is important, and it is one that teachers should teach. However, it is a hard skill to teach, especially to bright students who do not have to make a large effort to learn the existing material. But, while the ability to learn is important, it doesn't make up for not knowing basic information about the world you live in. Everyone should be able to read, write and do basic algebra. Sadly this is not the case.
I was shocked to hear the lines people were spewing about E=MC^2 when Einstein was named person of the century. Come on, all you have to do is think a little. Even when they played Einstein stating, VERY clearly, what the equation meant, "A small amount of mass contains a large amount of energy", the announcer announced, "It is still too hard for me to understand". Personally I think that is someone who was advanced with her peers.
Jason PollockHe gave that money to the Bill and Melinda Gates something-or-the-other charity foundation. That was a $16B tax write off, and his net worth was still over $70B after he gave away that money. He could give about $7 to every man, woman and child on this planet and still have billions left over (assuming he could convert all that net worth to cash}
HOWEVER... giving money to charities does not necessarily make him good, or better than anyone in the free/open software/source movement. If everyone had free/open software. They are giving, and giving a lot, just not in ways as easily quantifiable to the materialistic nation we live in. Money != Everything. And if it did, think of all the money that we could save with OSS (not only price of software, but downtime and security risks, etc etc) and give to charities of our choosing instead of Microsoft, which give to charities they control?
After a lifetime of being mean-spirited, Gates could redeem himself by acting with truly good intentions. However, I don't think giving to his own charities to make himself look good and get write-offs qualifies him for that. Mega-Rich people like Gates don't get where they are by being nice. They get where they are by any means possible.
-dj
P.S. Go Woz! I really admire the work you are doing.
`/\/\
(^.^)
(")(")
not quite an analog pussy, just a cat that plays with vinyl
I never thought I'd be the one coming to BGates' defense, but... do you know how much money BG gave to charities last year? I read the other day that it was something like $16 BILLION!
/. "community"
OH, yes... $16 Billion in MICROSOFT SOFTWARE. What use can make the charities of Microsoft Software?
His huge donation was compared with Carnegie's. But Carnegie donated money to schools so they can buy books or whatever they might think it's useful, not some milion tons of steel.
Sure his company may make crappy software, but I would say that he has done more for improving the world that we live in than, say, RMS, ESR, or any of the other idols of the
Like what? Morality is not at all important to you? Businesses and business models come and go, but mankind needs something more than just money.
Are we slaves of Intel and Microsoft as Woz says in the Interview?
:-)
I don't think so. You have many Unix operating systems which run on a many hardware platforms. If you only think about Linux it is running on Intel, Alpha, StrongARM, Mac, UltraSparc, Sparc, and more. We don't want to make a list of the NetBSD ports here, right?
I really think this interview was good, but this point was something which I didn't like. The rest of the interview was good work with really interesting answers. -thanks for it.
I saw him on CSPAN-2 as well. Whatever you want to say about Stoll, you have to admit he is a very interesting person. I remember seeing him speak years ago and coming away thinking that he was a complete nut. He brings such enthusiasm to whatever topic that he speaks about, that regardless of whether you agree with him, you wind up going away admiring him.
I would love to see him interviewed here.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
I've never actively crashed a Mac either, but I've seen them go down all the time.
:-).
In the lab I have to work in at school to make spare cash, its half Mac, a quarter NT, and a quarter 95. I would say that the 95 machines and the Macs go down about the same amount followed by the NT machines, which are newer and haven't been messed with/up as much. It's all due to various software problems, usually Netscape, Cricket graph, or MS Office on the Macs and almost always Explorer on the PC's. These machines take a real beating, being used from 7:00am to 2:00am by a lot of different people who tend to know little about what they are doing.
My point here? People dispute whether or not the MacOS or Winders is better (in this case crash less), but in a real world situation they perform about the same for average users. Of course this is different if you're a graphic designer or programmer or whatever but I'm talking average Word Processing/Email/Web browsing, AOL instant messenger is really cool, type users.
Now, if only they'd let me throw Debian on those PC's
---- sonoffreak
Interesting. Whenever mindcraft comes up, linux users abandon their data and every post begins with, "well in my experience." During the numerous mindcraft posts, a single person had yet to give anything OTHER than anecdotal data. Oh well, just a thought.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Well, you want data? Here is an article from NCES (National center for education statistics.) It is quite a good source of info, and a government organizatoin at that. So have at it.
http://nces.ed.gov/timss/twelfth/
Some particularly interesting exerpts.
In mathematics general knowledge, students in the final year of secondary school in 14 countries scored above our twelfth graders (the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, France, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Austria, Slovenia, Germany, and Hungary). Students in 4 countries were not significantly different from ours (Italy, the Russian Federation, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic). Students in two countries (Cyprus and South Africa) performed significantly below students in the United States.
and
One explanation for our low performance that has been suggested in the past is that, because of our diverse population, there is a greater range of scores among U.S. students, and the difference between our lowest-scoring students and our typical student is greater than in many other countries. These low-scoring students, it has been argued, "bring down" the U.S. average. Available information suggests that this is not the case in TIMSS.A
and still more
For example, while a quarter of U.S. students scored 521 or higher, in many high-performing countries half or more of the students had scores that high. Furthermore, the scores of U.S. students at the 95th percentile were similar to those of students at the 75th percentile in some countries. (See Table A2.3 in Appendix 2 for percentiles for mathematics general knowledge; see Tables A2.4, A2.5, and A2.6 for percentiles for the other assessments.)
and some from the science tests.
On the assessment of science general knowledge, students at the end of secondary school in 11 countries (Sweden, the Netherlands, Iceland, Norway, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, and Denmark) outperformed U.S. twelfth graders. Students in 7 countries performed not significantly different from those in the United States (Germany, France, the Czech Republic, the Russian Federation, Italy, Hungary, and Lithuania). Students in Cyprus and South Africa performed below students in the United States.
So here you go, data. And take a look at some of the test questions. You'll find them to be quite reasonable.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Another point that's worth mentioning is the vast, vast differences in the skills of students showing up in the class. My mom is pretty sharp and has substitute taught at many levels from K-12 at all kinds of public and private high schools, both normal kids and autistic/Downs-syndrome kids, and the range of differences in teachability is staggering. To accomodate and optimize computer teaching styles to reach 95% of those kids is a unbelievably big challenge, as if the task weren't already hard enough.
Bright kids who catch on are easy for most teachers to deal with; they excel in their own ways without too much encouragement. But the slow ones who never seem to get anything are agonizingly hard to teach. Teachers who get these "stupid" classes get worn down very easily over a few years, or hardened into people who don't care. And usually the worst teachers get assigned these classes as punishment or encouragement to quit.
Also, keeping a normally restless class under control is another major part of a teachers job that hasn't been mentioned as part of the computer-as-teacher role. Any automated teaching mechanism would have to deal with that too. The psychology and creativity required for that are so huge that I think it'll be well over a decade after the Turing test is first passed that any "computers substituting for teachers" makes any significant sense.
The more I hear my mother talk about her teaching experiences, the subtler and more challenging all the AI problems appear to be. It's not going to happen for a long, long time, IMHO.
--LP
In addition, the future mobility of computer systems will allow them to be used with ease in the outdoors. Imagine a system resembling the popular anime 'Pokemon' with the 'Pokedex' being able to be used on actual creatures in the outdoors. That would be wonderful.
:)
I have one of those, it's in my head... every year, from age 6-12 or so, at the top of my birthday and xmas lists (other than legos, of course), were Safari Cards... I must have committed 200 or 300 of the damn things to memory... and yet, i still have trouble remembering my own phone number... but can still remember the gestation period of an ermine.
goddamn WORM-wetware...
my karma ran over your dogma
The ergonomic issue is a good point, but not a universal one. My eyes are shot, but that's from years upon years of reading to fill my hours during childhood. I never even had a computer until I was 14 or so. Basically, we need to teach kids the whole of taking better care of themselves, not just in front of the computer.
The only real common times I had crashing Macs was when the "brand new" 1st generation PPCs came out (6100/7100s I think).
I think it was that they didn't have all the bug ironed out of their emulator for 68k programs.
(The natives ran fine.)
Every once in a while, I'll get the bomb on the iMac. Usually its because I'm playing with beta software tho...
(Sorry about OT)
I've managed to click my way through a Win98 upgrade only to have it freeze on bootup. Apparently, when it went through to find/install the drivers for my hardware, it reinstalled all the drivers so I had multiples of all my drivers on my system. Fixed that and no serious hang ups yet.
Nothing has frozen my Linux box yet and RH6.0 installed nicely with a win partition....even with a kernel recompile.
-Vel
Why is it automatically assumed that if we put computers in the hands of elementary school children that all they are going to do is sit in front of it? I got my first computer when I was 4 years old, and I don't think my development suffered because of it.
We can't allow our fear of changing the environment in which our children are raised stop us from exposing them to technology at an early age. IMO learning about computers and technology as a young child has the same types of benefits as starting foreign language studies at an early age.
My biggest fear is that the increased use of technology in education will further the economic class separation in America. Consider this: the schools most likely to obtain the funding needed to implement computers in all classrooms are in affluent neighborhoods. Meanwhile, children who are not exposed to technology at a young age (read: the poor and/or inner city children) are at a serious disadvantage to catch their more economically advantaged peers. Does free software offer an answer to this problem...?
He talked about how educational software could be made better, but as the poster above points out, the teachers need to be able to use it effectively.
A great deal of teachers I know are technophobes. They work exhausting hours and have no time (and little incentive) to learn how to use computers. I'd love to hear what role Woz thinks computers should really play in education.
Mr. Wozniak hasn't been 'Apple' for quite a while. I'd go barking up another tree.
.sig: Now legally binding!
I can say that I got interested in Linux, not because it was not Windows, but because is was/is Unix (like). For someone who taught himself computing and programming just by buying TRS-80s and 8088 PC clones, etc, it was a chance to open up a new world where I had no access to SparcStations or HP-UX boxen.
I still like it for that reason. Unix is elegant and deep and rich. Windows (NT, anyway) is a great desktop system.
MacOS X looks super - I may have to save my pennies for a G4
I don't have an Oxford Unabridged handy, or I'd look up the origins of the current forms of the pronouns. Irregular forms are generally earlier than regular forms, so "mine" and "his" (arising from "me" and "him") probably precede "hers" and "its".
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
All this, just because I was out riding my hobbi-horse. ;-)
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I would imagine that being the problem. However, there is an even more serious problem behind a blind use of technology in teaching. I see it in UK's secondary and tertiary education system. That is to use programmable calculators/computers in classrooms and during exams. While it makes sense when you teach people about Laplace transform and you assume that the have the basic algebra mastered and they can do the same calculations WITHOUT any aid the same can't be applied to high scool or college students (in the UK sense of the word).
Being a college lecturer myself for a while I came across many students who were taught concepts like integrals and differentiation but their basic algerbra skills just weren't there. They had trouble in proper understanding of calculus basics such as logarithms. To them a logarithm was simply that button on the calculator. "Plug in the numbers and here pops the answer" was a generally practiced method of teaching.
Now the government has realised their mistake and they are trying to discourage use of calculators too early on in the education process. However with a whole generation of students brought up in such system these practices cannot be easily reverted anymore. While those devices are great they can seriously impair one's depth of understanding if their use in classrooms gets out of control.
On the other hand there is a definite need for subjects such as Microprocessor Design or Analogue Electronics early on to prepare young people to become useful Engineers/Programmers in their future careers. I feel that in Poland (my home country) and in Germany a much stronger emphasis is placed on the "techie" subjects (In Poland you can actually choose to pursue Electronics/CS when you are about 14). In the UK however, engineering subjects are still grossly mistreated in the High Schools' education programmes. I always wondered though how this is addressed in North America (US, Canada). I don't think anybody believes that four years of university education is long enough to teach someone all aspects of modern engineering.
Actually, somethingl like this does exists. Unfortunately, it is not usually paid for by anybody but the teacher him/herself. Only wealthy districts subsidize the costs for their teachers.
I'm not sure of the specifics, but it basically runs something like "15 hours of classes in 2 years, masters in 5 years", and "x hours of college classes every x years". At least this is the case here in MO. By doing the "x hours every x years" the plan allows for the fact that some teachers may have a very busy year, but then they have to work harder on taking classes the next couple years. Teachers who don't meet the guidelines lose their teaching certificate.
Of course, this doesn't work in states like NM that don't require a teaching certificate at all because they are seriously low on teachers and will take anyone with a college education.
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
If you've never done anything that crashed a mac, you've obviously not tried very hard. Ever use Netscape? :)
But seriously, I can't wait for OS X, it's about time they added useful Unix networking tools to the core of the OS! It was blantatly lacking them before - that's why I'd always pick windows above mac. Well, that, and the lack of a starcraft battle chest for the Mac platform...
lf.o
oops, thought that was a reply to me. sorry for wasting bandwidth!!
lf.o
I'm a flamer sometimes I admit it. Maybe this is a good way to take advantage of the slashdot dev/null bug.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I've never actively attempted to crash a Mac though. I don't use them enough. I do know that I've seen Windows (which I use about as much as MacOS) crash more that MacOS.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Reading through the questions submitted and asked of Woz, it seemed kinda leading... browbeating him into admitting "we" are right, and "we" are misunderstood, and "we" hold the key to the future, blah blah.
So, what do you think of Apples? Aren't they going the wrong route because they used to come with pinout charts and now they don't?
Well, having control of the hardware's a strength to both hardware and sof...
Hush! So, what do you think of Microsoft? Aren't they SUCH bullies for MAKING people buy more PCs than Apples?
Well, early on, Apple did make some big mistak...
Stop! No, no, no. So, what do you think of BeOS? Aren't they SO wrong for being closed-source?
Yeah, I guess you're right. Open Source is popular.
See, I told you.
[
The difference is that PC peripheral manufacturers are competing, while open source developers are cooperating. The reason for this is closed hardware specifications. Open source developers share a common goal (better software), and a common vehicle (they all hack on the same codebase). Hardware manufacturers share a common goal (better hardware), but NDAs and patents force them to introduce incompatible, competing standards.
If the PC specs had been released under a GPL-like license, ie "if you develop any hardware using these specs you must release the specs to your hardware under this license", maybe we would have seen a PC peripherals market with more small players and less conflicting/competing standards.
Next week: how the GPL could have cured the Black Death and brought peace to all mankind.
I remember in the wired article about him, it said he had afternoons where he would take in kids and try to pass on the kind of attitudes and skills your talking about. I wonder how he deals with it if he has a really shitty session, and essentially just spends a day being frustrated.
I think your logical approach works in 99% of cases, but isn't it occasionally important to feel, whether that's good or bad? Reminds us were human. Adds flavour to life.
Then again, maybe I just need a beer ;p
Overcome?
The skills to interact with a machine are learned. Period. Sometimes the machine is a hand planer, other times it is a fighter jet.
Sometimes the skill is reading. (how many of you remember mastering that skill?)
But overcome? You make it sound like a command line is some big smeging thing, worthy of praise if you somehow manage to figure out how to type something that gets you a desired response.
By painting a command line as an obstacle, you make it so.
Think back to the 1950's (not that many of you can). When making silicon transistors was considered impossible. No EE felt it was possible. Yet, Willis Adcock did it. Why? Because he didn't KNOW it was impossi ble.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I was listening to the radio one day, and this guy came on who was very against using computers in the early grades. Being a computer geek, I was generally for it, but I have to admit this guy made some sense.
His argument was that if computers are used too much in the early grades, there is a risk of the child not developing proper spacial senses, since they are only looking at a 2D screen. We don't really think about it, but there is a huge amount of coordination developed between 5 and 10 years old and just the act of holding pencils, holding books, turning pages, etc is what helps develop them.
I thought it was a really thought-provoking argument for not going overboard with computers in the early grades.
---
I was disappointed as well. The government should tax half your assets if your in upper income brackets well before death. Every year in fact. Between January and April.
First off: RISC/CISC doesn't matter. In fact Intel's (an AMD's) recent designs have many "RISC-like" features especially in the processor core. Conversely, the G4 has many "CISC-like" features now.
One of the performance advantages that the G3/G4 have is support for a much faster Level 2 Backside bus cache. It can run anywhere from 1/2 to the full clock speed of the processor. This allows a bigger cache to be used more effectively. The G4 also gives programmers direct control of a huge bank of processor registers, allowing more direct control of processor resources. It also has a 128 bit bus for it's vector processing (Altivec) unit (a glorified DSP).
Another advantage the G4 has is a much smaller die size and therefore smaller power/heat dissipation requirements. This is due to the fact that the G4 does not need to support the many bloated legacy instructions in the x86 architecture. All the PowerPC instructions are the same memory size (unlike x86), which makes the preprocessor logic and pipelining *much* simpler as well.
Operating systems that run on all types of hardware is a recent thing. It is only due to Micro$oft that we think in terms of "standard" systems. There wasn't even a standard BASIC out there. I'm really amazed when I see comments like this on slashdot. Doesn't anyone have a memory anymore? There really was no reason for Apple to OEM anything, given past practices of the industry. MS was the first (OK, UNIX was really first, but it took years to beat out DEC and IBM's systems) to sell their OS to anyone (as long as you could get a BIOS chip).
Sorry about the rant.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
So, imagine that Apple had come to dominate the consumer OS market -- say by licensing MacOS to Compaq, or Commodore, or Atari. Compaq was apparently interested, and Commodore and Atari were working with 68k designs and probably would have welcomed the chance to move into the Mac market, given what their mid/late 80's designs did(you know, nothing -- remember the Atari Stacy?).
So M$ gets out of the OS business, building apps for MacOS instead. DOS dies. IBM and M$ get into bed to make 0S/2 run way fast on Intel, targeting the business market. IBM and Intel, getting desperate, go into the PowerPC business together. Stuck with 68k, and stagnating due to high market share, Apple misses the Internet as a killer app, and the biggest thing in computers in the late 90's is a G3 CHRP box running OS/2 and Internet Explorer, with Apple scrabbling to make a slower, creakier platform somehow seem inviting -- perhaps by selling colored boxes?
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
These days I'd agree. Win95 and MacOS 7.5+ are about the same. However, in the old days (MacOS 6.x and earlier vs Win3.x or Win95) the Mac was a lot more stable. I've never locked or crashed my SE or my LC. Netscape on my iMac crashes about as often as Netscape or IE will lock up on NT.
Kind of offtopic, but: If you're interested in this sort of thing, nip down to your local bookstore and pick up a copy of "High Tech Heretic" by Cliff Stoll. (A fellow who I personally would love to receive a /. interview, if he hasn't had one already) Stoll basically states that computers have no place in the classroom (amongst other things), and backs up his points convincingly. Definitely a very interesting and enlightening read.
disclaimer: opinions contained therein are not neccessarily those of my employer.
I think it's a good point that Windows became so widely used mostly because it worked with everything, and if someone like Apple had taken the same approach, they likely would have run into the same situation as there is with Windows now. You can either make your product work well with one thing, or less well for many things. It's a good deal harder to make it work as well for everything, almost impossible.
As for MacOS pre-8 vs Win95, i think 7.5.5 is more comparable. I've never used a system that's pre-Win95 or pre-MacOS 7.5.5 that was all that reliable in any way, but I've seen relatively stable Win95 boxes, and my older computer which is still running 7.5.5 averages about 2 months uptime without problems. As of now, I've had better experiences with MacOS 8/9 compared to Win98, but we'll have to see what happens with MacOS X and Win2K.
This makes me wonder what is better motivation for hackers: the garage world, or the IPO world. Sometimes I wish I was born ten years earlier so I could have toyed more with the computer's hardware and coded all the apps myself. But then you can't deny that we also are living in a great age with the hyper economy. Any kid with an idea in the tech fields can get funding. Do any of you have opinions?
This is obviously off topic, but it is a worthwhile discussion. A shame to see it moderated to -1.
In response to the fellow who contends that Cliff is "Mr. Anti-Technology", I must offer my objections.
True, Clifford Stoll does not favor many current trends in applied technology (see "Silicon Snake Oil", his second book). But he is a real hacker, who understands the Hands On Imperative. He is only trying to call a stop to the horribly exploitive hype of the Internet Age.
He isn't talking about technology, he's talking about today's applications of technology. Haven't you ever looked up from your mindless web surfing and wondered where the last two hours went? Haven't you ever regretted that second round of Starcraft when you might have been napping in the sun, playing frisbee, or finally washing the dishes? Cliff and I will be more forgiving to today's technology when it stops "dribbling our lives away at 48.8".
Thrail
Two wrongs don't make a right. But three rights make a left.
Also, we should not forget the effect that competition and "wasted" energy by dozens of companies has on hardware. (We all believe in the power of a naturally evolving technology here in open-source land, right?)
Although Apple and other envelope-pushers are essential, one could argue that a closed hardware standard would never have given us $1 per MB memory or $10 per GB storage or $.2 per MHz processors as we have today, as there wouldn't be the same competitive pressure and the certainty of market acceptance as with open, commodity hardware.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Teach a kid to stop rambling and he'll never post to Slashdot ;)
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
In my experience, I'd agree. However, I'm somewhat stumped why no one has brought Linux into this little crashtest... After all, we seem to be talking about popular Desktop OS's. (I'd ask about OS/2 as well, but I have no experience with that one). MacOS 8 and Win98 seem to have about the same reliability when it comes to everyday network users (From experience running my school's network, I know this to be true). But honestly now, how many times have you seen a Linux 2.2.xx OS die? Aside from compiling the kernel wrongly, I haven't ever seen it happen, whereas in both Win98 and MacOS 8, sometimes you don't have to do anything at all to make them crash, much less put them to intensive tasks. I am, however, very excited about MacOS X. It shall be interesting to see how it stacks up in reliability as opposed to the other aformentioned OSes. Whats more, if I can have the prettiness in an OS, like Mac is famous for, and the just plain usefulness of UNIX, I might be tempted to buy a G4 with OS X to compliment my aging P-II/Linux system. However, I won't pour money into a G4 and OS X if a good portion to it isn't Open Sourced. Heck, as long as I can see most of the source, I wouldn't even care if the License wasn't GPL compatible. People deserve to know what they're getting. Providing the source is a fair solution. Now, how they'd regulate a non-GPL type OSS model is another matter, but I think its something that is going to need to be addressed by proprietary companies if they want to remain competitive with true open source projects like Linux. The consumer is not going to be left in the dark and expect to pay for shoddy programs/OSes when they can probably get a more reliable Open Sourced program or OS. I don't want to seem like a OSS zealot (cuz I'm not), but all you have to do is look at Microsoft and Intel and the like, to see that the public is getting royally screwed, and it doesn't benefit anyone but those companies. The only other alternative is to pass legislation that will effectively allow more companies a fighting chance at giving these giants decent competition. Thats the only other way you are going to get low-cost, efficient technology.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
And all the while, Mac "borrowed" the Gui look and feel from Xerox.. a fact most Mac Addicts don't share. =)
now how does this relate to computers? well, we can never expect something programmed and created by a human to have the depth, the love to nurture a child; it just ain't gonna happen. to try to have a computer raise a child is akin to setting the kid in front of the boob tube 12-16 hours a day and expecting him/her to grow up healthy and stable. come on now, people.
miskam evets
There are some points there need to be raised here. The first is that at the moment education software is very poor. For an industry that is already technophobic and poorly trained in the use of technology it is very hard to convince Educators to stick there neck out with poor software and even harder to convince them to make good software. Good Educational software should teach something (not just provide a better chalk board), never crash, have as few modes as possible ("I hit a button and it put me here where am I?"), be exciting, and be very secure (the best hackers in the world are board students) this is a tall order which I have not seen filled. For this reason most of what technology is used for in the classroom consists of using applications that were not designed to teach. Word processors will not teach you to write spread sheets will not help you learn to add and graphics programs will not teach you to draw. You must already have these skills, then the computer programs of today can help students improve them. This is the reason many "experts" have recommended agents the use of computers in elementary education. IMHO if computers are to be used as an educational tool and not as someone put it just to "make school work look better" then there must be reliable and easy to use software that serves this purpose and does it as well or better then the current method.
In regards to using computer in High School (where I would like to teach) there is an entirely different problem. That is the immense difference in skill levels between students. Current trends in educational theory say that separating students by skill level is to be avoided if possible. I 'm sure that there are many Slashdot readers who will testify to the fact that in a computer class in high school, those who know about computers often know more then the teacher, while those who don't may need to learn how to use a mouse.(probably not this bad any more but you get the point) Now imagine a science lesson using computers where instead of teaching the science that is needed the teacher spends the entire class trying to teach the students how to use the computers. I have seen lessons like this and it rightly scares most current teachers away.
In conclusion, All students need to be taught to use computer as it is becoming a necessary job skill just like reading or math, but for this to happen there needs to be software that is both useful and reliable. Also more training for teachers whose first taste of technology was most likely not a good one. All this will cost money and take time two things that today's Education system doesn't have. I don't think teachers fear being replaced (At least they shouldn't) Most would be willing to change if they thought it would be an improvement, but for the reasons above that is currently not the case and sadly is not likely to change any time soon.
What do you think? If you can point out the names of Software that you think might fit the bill I would be very interested? Also any advice fro a prospective teachers?
JF MIiler
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
You're absolutely right about computers not replacing teachers. When I hear some of the more, er, 'uncritical' advocates of computers in classrooms go into their rhapsodies about how technology will improve their education, I want to grab them by the ears and (screaming) point out to them that people like Einstein and von Neumann and dozens of other people (including Woz himself, for that matter) somehow managed to become really fucking bright despite the fact that they were educated without the assistance of computers. Throwing computers at the classroom will accomplish little at all - it'll help the kids learn to use a particular sort of platform, but it won't teach them more basic skills, and in fact may distract them from those more basic skills.
As to your comment about teachers not teaching: This is true, but it's not entirely (or even mostly) their fault. To a greater degree than we're willing to admit, schools today are designed to simply keep an eye on kids for enough time each day that both parents can go off to work and earn money to put food on the table and a nice big home theater system in the living room. Is it really necessary for both parents to work in order to support a family? In many cases, yes. But more often than we're willing to admit, it's a means of keeping up with the Jones'.
Both of my parents have worked as teachers (my mother still does), as do a number of my aunts. Here are the two most important things (in their eyes) to improving education: 1) more parental involvement in the process - the kids who have the hardest time learning are usually the ones whose parents never show up for Open House or teacher conferences. 2) smaller class sizes. Personal, one-on-one interaction is a crucial part of education, and the more students that are in a classroom, the less individual attention each gets. Mind you, they don't want smaller classes to make their jobs easier - they want them because it makes them more effective as teachers, and thus makes their jobs more rewarding.
Sounds like a pretty * Up Front* comment to me.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Well, I've used Warp 3 and 2.11 of OS/2 (sorry, haven't used Warp 4). 2.11 didn't ever crash on me (I had Word for OS2 and some other programs). Warp 3 only ever crashed on me when I tried to play midi's on my Sound Blaster 8, but only the midi-player crahsed nad the operating system kept going.
It's a shame Win95 compatibility and (better) networking was never put in, because OS/2 was really a great operating system. Windows 3.1 was a complete rip-off of OS/2 anyway.
If you check out the specs on a Mac G4, it has the identical specs as any Intel computer. It uses the same SDRAM, the same UDMA hard disk, the same PCI/AGP slots, the same graphic accelerator chip (Rage 128). It has the same front side bus (100mhz). The only real difference is the CPU. And really i think part of the speed difference is the L2 cache, the G4 processor has 1MB of L2 cache. Besides the processor I would call this more of an Intel computer then an Apple. In fact Apple is falling behind because the PC has moved on to 133 MHZ FSB, and RDRAM. I think at one time Apple made better hardware but that is not true today. I think their strength lies only in thier their software and APIs. What will happen to Apple when Intel (eventually) comes out with their RISC processor?
This thread on education is becoming a bit off-topic, but I just have to throw in my two cents. Throwing money at a problem in and of itself isn't the answer to any problem. As someone earlier in the thread mentioned, that can attract lousy teachers who are in it for the money. Money is a reward in a competitive society, so really what you need is competition: good teachers get good pay, bad teachers get bad pay, or just fired. It works like that in the tech industry: that's why our salries are 70k to 80k, easily. The problem with introducing competition in education the same way we have competition in the tech industry is that education is (probably justifiably) considered a right, to be provided by the state, with equality for all. But how can you have equality provided by the state when the simple fact is that some communities are richer and collect more taxes? If you allowed competition, rich communities would attract all the good teaching talent, leaving poorer communities with poorer teachers. And since education is supposed to be the levelling field, the spiral of poverty would thusly deepen. So the result is teachers' unions insisting on tenure and other policies that are meant to keep education uniform throughout rich and poor communities alike, to prevent exactly the stratification that competition might bring. The flipside of that is, without competition (a key element of free-market capitalism) we have socialism, or communism, or something like that. And we all know how the high ideals of equality is undermined by "free-riders", human laziness, and selfishness. i.e., Communism doesn't work. This is an open topic: I don't have a solution, or even necessarily an opinion on this topic. If I had a solution, I'd be the Education Czar (or whatever they call it.) Flame, reply, debate: thought is a good thing. -- Colonel Forbin Incidentally, I believe the same argument applies to health care. It is achieving a status approaching a state-endowed right. Where will this leave doctors and the health care industry in the future?
I don't remember their suing Microsoft, ever. Idiot. I do remember they tried to sue Commodore and Atari over their GUI's. Moron. And the GUI's on the Amiga and the Atari's was pretty good, not crap. Jerk. And seeing how you don't have the guts to put your own name on, you truly are and "Anonymous Coward." Jim Swanson
Someone asking an old Apple employee about companies suing other companies over patents on software, considering Apple sued everyone who had a GUI (this was in the mid-eighties) to maintain a monopoly on this type of user interface.
I just wanted to say that the program I believe you are talking about, LOGO, was the coolest program ever! I wish that someone had invested in developing a true LOGO operating system, LOGO2000 or some such, so we could give the turtle it's fair share of the glory along with the gnu, the penguin and the mouse! :^D And we could all be making multicolored fractal looking things for a living!
Ok. Tell me one thing; who is then the leader in GUI? ./
***I personally think computers can replace teachers, for 95% of the teaching that teachers currently do. It's that last %5, where a teacher can take a difficult problem and break it down in different ways, until they find one the student can understand.****
WHOOOOOAAAAAAAA THERE BUFALLO BOB... Now just hang on there a minute cowboy..Computers can't replace teachers, a computer is nothing but a fucking tool sparky....eh... the problem with teachers are that THEY ARE NOT TEACHERS. Huh... how's that for a fucking load eh... teachers don't teach, they force you to memorize and spew.
WHERE IS THE FUCKING SOCRATIC METHOD ???? THAT'S HOW YOU FUCKING LEARN HOW TO LEARN. Give some dude a fish and he'll eat lunch, but you teach that motherfucking spastic bastard how to fish and he'll eat like a fucking king for the rest of his fucking life.
So there ya have it...Theose were the best of times, those were the worst of fucking times. Hey teachers... shove those computers up your ass and start teaching or I'LL TRACK YOU DOWN AND RIP YOUR FUCKING HEART OUT.
A genius writes code an idiot can understand, while an idiot writes code the compiler can't understand.
Bunching disimilar children together is not a good idea IMO. Children are vicious little animals that tear apart those that are different. If you want to allow mixing it has to be done under very close supervision to keep the animals in line. Intro's do not understand the pecking order of the extro's nor do they want to. They just want to be left alone. Mixing can happen AFTER the animals have become somewhat civilized, like say in college. Before that time the intro's get more than enough socialization from family and neighbors. School should not have to be a place of dread as it is now for the introvert.
Jumping to correct solutions slowly is better than jumping to incorrect solutions quickly.
I can understand your comment but would like to add this thought. Public schools are designed to handle the 75% of people who are extroverted. The goal is to give this majority the basic education that they need. For the most part they succeed in this. The problem is that the remaining 25% of us who are introverted are badly mauled in the school system. An extrovert can not understand an introvert and visa versa. My wish would be for all children to be given the best education posible by sorting out the intro's and extro's into 2 groups that do not have to follow the same course of education. A computer with some good software would be perfectly acceptable for the introvert. A teacher and masses of other children would please the extrovert. I was a square peg being mashed into a round hole in school. I did well in the classroom but did not want to be put through the B.S. that happens around the school. I do not feel Woz can be branded as harmful, he just needs to be aware ,(and he may be), of the different personality types. His thought of computers to help in teaching would help the intro's get through the school systems with their ego still intact.
Jumping to correct solutions slowly is better than jumping to incorrect solutions quickly.
I had this crazy thought about half a year ago. When the economy is running high, there are plenty of jobs about and few individuals of high qualifications seek out a teaching position. Thus, the teachers are less qualified, less talented, and less skilled, and produce a lower quality of students, thus lowering the national level of education.
Suddenly, the nation is run by this low quality batch of graduates. I can't think of anything more likely to cause a recession than stupid management. So, we divebomb into poverty, the market crashes, and jobs become scarce. A teaching job is suddenly a treasure - it's one of the few jobs available! The most qualified people get them, producing an excellent flock of graduates, who bring the country out of recession....
Cycles.
Gotta love em.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Teachers will never be replaced. Think of all of the influences in your education (assuming you had any), and most likely, a teacher or two will come to mind... someone who inspired you to go a little further. I attended an independent, public elementary school. This school did not stress grades, instead dividing the entire K-6 student population into four "colonies." Each student was free to work at his/her own pace (under the watchful eye of a teacher or aides) in every subject. This was a benefit to many kids, especially quick kids and slower learners, but those who were not self-motivated had some problems in completing the assigned goals. Computers were not an integral part of the learning experience, but they were certainly used as a tool. Math drills (making the alligator eat the right number) were completed on the computer. These games were infinitely more fun with animation rather than just another sheet to fill out. Teachers could also spend more time helping the kids who needed it. Typing was taught to all 2nd graders (second colony) with a computer program; this is a necessary skill, but teachers' time could (and was) better spent elsewhere. Regardless of the benefits of computers in learning, personal attention to students cannot be replaced by a machine. I know that AI is progressing, but a program cannot take the place of another live person giving you a pat on the back.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
New PCs were still upwards/backwards compatible with existing software. People could upgrade incrementally.
Apple screwed their Apple ][ userbase by bringing out the Mac with no upgrade path. Years later they brought out an Apple ][ emulator card for some of the Macs, but it was too little, too late.
For instance, when Acorn released the world's first 32-bit RISC personal computer, they had a software emulator for their previous BBC computers, providing a vital bridge from old to new.
Hence the popularity now of the emulation scene. We've finally found keys for suitcases we packed years ago. Mine is a handheld Apple ][. Apple didn't build it, so I had to code it.
Nick Westgate
Professional Geek
[Antispam] Kill the x in my email address to reply
main() {1;}
The deterioration of the the interface should present an opportunity for Linux designers. It would seem the challenge would be to create a default GUI that is easy to use by novices, yet with the option of added controls for users with bigger needs. I saw this sort of switchability in the old Word Star program all the way back in the days of CPM on an old Osborne computer and I'm sure a GUI could have this sort of "back door" for experienced people to add what they need.
>Dr. A. was commenting upon the fallacy that
>"children don't need to learn the nuts and bolts
>of technology, they just need to know how to use
>it.
Well, the Good Doctor was just partly right. When a kid learns to use a pencil in first grade, he doesn't have to take Why Graphite Writes on Paper 101 or How to Make Skinny Wooden Tubes with Holes in Them. He (or she) just uses the blippin thing! And a pencil must have been high tech once. It's just that the use of the tool is more important than its technology.
Eventually, though, the kid may learn all the science of pencil-making, which is good; but making the knowledge of how something works a prerequisite for using it eliminates one of the things that has taken our society so far scientifically and technologically: specialization. Somebody can be as great a scientist today as Ben Franklin was without having to be as great a politician; it would be much harder now to do both, so we might as well let the scientist take the political system's well-being (does that exist?) for granted so he can specialize on the science.
Exposing every kid to computers is a good thing. Giving them the opportunity to do things with computers is good. But making them learn the inner workings before using computers would be as inappropriate for some students as it would be for others to have to learn to act before reading Shakespeare...or something like that, it's too late for me to think of good examples.
"Hey, who took the cork off my lunch?" -- W. C. Fields
Open source software works as those who have the ablity to fix bugs are permitted to do so and either fork off a project or get the fix into the original. And they, and anyone else, can apply a patch or download a new version to get things fixed on thier system in a hurry.
Hardware open source isn't quite the x86 situation. There is competition to fill 'open spec' slots (MCA may be great, but IBM just plain blew it by hoarding the specs, etc.) So what happens is many companies make boards to fill those slots (or systems to fill boxes, whatever)... some use top of the line parts and take time to design right. Others go cheap and throw anything handy together. People are cheap, quality can be inexpensive, but is rarely cheap. Result: A lot of junk gets used and good hardware doesn't sell as well.
Can open source hardware be done? Almost certainly. A person/group(company?) would have to set out a license (insert BSDish vs GPLish flames here, I prefer BSDish, myself fwiw) for it and stick to it. Then hardware hackers would have to be able to see specs and schematics (and protocols and all the software/drivers would need to be open source as well, of course) -- and those who could 'scratch itches' would be able to at least see problems and suggest solutions back, or implement them if they had sufficient capability on hand.
What would happen? The first versions of anything are crude. Anyone running an early '90s linux version? For production? No, of course not. But the 2000 versions are rather solid. The first open-sourced hardware would likely be annoying and buggy as hell. ("This may cause severe problems - we are NOT responsible for burned out hardware, downtime, fires... this is VERY 'alpha' hardware. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK [a handy fire extinguisher is a Good Idea!]") But a few cycles later... it'll be solid.
The real question then becomes, will the open source hardware development cycle be fast enough to keep pace with the lastest and greatest closed source, eventually? Will the costs be low enough to make it workable? Software can be copied easily, I can give you a copy of something and not lose anything but a my time. If I give you a copy of my boards, I'm out a few boards.
If anyone is doing this, or will be starting, Good Luck. Maybe you'll be interviewed here in a few years...
The comment about unix/bsd/linux style "real" comp sci education at an early age is quite interesting. I think some kind of technological literacy will be necessary in the future, but really, how much of this will be hardware, and how much software, and how much telecom-related? The world is only going to get more networked.
In anycase, I'd like to advocate for the software portion being taught with free tools. I think it makes a lot more sense. I've long worked on GPL'd tools for the free software community, and can honestly say that the things I miss the first time from reading open sources are invaribly pointed out to me by others. It's easier to understand complex systems when you are able to look at all the little bits, even the obscure ones.
As a realtime embedded guy I worked with would say, ``shows how much you know.''
Take, for instance, the MC68HC11. This microcontroller was designed for automobile manufacturers. The HC12 was designed because motorola didn't want to lose out on antilock brake system controls.
Every Dodge/Chrysler car has a Motorola MC68HC16 in it that does all sorts of stuff. Microcontrollers run much of the mission-critical stuff you see around you. But if you work with microcontroller guys (and gals) you'll find that they strain their brains for every concievable way that something can go wrong... if you think systems programmers for a typical PC os or even for high-end server systems are anal retentive you've never met a good embedded microcontroller programmer.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I would appreciate an interview with somebody with a differing view of technology but Cliff Stoll is not that. He has turned distinctly anti-technology in recent years to the point of near-fanaticism. I'm all for controlling technology and using it, not letting it use us, but I'm not going to ditch my computer and go grow apples as I've heard Mr. Stoll say we all should.
The wonder is that most students come out of this system with an adequate, if mediocre, education (even our best and brightest don't get the level of education that the best and brightest in other countries get). The sadness, however, is that it could be so much better -- if we properly focused priorities and organized schools for quality rather than as babysitting academies tied to the bus schedule.
Obligatory story:
A very good assistant principal was promoted to the principalship after the former principal retired. This guy was GOOD. He did not tolerate nonsense, but he had the patience of Job and great ideas for how to better our school, ideas that made sense (as vs. "fad of the day"). Anyhow, he decided that it'd be great if we could extend the school day in order to give both students and teachers more of a break between classes.
No could do. The Transportation Director blew a fuse. "You'll mess up all my bus routes!". At the end of the year, this great principal was demoted to 6th grade teacher for the crime of "rocking the boat" on this as well as on other issues (such as, his willingness to discipline kids whose parents were influential in the community).
That's what we're up against, folks!
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I have a certificate to teach Mathematics in the state of Louisiana, but even without that, if it came down to a choice of home schooling and sending my kid to the schools as they exist today, I know which choice I would make. Today's schools are utterly strapped by misplaced priorities, high turnover, and lack of ability to properly discipline children due to all the lawsuits that have been filed against schools that effectively discipline their students. Unfortunately, for most people home schooling is not a viable choice -- it requires altogether too much labor on the part of parents required to be in the labor force in order to make ends meet.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I think Woz's point was that children DO need to learn something about the internals of computers -- not just how to be a user of black boxes, but someone who knows what's inside the box. Maybe not in excrutiating detail, but enough to know WHY you don't want to run cute executables from people you don't know.
Of course, I suspect people will heed Woz's warnings about as much as they heeded Doctor A's warnings -- i.e., not much at all. -E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
If a kid's going to play Quake rather than go out in the schoolyard and see what a fight really feels like, he's going to grow up with misconcieved and possibly fatal preconceptions of just how fragile human existence really is. And what about all of those "educational" programs that show little kids outdoors, exploring these cartoon worlds.
I, for one, would have much preferred it if Quake had been around when I was eight years old so my classmates could have had something better to take their eight- and nine-year-old angst out on besides me. But I guess that's just me.
And, most important, anyone who sits in front of a computer for hours at a time knows that they are the most ergonomically incorect devices this side of a guillotine. My back, wrists, and eyes are all damaged on a continual basis from these unnaturaly devices. Do we want our kids growing up with bad posture and carpal tunnel syndrome? School desks and video game consoles at hmoe are bad enough - do we want them to think that bad posture and continuous back pain is the norm?
One wonders what millennia we live in when a computer is blamed for the incompetence of its user. Computers have never been ergonomically incorrect devices. Find yourself suitable desk and working environment and stop blaming Microsoft for your pain; for once it isn't their fault.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
I totally agree; and as computers tend to become more like `closed box', limited capability appliances, not only is the urge to experiment and tinker taken away, but so is the means; at least with most vehicles, one can get a manual, pop the hood, and see what does what and how. (iirc, though, even cars are tending to become a lot less easy to tinker around with..)
I'd like to hope the geeks of tomorrow are intrigued and curious by our present-day non-appliance computers, intrigued and curious enough to find out what they can do with them today, and dream of what they can do in the future..I also hope that dream isn't just a more powerful toaster.
Peace!
"Fundamentalist forces are undermining the integrity of liberal and democratic political structures."
My iMac has never actually crashed, but both IE and Netscape have hung on me more than once. The only app to shoot itself in the foot was Outlook Express probably because of a large attachment. Since I started using a PII 450 with WinNT at work I've never had a crash or hang. Due to company security policy I have to shut down the machine every night - which isn't really an issue because I'm not using it when I'm not at work.
my blog: good times, man, good times
Actually, I apologize. This was meant to be a reply to the post "Just some thoughts ..."
What influence does Wozniak have over whether the carbon UI or any other Apple proprietary stuff is Open Sourced? Apple isn't his company and he isn't even an employee of Apple. He may still be a stock holder but that doesn't entitle him to run the company as he sees fit, if he would even support Open Source in that manner. Steve basically said that the allure of Open Source software in his eyes was the ability to not support the big players.
Maybe Apple will Open Source the UI, but I doubt it very much, I don't see how they'd be a viable company if they gave away everything and the stock holders would thus react rather violently.
I think a better opportunity would be for Apple to make QuickTime available under Linux even if its via the LGPL (they don't own the Codecs which are the merit of QuickTime, they're owned by Sorensen, the parts which Apple does own, which is basically the file format which surrounds the data is as far as I know publically available)
you're neglecting a large part of what teachers do in a classroom - facilitating social interaction.
If the focus of relationships in the classroom ever disappeared to boxes on the desk, there might be an interesting struggle that might develop among our youth. Kids might be too young to express "the good old days when we got together and played games." Physical education, which may be considered as an advanced form of social interaction, in such a culture might be too intimidating and as an option.
Computers are great learning tools, but are no replacement for a good education from teachers and peers.
OK, I admit I was being a little... brash in saying that Woz agreed with me, but I still stand by my earlier conviction..
Now I agree that all video-games are not necessarily beneficial, but I think in general, games are created by geeks, people who think in a structured technical manner, and I think the games reflect that. Many computer games force people to think in a very logical fashion to solve the puzzles, or just to win. Computer games are difficult to win (that's why they're fun) and the majority of them aren't won through sheer quickness (although it helps often) but by problem-solving strategies.
I'm sure if you were to go back in time and ask my mother her opinion 10 years ago about computer games, I'm sure she would agree with you, and she might be thick-headed enough to think so now as well, but she's wrong. The first many years of my computer use were dominated by games. I didn't start becoming interested in the technical issues until much later, and it was my love of games that dominated that drive. I learned to program so I could write my own games. It's only once I realized how difficult game programming is that I gave up on that dream. But my point is that there was a very long period of time when it looked like I was wasting (VAST quantities of) time on games for no gain, but it got me where I am today.
My very first lesson in C was when I tried to contribute code to a MUD (an online RPG) that I played until 5AM every day (driving my mother crazy, and convincing her I needed a bedtime at 16...) My second lesson in C came when I became the maintainer of another multi-player game at my high-school. This might seem like an isolated case, but every single one of my friends who was a game-addict has also moved on to more technical matters. Just like the couch-potato is motivated to throw the football around with his buddies after watching a football game on TV, so computer-game players tend to start mucking around with their computers.
I'm not foolish enough to believe that everyone will be helped by computer-game interaction, but I think it has a more subversive and less noticeable affect than most people think.
Maybe I'm just bitter because all my parent's parenting efforts and society's educational efforts were misguided, and playing computer games was the best thing that ever happened to me.
What more can be said?
**>>BELCH
Every other one is a slave to Intel and Microsoft and competitive prices that don't allow for much R&D.
Not R&D in terms of computer architecture, true, but R&D is alive and well in terms of software and peripheral hardware. Look at the revolution 3dfx started.
**>>BELCH
> In America we seem to take education for
> granted and are very far behind other countries
> in regard to the quality of the education that
> our children receive.
The emperor wears no data. It's amazing to me that no one else has commented on this part of the question. There have been no assessments of quality of education which have ranked U.S. schools as "far behind" other countries, much less "very far behind". This is just false.
The only assessments which have ranked U.S. schools near the bottom are ones that have suffered from systemic errors, such as uncontrolled sample sets.
The failure of our schools is a matter of faith these days. It seems no one is interested in looking at data.
Woz, you're the greatest, thanks. Thanks especially for the Apple II, the first computer I actually got to touch. I had been coding on paper for 4 years (since I was 10) before meeting my first computer in high school.
I'd also like to thank Jobs for convincing you to box it up and sell it, because I came from a poor family and wouldn't have touched one for several more years if I'd had to buy all of the parts and assemble it from the schematics. It was good to have it encased in plastic and therefore palatable to public schools.
Best Wishes, and thanks again.
I never thought I'd be the one coming to BGates' defense, but... do you know how much money BG gave to charities last year? I read the other day that it was something like $16 BILLION!
:-)
/. "community"
I can smell the tax benefits from here
Sure his company may make crappy software, but I would say that he has done more for improving the world that we live in than, say, RMS, ESR, or any of the other idols of the
If they or I had that kinda money, I'd probably do the same. Point is, they/I don't have that much (although maybe they could give more to charity, but I'm not accusing them or anything. OTOH, I have no money, so the point is moot).
Woz
gzw@home.com
The MacOS is definitely not more stable than Windows NT (even though Apple has the proprietary hardware advantage, which helps), and as far as OS basics, it's way way behind (no real multitasking, goofy memory management, etc.) I'm a big fan of the MacOS, but let's view the company realistically.
Apple would likely have been much worse than MS had they become the monopoly OS. Doesn't anyone remember the FSF boycott of Apple products? There was a real reason for that.
The real question is: had Apple won, could Linux have even gotten started? An open and ubiquitous hardware spec was one of the most important aspects of early Linux. Look at how Apple was 10 years ago, not how they are today (when they're starting to slowly embrace open source).
Given their total control over both the software and hardware, and their eagerness towards lawsuits back then, I could easily imagine them crushing Linux back in '92 by setting the lawyers on them (like BSD).
I appreciated hearing from one of my early day heroes. I own an Apple ][+ and one of the great things about it was that the ROM's were listed in the manual as where the schematics. It let me understand what a computer is, back when I was 11 years old. Further the fact that it included 2 flavors of basic (I had a language card (16k!!!)) and the monitor(programming environment for writing code to memory with hex) and the miniassembler which actually let me use mnemonics, all in the inital box, was great. When the first Macintosh came out, I was very unhappy to see that the schematics were in a 50 dollar book, and there was NO programming language. While I do love the Mac, I have always felt that the difficulty programming it for the begining coder is prohibitive. Where Microsoft gave us Visual Basic, It took years to match that kind of easy novice development system. Microsoft Basic infact was the first language I bought for the Mac. It has always been my feeling that an OS provider had a responsibility to see that there were development tools available to get the greatest application library, and from the Apple][+ with 10000+ programs to the Mac which for a long time had one app in any given category, It is clear how long it has taken for the Mac to really gain market parity.
I do not think that Steve Wozniak has to prove his comittment to hobbyist computing and programming. I think his efforts there made alot of programmers out of kids in the 80's. Whether he has the power to influence modern apple towards his early and it seems current philosophies, he is a real hero in my book and he doesn't need to do a damned thing.
Maybe the Linux/m68k for Mac people have been living in a parallel universe or something, because Apple has shown itself highly uncooperative with people trying to port Linux to their hardware.
I find their experience highly inconsistent with Apple's recent lip service to open source. So which is it?
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
I agree with the main thrust of your argument completely, but I differ on the specifics.
I see the disinterest among teachers in computers as the ultimate result of a time in which bright young men were expected to be doctors, lawyers, or engineers, and bright young women were expected to be teachers, nurses, or housewives. The feminization of the teaching profession led to an environment where teachers (predominantly female, though I don't at all mean to indicate a personal gender bias) saw their profession as being in a sense, "seperate, but equal" from technology.
That view is changing, even among the "old guard" in the teachning profession. But the attitude of most of the people I talk to in this position is one of reluctance, bordering on dismay: they know they should learn how to use computers, possibly even that they must, but they fear and delay the process. Even worse, this situation leaves our schools open to school staff and faculty with "dangerously small" amounts of knowledge, more interested in personal glory than providing technology solutions that work for schools. (Fact: I personally know of a district who's technology director singlehandedly raised the local tax rate by requiring a T3 and two Cisco 7500s. For a high school. Not even a very big one, at that.)
(My credentials, not that you asked: two family members working in the public school system, two years as a systems administrator for an ISP providing access to several districts and private schools.)
There seems to be a distinct lack of the usual flame sessions that have become synonymous with Slashdot in this interviews responses. It's like a visit from the cool uncle who all the kids love, with all the siblings and cousins curtailing their usual ugly, bratty fighting as a result of the laid back, fun-loving attitude he brings to every situation. When's Uncle Woz gonna come back for another visit Rob? Huh? Huh?
The music is not in the piano -Clement Mok
This isn't so much a problem with teachers but with a lot of adults as well. My parents for example. They are afraid of computers. They both come from blue collar backgrounds where computers are something that steal your job, not a tool to increase your productivity. They go through the day blaming computers for why things dont work like they used to. A computer to them is something that sits at an insurance company or bank. It's evil. It's heartless.
:-)
Of course this isn't true (My father is figuring it out qucker than my mom now that they own a computer). My mom's biggest complaint is that she thinks the computer makes her feel stupid, it's absurd to us, but it's how she feels.
Worse yet schools dont exactly have quick turnaround. In high school I had the same english teacher as my father did. Same coach in PE. Same Economics teacher. Same Spanish teacher. The dean of students was my mom's history teacher. There were many more teachers that taught my parents that were still there, but I didn't have.
Eventaully these people will retire and the next generation of teachers will come in, more saavy in the ways of technology. Hopefully by the time I have kids
-Rich
*raises hand*
I cant put into words how exciting it was to first learn how to print my name on the screen or write a program to ask the user his or her name. Or to draw a low res picture of a house or a rocket. This was earth shaking stuff to a 9 year old in 1982. Thanks Woz.
-Rich
For a while, I believed that increasing teacher salaries would only attract more lousy teachers to the job, assholes who were only in it for the money. A couple of my worst teachers in HS were people who didn't give a rat's ass about teaching, but who fell into a teaching job for one reason or another. I did have a number of good teachers, however, that I felt should be rewarded, so I found myself rather conflicted on the matter. Once I got out into the real world, however, I met a number of people (and came to suspect that there were many more who felt the same way) who would have loved to teach if the pay wasn't so much lower than their other options. I now believe that there are a lot of people out there who would be great teachers, if only they thought they could earn a reasonable living that way.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
I recently read an article about living in Silicon Valley. The article focused on people with non-tech jobs, such as service jobs and teachers. Housing is so scarce and expen$ive that the Silicon Valley school district is considering a plan to build "project housing" for teachers. Their teachers cannot afford to live in the area, so the school district would offer housing as a job benefit.
What if the school district put that housing money into their teacher salaries? I don't know what the "solution" is. This are some crazy times and Silicon Valley is a surreal place sometimes..
cpeterso
God, I thought the guy who responded to my other message was fucking ignorant, now I discover he has a twin.
You're too fucking stupid to read, so I'll break it down into easy little concepts.
Teaching = Simple Repetetive Work + Hard Human Interaction
The simple, repetetive stuff, like showing for the hundredth time how to do a simple math problem, can be automated. That's why we have textbooks, to save a teacher from having to write this out every time, for every student.
Having a system which could do this dynamically, adjusting the course work to fit each student, and having infinite patience and the ability to show many different ways of tackling a problem, would free a teacher from having to do this. That would let teachers do the stuff they don't currently have time for, like helping kids with social development.
A question. Why do you launch into personal attacks like "your education (assuming you had any)" when you disagree with someone? If nothing else, it proves my point, that teachers are so busy with other things that they can't instill any manners, or interpersonal skills in people like you.
You know, this proves that some moderators just don't get it.
I get massively flamed, by someone who has his caps-lock key shoved so far up his asshole it affects his ability to read my post, which would inform him that I'm not saying anything like what he thinks I'm saying.
And he gets a +1 interesting.
For what? He didn't have a properly formed sentence in his post, let alone any coherently expressed ideas.
Then I reply, tell him to piss off and stop flaming, and coherently and rationally explain why I said what I did and how it isn't what he thought.
And I get -1 flamebait.
Ummmm
Hello!?!
The ranting, all-capslock people get the negative moderation, for they add nothing to the board.
I'm not even complaining about my moderation as much as the fact that his juvenile flamebait and venom was deemed worthy of a +1 at the same time as I got a -1. That's just clueless!
I personally think computers can replace teachers, for 95% of the teaching that teachers currently do. It's that last %5, where a teacher can take a difficult problem and break it down in different ways, until they find one the student can understand.
I see schools of the future having most people working on the computer, with a few teachers wandering around giving support, and helping with the problems that need human assistance.
Class sizes probably don't need to change. 30 kids aren't too many to handle, if you're not run ragged trying to teach them at the same time. This would free teachers up to do more social teaching, hopefully preventing the uglier aspects of school that all of us remember.
I assume you're saying that much software is mission-critical.
Sure. I'll accept that. I said 'few', meaning relatively few. Even most of the people I know who write code for embedded systems don't do it for anything terribly important. I mean, what's the worst failure in a cd player, or a VCR, etc.
I don't know what you think you're proving, with the detailed message, and the chip #s, and all. I didn't say there weren't critical systems, just that there were 'few' of them.
And, next time, could you be more polite about it. You could have said "In my experience... which contradicts what you said" instead of "..shows what you know", especially because I don't think you showed that I was wrong, just that 'few' means different things to both of us.
If the only way he can parody anything is with the caps-lock key and insane, insulting rants, then he's not doing anything very intellectual.
/. is worth even less. If his main contribution to discussions is to flame anything that moves, then he should just shut the fuck up.
/. people, implement /ignore, that way we can get rid of people like that.
Intelligent parody might be worth something, assholes with drunken rants, are not. It was done to death by 'comics' in the late 80s and it wasn't funny or witty then, a cut-rate parody by a moron on
Please
(OT:
Since the IP of ACs is logged, as is the account of people who use the 'post anonymously' feature, a way to ignore certain ACs would be nice. The software wouldn't have to actually let us know the IP or account, it could just ban the freaking retards, like Hot Grits boy, and your favorite mr. Caps Lock with the not-so-witty rants.}
MacOS is fairly stable for low-end usage. I only lock it up when I try to do more than one thing at a time. For an office worker, or a casual user, both it an Win9x are probably about the same.
I'd still want an open OS even if it wasn't MS I was getting away from. Apple's "Users are too dumb to need to see X" where 'X' was most things, attitude pissed me off. I'd have been looking for a replacement even sooner than with Dos/Win3.1 (which is the era I got into Linux in) because the Mac is even more restrictive.
An open OS is also a learning tool. You can view it as the same black-box, running a bunch of black-boxes, or you can look at the source and attempt to understand it. An open OS is *always* preferable to a closed OS, all else being equal.
I'm not sure I follow, Gates dosn't make that much as pure salary for being CEO, instaid is "net worth" is all tied up in microsoft.
As far as I can tell the majority of the billions of dolars he does get out of the system ends up going to charity, so in a sense, nearly all of his "income".
Or, to look at it another way, gates most certanly did *not* make billions of dolars of money in salary this year, and he gave away billions of his money. I don't know many people who give out 1000x there own income to charity.
This is not to say that I like bill gates in anyway, just that your post dosn't make much sense.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I had a Franklin Ace 1000 when i was growing up. It was an apple IIe clone, which my grandfather replaced with an IBM XT so he gave it to us. It had a command line, and a basic interpreter and not much else. I learned how to use the command line to launch my videogames, then how to manage files, use the word processor and spreadsheet and database. Then i learned how to program in BASIC so i could write an adventure game, then 6502 machine language so i could put sounds and fast animation into my programs.
The point is that children, if they are curious and determined, can overcome a command line in just a week or so. GUI's primary function is to provide support for legacy wetware (stpuid adults...) I remember my Franklin Ace 1000 fondly, and infact i still keep it running. I remember the day i took it apart and using the schematic and some knowledge of the console device, wired "open apple" and "closed apple" keys onto it so i could boot and use UCSD P-System and run my old Pascal compiler.
I think it would do kids a service if there were an operating system and computer available today to provide a simple, efficient, open, and functional platform, with an optional GUI (for the old people and the mindless television-degraded children).
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
A lot of people i know went off right after high school and took out thousands of dollars in loans to go off to college, and now they are back flipping burgers, or driving cabs, or whatever else. On the other hand some of them went of to school and got good interresting jobs, doing what they are good at and making decent money.
I stayed in town, didn't go to college, and got a decent job programming, working with a small team of people i like, and i have a much higher quality of life than i have ever had before. I think the real wisdom is to set kids free. I grew up with minimal supervision, and i explored what i was interrested in all by myself. My parents didn't try to stop me from spending 10+hours a day programming/tinkering, so now i made a marketable skill out of what was just a hobby then. My parents also didn't stop me from running around with the wrong crowd, being a punk, or any of that. They said that if i needed help from them i should ask, but they trusted my judgement. I think that the more people pamper their kids, and the more they push them, the less they learn to think for themselves, and therefore the less fit they are to be anything but preprogrammed mindless consumers once they leave the nest.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
I think if i ever have a kid i'll get him/her a simple computer that can be taken apart, put together, programmed, and expermemented with as easily as my old franklin. Maybe i'll be that one and same old franklin (i still have it, and it still works...)
I'll design and build a machine to spec if needed...
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
"While I don't think computers will ever replace
flesh and blood teachers, (A computer can't be as passionate about a subject as a real teacher, but it can be an excellent tool to reinforce teaching.) I do think that his support of computers in education is A Good Thing (tm)."
While its possibly true that a computer may not be able to eventually emulate passion, and hence replace passionate teachers. There are such a small portion of teachers that are passionate about there subject -(1/100 or fewer I would guess?), that the other 99/100 could be replaced without much difficulty.
The future role for teachers (10-20 years? I'm optomistic ) will likely be
1) education in subjects where teachers excel, and computers suck, namely in social interaction and group communication. Areas that are largely ignored formally in schools, but generally have the greatest impact on success in life. (For almost any definition of success...)
2) tutoring, counseling of special needs students. Roughly ten to fifteen percent (more I think, don't have the statistic on hand...) of students have handicaps which substantially impact learning ability. These range from learning disabilities (Dyslexia, Dyscalcia, Attention Defficit), genetic and developmental problems (Fetal Alcohol Effect (FAE is the widely spread, but lesser known cousin of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome) is the most common, as well as many others...), the emotionally handicapped (EH) and abused. There are also the common physical disabilities.
3) There is also the role that the WOZ mentions, that of glorified babysitter. The major changes that will be effected here are- substantial increase in the student teacher ratio- currently 20-30/1 will likely change to 200/1 or perhaps even as high as 400/1 with computers. (Think freshman college courses at major University's). There will also probably be a substantial reduction in administrative overhead.
4) There will probably be an increase in the use of teachers for special tutoring- athletic, academic, and artistic.
That's it for my predictions
LetterRip
I've been using the Mac since it first came out. It is relatively stable as compared to Windows (i.e. the OS iteself very rarely crashes). It seems like the larger the marketshare of a platform, the more unstable the user experience is. Sometimes it's due to corporate arrogance (like at Microsoft), but more often it's due to a larger number of low quality developers attracted to the platform for all of the wrong reasons.
The Mac was never intended for the hobbist. It was intended to be used by a someone who is relatively computer illiterate. Even still, I enjoy programming it and find that it's the best choice for me for other productivity.
Linux is a very inviting system for the hobbist, so I think that the Mac's popularity would not have had too much of an impact on Linux, except perhaps on hardware. Windows, however, probably never would have existed if the Mac had dominated the PC. OS/2 also probably would have had a better shot of living. (Hard to picture MS and IBM developing OS/2 as their last, best hope.)
-Jennifer
I don't know if it's the memory "padding" done by MacOS 9 or if the apps I run (including some of my own) are more polite, but the only time I've fully locked up my G3 is running the Netscape Client Customization Kit. That an app can crash the entire OS is unacceptable... but if I had the equivalent of "uptime" on my Mac, I'd have gone about 10 days of Netscape, Unreal, Q3 Demo, BBEdit, NiftyTelnet, et cetera since last I booted, which was, IIRC, to add a second video card and display. Interpret that as you will, but uptime on my Macs and my BSD and Linux boxen (which, granted, serve a few more SSI pages and CGI's than the Macs ;) is about equal.
His point is basically that while computers are nice, "real life" can and should be even nicer, but that we are losing track of those real life pleasures. He may be a little too hard on the electronic beasties, but it's a refreshing and necessary antidote to e-hype.
For many (perhaps most) of us technophiles who become deeply involved with computers, there comes a time when we realize - as a friend of mine put it - that a real flower is infinitely more interesting than the best hi-res JPEG image of a flower. We have to find the balance where using computers and the net is enhancing, rather than replacing, our life experience.
As for computers in the classroom, they have their place there. But they should be though more of as replacing textbooks than replacing teachers.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
When the Mac first came out, I loved the GUI, but it was a shock and a disappointment to realize that there was no straightforward way to explore the internals. At the same time, the internals were a lot more complicated; the early Mac programming manual was something like 10 volumes.
I'm wondering whether 12-year-olds today are learning Linux internals, or if that's just too much to ask of even a very smart 12-year-old. If not, maybe Apple should start manufacturing the Apple ][ again, so that young people can learn low-level programming on a manageable scale.
--
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was spotted walking over to the exhibit hall after the speech. "I cried," said Wozniak, in reaction to Jobs' decision. "It felt just like the old days, with Steve making announcements that shook my world."
Asked if he saw himself returning to the fold in Apple's Cupertino headquarters, Wozniak said, "Well, not really. But who knows?"
Whether or not he's referring to OS X or to the new site stuff is unclear. It should be noted that the reviews and cards sections are largely available for everybody; only the tools and certain customization sections of the cards require the Mac OS, unlike (for example) Intel's WebOutfitter service for P-IIIs, which requires both a P-III and Windows 98.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
I don't like the fact that the hardware is closed, but Woz does have a very valid point that Apple is more free to innovate with hardware than the PC world.
:-)
Be aware that this sounds very similar to the MS argument that they should control the protocols on the network, so they are free to inovate and control things for us. What the PC lacks is not a single, focused mini-monoply (like Apple), what the PC lacks are standards (like the Internet).
The RFCs of the Internet provide a complete specification for something. It's completely optional, but it's in a corporation's best interest to support it -- other companies have. USB was a standard (like the FTP protocol RFC), so it was shoved into every chipset (Irix has Ftpd, OpenBSD has FTPd, Linux has FTPd, etc). Once the dominant OSes began to support it (lots of FTPds running with interesting files), then the devices (FTP client applications) appear as is by magic, and are free to compete on their own merits. (Alright, RFCs are not standards, but it fits my example very well)
Field of Dreams told us, "if you build it, they will come." The Internet taught me, "if it is a standard, and it has a reference implementation, it will thrive." So -- you want easy GUI on PC side? Make a cheap GUI that works mostly, and it will thrive. Design a simple printer that can be hooked to one of the ports, and you will have desktop publishing. Make a simple reference browser (Mosaic), and everyone will licence it or make another one. If you want cheap 3D, make a simple 3D board that has some important support for standards (OpenGL), etc.. And if you want a cheap Unix work-alike, write a mini-kernel that kinda supports things, posts it as 0.01, and make sure people can muck with it
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I noticed that Woz referred to RISC designs as an advantage for the Mac..I would have too, if not for the ARStechnica article about RISC/CISC...which makes me believe that we are in a post RISC/CISC era. The G4 has a RISC history, but it has more instructions that some CISC chips! And I'm a Mac user to boot..
t ml
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/risc-cisc/rvc-1.h
Risc vs Cisc
MANY teachers are afraid to use computers. Even the ones who realize that children really need to learn about computers, and that computers won't replace teachers are afraid. They are afraid of the technology and of looking 'dumb' in front of their students. Several times now my wife has had to demonstrate to teachers how much easier a word processor is to a typewriter. She has saved several teachers dozens of hours by showing them that they don't really have to re-type their 15 page report on an old typewriter for every revision and proof reading.
It is very sad to say, but too many (I'm not saying all) but too many teachers are not intelligent or ambitious people. They are afriad of learning new ideas. They are the people who get C's in high school math and science.
Just "loving to work with children" like many teachers do, is not enough in my book. I want teachers who want to learn, expand their minds, and share that knowledge with their students. Unfortunately our current system does not provide the funds to attract these types of people and they are instead snatched up by big companies and universities.
Just as a disclaimer, I do realize that there are some VERY EXCELLENT teachers out there. I know several of them personally. I just wish there were more.
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
This all may explain why I despise Microsoft. Their software design is still catching up to what we were using back then. DEC introduced their 16 bit PDP 11 in 1970. These days we're still having to do 16 bit thunking in our MS Software, while DEC's had a full 64 bit archetecture for years.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I want to know how he manages this bit, a true skill.
Source:Jim Carlton's Apple history book. Boy, that's a downer. He published it right before Apple's current change of fortunes...
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
It's good to see someone as Woz interviewed here on Slashdot. And it was even better to read his answers, because it's very rare to see such depth in these days. Everything is relevant - but some point are really precious.
First of all, it's clear that Woz really believes in Open Source. But I found it strange because his answer on Open Source wasn't so enthusiastic as I thought it would be. Seems that Open Source is so natural to hime that he misses some things. For instance, at several points he does mention the value of information for research. It's related to his beliefs about teaching and personal computing. And this is one of the main advantages of the Open Source approach. So it seems that Open Source for him is much more important that even he realizes - up to the point of saying that his Apple ][ 2000 would be completeley documented, hardware and software.
Also it was funny to see his line about designing computers for the average person - he took himself as an example. Steve Wozniak is not an 'average person' - he's way up above the mark - yet somehow he does know what it takes to make something usable for the masses. Ideas that we take for granted - for instance personal computers with keyboards - were perfectly clear for him yet nobody else seemed to catch at that time.
In the end, it was a very good article. It shows that you can have your ideology, live it, and not have an inflated ego as a result. Woz humbleness should ashame some self proclaimed Open Source stars (thansk god he's not the only one...)
And I have a degree in Computer Science.
Yes, computers are not being used properly in the schools. But it's not always the teacher's fault. If the software is not related to the curriculum that teachers are required to teach, or if there's no instructional materials for teachers to know what software relates to what topics in the state curriculum, what are teachers supposed to do? Most teachers eventually, on their own, figure out something to do with the computers, but without leadership it's being done on an inconsistent and haphazard basis.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I started using a computer at home in around first grade. It was a TRS-80 my dad brought home from the office. You could just flip it on and it was instantly working, ready for your BASIC programs to be written. Shortly later, we got a C-64 which was even better. All I ever did was fool with this things, and I had a great time. I credit those machines with my career today at the age of 23.
I loved to figure out how the operating systems on those machines worked. I read all of the low level stuff I could get my hands on. I learned assembly language around fourth or fifth grade. I remember writing programs on graph paper in class, hand assembling them to opcodes and running home to type them in. It was fun.
Now, computers are everywhere. Few families don't have them. But look what they do with them. Surfing the web and playing games, that's about it. I feel _sorry_ for kids these days who don't have the advantages I had of what now seems like a crappy computer. I learned logic and programming skills from those original computers and they sparked my interest. If I were a kid today and had a Wintel box, I don't know if it would have inspired me the way those machines did so long ago.
Kids have forgotten the value of a library because they can just browse the internet.
And I think that's beautiful. A library represents everything which is proprietary and wrong with the information distribution of the world. A library is a closed system where people with cards can get books which have been selected by the few to be available to the many. And the books in publication are those which have been published by those with the relatively rare capacity to publish a book. This is a self-preserving system which has no interest in bringing new, challenging ideas into the system.
The internet has no such structure. Anyone can publish anything, and be heard without the approval of a third party who has no business interfering in the affairs of readers. This directly supports people with challenging or unpopular ideas, because they can be heard, too, in this medium. Not to mention the technical benefits of the internet over a library: access from any point at any time, powerful searching technology, the practicality of information being updated in a timely fashion, and the existance of a forum for discussion and disagreement about the content. It's far more difficult to access a library from Guam at 2:00am. It's far more difficult to find a book with a [computerized] card catalog than it is to use Google. Making comments in the margins of a book if you disagree with the author is usually frowned upon, and the opportunity for an interactive discussion is nil.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
I just picked up a book by Cliff Stoll (Known for the cracker non-fiction whodonnit Cuckoos Egg) in which he argues that Computers DO NOT belong in schools in that they are sold as the quick and easy way to a great education, where they only serve as a distraction from the ultimate purpose of educating. A good read, and I'd recommed it to all techies as a viewpoint not often considered. I wish I had it on Monday and would have thought to pose this question to Woz, as it would be interesting to know if he'd heard the arguments involved, considered them, and how he would insure that technology does aid in education and not become a distraction...
One noted example from the book is a school district where the students loved emailing people from foreign countries, while 11 students who were going to the school district from different countries were completely ignored.
I'd recommend this book highly.
.02
Brian Seppanen
seppanen@bresnanlink.n.et
Brian Seppanen
Minister of Information and Propaganda
Area 54 The Secret Government Disco Labs Provo
You fool!
When we built The Woz as part of 'Project Ubergeek', we did it right. Underneath his caring exterior is a pure rubidium exoskeleton encasing the most advanced robotics that the US army has ever developed. He can take a direct hit from a nuclear warhead and still keep teaching and designing boards. He cannot and will not be stopped until we have achieved our agenda of...
Hang on, I seem to have forgotten why we did this...
It'll come to me eventually...
--Shoeboy
Hmm.. but the problem isn't that the teachers need to be trained. The problem is that we need teachers who are as enthusiastic about learning with their computers as the kids are.
Right now, training is the last thing that I'd want to give a teacher who has to teach kids about computers. Whenever someone's just taught something, they tend to teach it to other people the same way it was taught to them. ie; you use the same crutches (memory mneumonics, etc.) that your teacher used.
The students, on the other hand, will be more interested in endless experimentation. You'll have kids messing around in the control panel, trying to figure out how to change the colors.. you'll have others messing with the command line options on command line programs.. These are the sorts of things that kids like to do when learning something like this. And it's also the way they learn best.
So what happens when you've got a bunch of teachers, who were trained one way trying to teach a bunch of kids, who are inclined to try to learn another way? A disaster. The kids will tend to have a difficult time paying attention; they'll wander around, trying out everything in sight. What's this do? How about this? Ooo, this is neat..
It's not long before the teacher loses it.
See, training and learning are two totally different things; training is whenever you force a crutch on the student to help them speed up the learning process, at the cost of them being less intuitive with the material. Learning is whenever you attempt to fully understand the material, ("zen") at the expense of time.
That's not to say that training is bad; I'm just saying that by training the students, you're forcing them to use the same crutches that their teachers use.
Problem is, the teacher's crutches may seem especially stupid to a kid. The recycle bin in the upper left-hand corner of the screen? Why? Let's move that recycle bin to the lower right-hand corner. It's still a recycle bin, still does the same thing. But lookie, it goes here now. And if I move this over here, and this over here.. yes, now everything's perfectly organized!
What happens, though, if the teacher was using "third icon from the top left" as their mneumonic for where the recycle bin is? This is the crux of the problem, you see. The teacher was using this crutch, and the student just pulled it out from under them. Two things can happen at this point; (a) teacher berates the student for doing something they're not supposed to, because they're not using the same crutch that they are, or (b) the teacher recognizes that this is another learning opportunity, and goes with the flow.
All the teachers I've ever had, who've just gotten off of computer training, are of the (a) variety. It's very rare that you'll see one of the (b) variety. The problem is that in order for the teacher to be this openminded, they have to be able to give time to each and every one of their students. And with class sizes what they are nowadays, one on one interaction with students is definitely not high on the list of priorities for teachers.
So I guess it all comes down to this; books and teachers versus teachers and computers. Which is better? I'd say there is no better. The problem we face is the learning curve of the computer. It's a lot like the learning curve for interacting with other people; it takes a long time to figure it all out, and the rules don't always carry over from one entity to another.
You see, we could dump the requirement of using a computer onto a parent---but that's not right, because using a computer requires the use of the alphabet. But use of the alphabet is taught in school, so that has to be taught first... The problem is a chicken/egg problem, because if the child knew how to use a computer, then the task of teaching with a computer is greatly simplified.
So should the school or the parent teach the child how to use a computer? That's what I think's the real question we need to be asking.
James
Woz's take on schools is interesting. In the wake of Katz's HellMouth stories it seems like most people on /. probably assume schools are going the way of the dinosaur, it's interesting to see a different view.
// was very successful, mainly because it was open. There were a hundred times more addons for the A2 than for the C64 for instance. But the collapse of the A2 and Mac marketshare was largely based on clones, or the lack thereof.
// (and much of PCs today) could have been made impossible if some company back then had patented the use of a keyboard to convey information to a computer, or a device to continually refresh dynamic ram, or similar. Amazon's 1-click patent is about like patenting 'Return' to enter a line of text. It's getting dangerous to innovate today, patents are being used as weapons to force huge payouts, something garage startups can't survive.
If computers ever get to the point where you can learn 95% of your schoolwork from one, not just the rote work, but the creative, and the whys behind things, then it'll make schools drastically cheaper. A teacher is overwhelmed now with even ten kids to teach; they either have to teach slowly, or leave kids behind. And it's not the dumb ones who get left behind, it's the ones with the different questions. If 9/10 kids don't understand how to multiply fractions, and one kid is interested in finding the LCM in the least ammount of work, guess who's going to get the teacher's attention. Being able to just nursemaid children while the teaching is being done, at their own pace, is likely going to be a revolution. If nothing else, I think grades are going to be a thing of the past. They were useful when you needed to cluster people together with a teacher, but when their teacher is net accessible, and on any terminal in the school or at home, you'll be able to learn at your own pace, being grouped with peers for emotional reasons.
I like the idea of making companies liable for products that don't work as advertised. Not that programmers should be sued for every bug in a non-essential program, but software should do what it says on the box, much the same as you'd expect a frying pan to be watertight, or a CD to be round.
I think we need a Raplh Nader for this industry. Not some arrogrant fat-cat looking for news coverage by advocating government interference in something they don't understand, but an insider, someone who understands the industry, attempting to regulate it in ways that are good for the consumers, above all else.
Few computer programs are in mission-critical roles, like the brakes on a car, but people still need to be able to trust labels. If it says 'x', it should provide 'x', not 'x if y' or 'x maybe'.
It's good to see that Woz isn't depressed by outcome of the apple// and Apple's (in my eyes) spiral from leader to barely counting in the industry. Their success and failure was strongly tied to their policies on information as property. The Apple
I'm suprised though that Woz isn't more anti-patent, considering the Apple
It's nice to see that Woz is still where he was in the late 70s though, trying to bring computers to the people. I got into computers thanks to him, and I owe him a lot. My way of paying that back is to support all the open standards I can, GPL, Linux, etc, so that kids will always have computers as computers to tinker with, not just locked up set-top boxes.
A lot of that is social, or will soon be irrelevant.
Who cares about running executables with an OS smart enough to spawn a restricted 'shell' to run the Frog-in-a-Blender of the week in? This is something that's only a problem because of the complete lack of security in Win9x and MacOS, the two most common user-level OSes.
People don't forward around warning in real life, or at least not to the same level as online, partly because they can't just hit 'cc' and select a whole list, but partly because 'real life' isn't something new and scary where they suspect nasty things. When students are raised with computer, and know what they can and can't do, this won't be a problem.
As for open software...
I got into programming because I could list the programs on my school's Apple//. It wasn't just a black box. At the time, it might as well have been, because basic looked like proverbial greek to me, but it gave me an incentive to learn. Without open source (in the form of unencrypted/uncompiled basic programs) I wouldn't have had the incentive to learn, because I wouldn't have known how easy it was/is.
If kids use Win9x/WinNT, everything is compiled and closed, from the OS to the programs. They can't examine any of it. With an open OS, GNU/Linux, or something else later, they'll have access to the source, and compilers, and all the tools it took to write the thing in the first place. And in any decent OS, you can tinker all you want without bringing it down.
slightly off-topic, but this is a good opening..
It is very sad to say, but too many (I'm not saying all) but too many teachers are not intelligent or ambitious people. They are afriad of learning new ideas. They are the people who get C's in high school math and science.
This is why I think that teacher's salaries should be doubled across the board. Take the money from other "programs", standardized testing, and yes, even some infrastructure. Schools don't need to buy new computers (esp. elementary schools) There are vast seas on old machines, and will be many more soon, that don't have the horses to run the latest software (esp Win2K), these can be donated to schools where the school IT man. (every school should have at least one) gets them up and working. The salary doubling part is to help make teaching a more competitive field. I'd love to teach, but I can't live like a hermit to do it. You do find exceptional people that can make the sacrifice, but they are few and far between, the majority of teachers (and this comes from my brother a HS Bio. teacher) are people who never figured out what to do, took it up "until something better comes along", or use it to complement a spouses income (i.e. just a "job", not a career). By subsidizing the teachers directly you could make it a viable career option for above-average folks and truly gifted sharers of knowledge.
The education system in this country is poor (unless you spend serious cash), but what can you expect for an industry in a capitalistic system that never generates revenue? Our normal "market" economics will NEVER right the educational system here, it must be treated as an entirely different entity. A good place to get the money would be from our prison system and a good way to do that would be to get rid of a bunch of stupid laws (possession of controlled substnaces springs instantly to mind) I'd rather live in a learning state than a police one.
/End Friday Rant.
+&x
Isn't part of the Linux hype the fact that it is something that is not MS?
:-)*
Ok, going back to when I first tried Linux...
I used DOS. Windows was something that ran Windows apps. I used it only for word processing. I spent the rest of my time in DOS, learning things about it (Thank you Peter Norton, for allowing me to see deeper into my computer). I learned assembly language, first used the internet (thank you Telemate).
Back then Internet for me was ftp and telnet. I spent most of my time downloading software and mucking about with it, hoping to learn something new. I kept noticing a directory called "linux" on many ftp sites and decided to enter one. I was amazed. A whole tree of apps I never heard of, and tons of text files. I downloaded some text files and read them, finding out that the easiest way to install Linux was by using a "distribution." In the "distributions" directory there were a couple of directories, SLS and Slackware (I think there was another one as well, but I'm kind of fuzzy). Completely randomly, I went into the "SLS" directory and downloaded the installation instructions. I then downloaded boot and root disks, as well as the "A" set.
Then suddenly, I backed up everything on floppy disks and parititioned and formatted my 100MB drive. 20 MB Linux, 5 MB swap, 75 MB DOS. I didn't go to sleep that night. I installed SLS, then DOS.
I read a vi tutorial, learned bash, read all the documentation I could get my hands on, learned how to compile programs in Linux, installed Slackware, and never looked back.
It wasn't MS problems that got me into Linux, simply boredom.
I was too young to have been able to get into Apples like I see many people here have, but I think Linux provided a similar enthrallment to someone who was born a little too late.
I hope that answers your question
Anyway, estate taxes are only relevant to the wealthy - you can pass up to $675,000 tax-free. And in our system, the wealthy usually get that way through government backing (the state creates artificial entities such as corporations that concentrate wealth, and defines and enforces artificial property rights on land and (saints preserve us) ideas); so for the state to take back wealth it created for you in the first place is hardly a tragedy.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Sigh..
--
Deepak Saxena
Deepak Saxena
"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers" - Picasso
Steve Wozniak is cool because his last name can be shortened to Woz. The other stuff is secondary. Check out the derivations:
1) Wozzup man !
2) Wozzie
3) Wozzinator
4) Wozster
5) Woz's Happening
etc.
Thanks for the nice interview, Woz !
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
I don't think it has anything to do with the Great Jihad against Microsoft.
:)
I'm now accustomed to thinking about everything like an economist, so here is my economic analysis (kinda summarizing what other posters have said).
Microsoft had a monopoly in operating systems. When you got a computer, there was DOS for "free". Of course, the OEM was paying for it, but you couldn't really tell.
The monopoly caused market failure. A competitive market would have seen many different OS manufacturers in a monopolistic competition. What monopolistic competition means is that each OS supplier tries to target a slightly different market. To some extent, this *was* true - you had MS going after the business market, Apple going after the home & publishing markets, Commodore not really going for anything, but somehow stumbling onto the desktop video, home & hacker markets.
Now, the thing is, Apple & Commodore machines were more expensive because they weren't based on "open standard" hardware. Apple kept the designs closed, and while Amiga designs were published, only Commodore could supply the Amiga chipset.
To make a long story short, there was a market failure in that no company supplied an OS as "cheap" as DOS for hackers to the "open architecture" x86 PC market.
Even if Mac was open & had a competitive hardware market, MacOS *does*not* target hackers!!!! There would be a few of us dicking around on DOS, Amigas, and, yes, I'd bet some insightful person would release a hardcore technically advanced OS for the open M68K Macintosh hardware market. (Heh but maybe it would have been "ARP"
So no, I don't think hackers would flock to Mac OS if it was open.
We're not going to have a sane society (as in less paranoid and less ignorant of its own flaws and strengths) until we separate advancement from socialization. And yes kids do need to socialize. They're human beings. They're in school so they can someday be successful human beings. They're not there to stroke some teacher's ego. They're not there to become productive members of society. Society is us; get used to it. Our ancestors are responsible for the mess we're dealing with. And we are responsible for the mess our kids will have to deal with. I don't want to even hear about kids saying Sir or Ma'am when they should be asking, "How come the text is so confusing, it says in my Physics book that reflection is caused by a wave reflecting at the other end on a rope." The difference between a kid who can succeed and one who can't is the one who can spot garbage in a page full of text, or even more challenging, a page full of colorful graphs and charts. You can't get that kind of skill if kids don't have the confidence to challenge their teachers. All you get is the fool getting Kool Aid points for saying I love Kool Aid in public five times in a row and then sending a taped recording to the company.
The people calling for the end of recess periods and breaks and the ones segregating kids into different special groups are completely wrong about their approach, and some don't even care.
If we separate advancement from socialization but still need to have it happen in the same place, then one or both of these have to become transparent. The people asking for uniforms, dress codes, and rules on top of rules, aren't just in denial and seriously don't get it, assuming they're not doing it on purpose as some are.
Learning should not stop period. Dividing time for learning and playing is at best masturbation, and at worst a way to keep future generation from being fully aware of their potential.
The goal of education should be to maximise potential, to teach kids individuality, to teach them not only how to fend for themselves but the value of being independent and unchained from the wolves running rampant. Most of all they should be taught how to to recognize those "wolves" and handle them with good judgment, as opposed to the uniqueness crap they sort of teach, but then penalize kids for.
The day a kid says, "I don't care about being special, consoled, comforted, but only somewhat supported and encouraged," is a day you can hope for the world to take a positive turn.
So what's this got to do with computers? Just take a look at the potential kids have when they go exploring the Net learning Java, HTML, C++, MIDI for crying out loud, poetry of all kinds and most important of all, freedom, to kids who only write papers and cut and paste pictures from a degenerate encyclopedia like Encarta which has no more content than to hype up the future which in reality is in dire straits.
The choice you have is: a kid who becomes a CEO at 17 or one who ends up flipping burgers, and if you think a college education prevents that, YOU ARE SERIOUSLY IN D-E-N-I-A-L.
Which one of those kids is more prone to pr0n breaks (pun intended)? And equally important, which one having seen pr0n can behave in a socially responsible manner, and which one will be so media addicted by Encarta, Saturday cartoons, and TGIF, that the sight of a fraction of the explicit content the other kid was exposed to would make them into serial killers?
If that destroys, maligns, or in any other way disturbs your rosy simplistic picture of the world, you're welcome. And as hard as it may be for some to accept, all the above statements are based on the same logic and are consistent.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I think that computers made great educational tools back when Woz designed them, but that they've become pretty much televisions with keyboards. Or at least that's the impression a schoolkid is likely to get these days.
I consider myself very lucky to have gone to elementary shool in a "backward" place like North Carolina, because as late as 1986, the state's shool computer labs still were filled with Apple ][s. And our "computer class," in the "gifted and talented" school, consisted of just one (that's right, one) day (that's one day--total, ever) of making the Turtle move. And the only way to make the Turtle move was by writing a BASIC-ish program telling it where to go. No mouse, no animated nothin'--just tell it what to do, type RUN, watch it do it. And by the end of that one day, a couple of us had made the Turtle do some cool shit. I wrote what today would be called a screensaver--a kind of butterflying perpetual motion thing that impressed the teacher a lot. But not because it was cool-looking (which, for the time, it was). It was because I'd applied reason to manipulate an utterly unfamiliar device semi-competently. And I learned something else that no one I know who went to a less impoverished shoool did: Computers are tools that do what you (yes, even you, first-day user) tell them to do.
I didn't go on to a career in computer science--though I use computers for all my work in music, art, and writing/publishing, and for some goofing off, too--but I did recently think of something my computer doesn't do that I wish it would, and instead of waiting for it to figure out how by itself, I went to the bookstore, bought the hardcore programming books, and...well, I'll get back to you in a year or so.
A lot of my friends, however, went to "good" schools. Windows everywhere. "Educational software" (silly games) up the wazoo. Used computers every day of their pubescent lives. And they can't do a damned thing with them, but they like to "watch" them. Everyone here knows the type; this doesn't need to get insulting.
But this has gotten too long, so, the point is:
I kind of disagree with Woz, though I admire the guy like almost no one else. Artist and tool, the former using logic and reason to manipulate the latter--that's the level on which a child should meet a computer. Maybe later they can be friends.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Wow.. this man is truly impressive. I had never really realized the depth of passion and forethought he has/had in the industry, and in creating what we now take for granted. a hearty THANK YOU! to him, and to /. for teaching me something about someone who is (now) one of my heroes. what a guy. (no sarcasm was used in this post)
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
I think you may be undervaluing some aspects of the physical library that go beyond the mere organization of information. Libraries include a social aspect, for one. Having a place that's just for reading says something important about the value of information and education in our society. Also, encountering other people who take information seriously has a strong benefit.
In addition, the physical and logical organization of a library is powerful. We separate fiction from non-fiction (as best we can), which the net doesn't even attempt to do. We find related information nearby, but there's no search engine I've seen that understands how optics and quantum mechanics are "close" to each other. And, finally, we meet people who are interested in the same things we're interested in, which is a little hard to do with search-voyeur functions.
Finally, libraries have the physical persistence that bits lack. Perhaps, someday, there won't be such a thing as pages that disappear and servers that are recycled. Until then, you can be confident that sufficiently popular work was preserved in a library. And you won't have to worry about never being able to find the first version of something that's now in its twenty-third.
One last thing: serendipity. The library is likely to have "recent acquisitions" section, and a pile of books waiting to be reshelved. These allow you to discover things you didn't know you wanted to know.
I worked fairly extensively with educators,(K-12) on a pilot program on PC's in every classroom etc. The main reason I see why the efforts failing is that the kids know more about technology than the teachers and the teachers feel outgunned. This is really too bad.
As those teachers retire and newer ones are hired (or not, depending on whether your community believes in passing school levies), this problem should diminish, slowly, iff the new teachers understand that the computer is nothing more than another tool to be put to good use.
If the computer as a used tool is ever going to have success in the classroom:
1. The teachers need to be trained better
2. The courses need to be better defined and managed
3. The government and other entities need to get out of the way and just let it happen. Get over or better manage the "The kids might see pron" Crap
4. Business needs to step in and help with funding and help build the infrastructure. These kids will be their employees soon.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Woz (of course) makes a good point regarding teaching of Linux/*BSD. Before you get to that you actually need to teach computer science. OS design is only a small area of the discipline, albeit an important and (currently) popular one.
I don't think most children will benefit greatly from being taught with free software as opposed to Mac or Windows programs. Obviously taxpayers and future programmers and OS designers will benefit. But most students are going to be using computers as tools, sealed boxes, and they need to learn different lessons. Like don't forward the hoax virus warnings you get in your email. Don't run cute executables from people you don't know. And don't believe everything you read on Slashdot, even if it is from a karma whore with a +1 bonus.
--
E_NOSIG
This gets me to thinking what would have happened if Apple had not made the marketing mistakes it did and MacOS became the mainstream OS (instead of Windows)?
MacOS is seemingly more stable that Windows (I'm not entirely sure, I've never done anything that has crashed a Mac, though), so if MacOS were the #1 mainstream OS right now, would Linux be doing so well?
Isn't part of the Linux hype the fact that it is something that is not MS? Dont' get me wrong, I love Linux, but would we have all flocked to it if the mainstream OS was MacOS? It's hard to say, but I think not.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
In announcing the new suite Wednesday, Jobs said the company had looked at the fact that it owned proprietary software on both ends of a Web visit to the site. "We realized we could take unfair advantage of the fact," Jobs said.
The panel generally said the approach just made it more compelling to buy a Mac for consumers seeking Internet access, and that Apple was smart to leverage it.
I would have liked to have asked Woz what his take on this would be. We all know how much we love pages that need AOL or internet explorer or some other non-universal technology.
With Microsoft slowly going the route of open source (also this) (it's only disclosed source but it's a start), I wonder if this is a wise move or a fatal mistake. I only wish I had known about this in time.
No Zen is good zen
It seems odd to me that on one hand, Steve was saying that varying manufatures of hardware/software lead to systems that are less stable (ie x86 systems). How can he then turn around and say that open sourced software will be better? Wouldnt this lead to a less homogenous os/system? Just wonderin' -Chris
I think it's important before questioning mainstream qualities of an OS that you remember how it became mainstream. One of the reasons that Microsoft was so successful is that it didn't have to worry about hardware. It just made software and let other people worry about selling the actual computers. It just made sure that its software would run on anything sold. Microsoft didn't become mainstream because of anything that it did. It became mainstream because of the way in which PCs were sold.
Apple, on the other hand, maintained vigorous control of everything and so you didn't have fifteen companies selling and touting something that was essentially the same, flooding the market with a very similar product. While this led to tighter integration of the OS and the hardware and more controlled innovation, it didn't actually do a good job at selling a product, which is what one needs to become 'mainstream'.
I think that if Apple had become mainstream, we either would've needed to have an industry in which clones weren't sold (highly unlikely) or Apples themselves would've been cloned, and then I think you would've seen a degradation in product similar to what we have with Windows. Then, I think our empathy would've been just as great to Apple.
And remember, the Macintosh for years wasn't exactly an open system (and it still isn't for that matter, despite recent changes like Darwin). I think a lot of the fascination with Apple in the past five years is for the same reason that we currently obsess over Linux: it's a challenge to Microsoft. If you look at the MacOS before version 8, it was total and utter crap, despite it's GUI. I can honestly say that I would receive at least two calls a week from my father about his Macintosh crashing or locking up or getting a weird error. I never had those sorts of problems with my Win95 machine.
But then again, I think that Apple's strength has always been innovating, and with innovation comes trials and tribulations as you 'feel' solutions out. Certainly, the makes Apple a bit more gallant than Microsoft, which has the same trials implementing what aren't exactly new features.
But, replying to the original post, yes, I think we would've disliked Apple as much as we dislike Microsoft, but then again, Apple most certainly would've become a far different company from what it is now.
This is definitely one of the best interviews so far -- it touches on technology, social and legal implications, and even some history.
It's nice to read from someone who doesn't complain, doesn't blame people for anything -- he just says what he'd like to happen, where folks fell short, and how we can step up to the plate.
So of course being cynical, i have to notice that it's kinda like politics -- anyone you'd want to be president is too smart to run for office. Similarly, i guess there's no reason for Woz to WANT to be involved in the daily rat race of tech companies, but it sure would be better for us all if he were.
Has anyone noticed that Woz and Paul Allen, the two "second-string" guys who actually did all the work, are the ones who are out there making the world a better place while Bill and Steve fight over pissing rights? I guess it's like Jimmy carter -- he's the best "ex-president" the country has ever had!...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
(Why should you listen to me? All of the jobs I held while in school, from high school through college, were technology-related jobs working for the school itself. My mother is currently the director of education technology for the city school system, and she and I talk shop when I go over to visit (which hasn't been for a while, sorry Mom). I'm very familiar with how technology is viewed at different stages of the cirriculum.)
While he is correct in saying that the educational software needs to be as friendly as possible, there is a more serious problem that, frankly, Woz and you and I can't do much about. The teachers in early education need to understand, use, and appreciate the computer as well.
Currently, far, far too many teachers view computers as either:
- A glorified Game Boy, good for nothing but entertainment.
- A replacement.
I won't tell any horror stories here because I've been typing all day long and I'm tired, but the current generation of teachers are not happy about the computer "taking over" their classrooms. As those teachers retire and newer ones are hired (or not, depending on whether your community believes in passing school levies), this problem should diminish, slowly, iff the new teachers understand that the computer is nothing more than another tool to be put to good use. It can't replace them. (No, "iff" isn't a typo.)We'll get very limited returns on improved software if the people being taught to introduce that software belittle it.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I've always admired Woz for his commitment to computers in education. While I don't think computers will ever replace flesh and blood teachers, (A computer can't be as passionate about a subject as a real teacher, but it can be an excellent tool to reinforce teaching.) I do think that his support of computers in education is A Good Thing (tm).
Also, his comments on the Macintosh are extremely interesting. With MacOS X, I have a feeling that Mac may yet manage to flourish - especially if they can leverage all the software available for BSD/Linux, etc... I don't like the fact that the hardware is closed, but Woz does have a very valid point that Apple is more free to innovate with hardware than the PC world.
All in all, a very enlightening interview. Thanks Woz for your comments!
It's great to give kids a head start on life by intriducing them to the world of computers and the internet, but no one really considers the consequences of taking kids from their active lives and introducing them to these pseudo-lives in computers. Computers are NOT good teachers when it comes to things like violence, play-time, and human interaction. If a kid's going to play Quake rather than go out in the schoolyard and see what a fight really feels like, he's going to grow up with misconcieved and possibly fatal preconceptions of just how fragile human existence really is. And what about all of those "educational" programs that show little kids outdoors, exploring these cartoon worlds. That's all fne and good, but we forget that these are kids, and most don't really understand the world around them. I personally know teahcers, especially in the inner cities, that have brought in pictures of REAL LIFE animals and scared the hell out of kids. They didn't understand that these things really existed in nature, they were so used to cute little cartoons. It's a dangerous for them to only understand this computerized, filtered world around them, and probably even more dangerous for the natural world around them. And I wouldn't replace up close, person to person communication, with IM for kids.
And, most important, anyone who sits in front of a computer for hours at a time knows that they are the most ergonomically incorect devices this side of a guillotine. My back, wrists, and eyes are all damaged on a continual basis from these unnaturaly devices. Do we want our kids growing up with bad posture and carpal tunnel syndrome? School desks and video game consoles at hmoe are bad enough - do we want them to think that bad posture and continuous back pain is the norm?
Invest in better teachers, more teacher training, better facilities to learn in. Computers are only tools, and undeveloped tools at that. We shouldn't be testing them on our children.
lf.o