Is lies. Lying, falsehoods, untruthitudes. When did it become acceptable to lie about EVERYTHING ? Corporations, politicians and alot of regualr people -- just lye about everything. We're becoming a nation of pathological lyiers. In our culture it has become acceptable to lie about anything that would suit our interest.
"The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic."
-- John F. Kennedy
excerpt from early Matrix script draft
on
The ASCII Cam
·
· Score: 2
INT. HALL
The ship is quiet and dark. Everyone is asleep.
INT. MAIN DECK
The core glows with monitor light. Cypher is in the operator's chair as Neo cones up behind him.
CYPHER
Whoa! Shit, Neo, you scared the
bejeezus out of ne.
NEO
Sorry.
CYPHER
No, it's all right.
NEO
What are you doing?
CYPHER
Midnight watch.
Neo's eyes light up as he steps closer to the screens that seem alive with a constant flow of data.
NEO
Is that... ?
CYPHER
An ASCII web-cam? Yeah.
The monitors are packed with bizarre characters and fuzzy shapes.
CYPHER
I've been watching it so long, I can make everything out. It used to be blonde, brunette, redhead... but now it's nothing more than a bunch of geeks with too much time on their hands.
Neo nods.
CYPHER
You want a drink?
He pours Neo a drink from a large plastic jug.
Neo takes a sip and it almost kills him. Cypher pounds on his back.
CYPHER
Good shit, huh? Dozer makes it... calls it Jolt.
It's good for two things:
degreasing engines and keeping coders awake.
Business reply mail usually has a code printed as letters and numbers or a bar code that allows them to track where the card was taken from. For example, if a bunch of people from southwestern Ohio decide to send in blank cards from PC World, they'll be able to tell that a lot of people who read the midwest printing at the very least looked at their card in PC World and took the time to send it in. Marketing pays for eyeballs, and by sending in blank cards, you're basically telling them that your part of the country noticed their advertising.
I mentioned this in the "Spammer Gets Spammed" article, but I usually hop on this stuff too late to get modded up. Just remove, white-out, or marker over the tracking code (it's usually in the lower left or right-hand corner) and you've truly annoyed them, because not only do they pay for the postage, but they don't get anything useful out of it.
I remember a little piece on TV a while back about those blow-in Business Reply Mail postcards, and the reporter mentioned a lot of people send them back blank. It turns out that there are codes (usually printed in one of the bottom corners) that are the marketing form of cookies - it tells them what magazine they were taken from, what region of the country, etc. They still find this information useful, because it gives them an idea of how effective their cards are in which magazines.
So, if you really want to piss them off, remove/white-out/use a black marker on that code first, because then they can't get any marketing data from it.
This is the beginning of my third year of teaching, and my second year as National Honor Society advisor. When I took over, I decided I was going to make it more of a service organization that went out and actually contributed to the community. Sure, you still have to have a 3.500 gpa to get in, but we also require activity in a school organization and at least 18 hours of community service outside of the school, and a faculty advisory committee selects the members based on personal recommendations the students turn in and faculty recommendations from the staff.
This year, a good number of students didn't return their applications this year, for a variety of reasons. The most common reason was a lack of community service hours, so we're putting on a luncheon for sophomores and juniors to let them know what Honor Society does at our school, and how they can get involved. I'm sure there were other reasons they didn't turn in their applications, and that's fine - to each his/her own.
However, you shouldn't blame National Honor Society as a whole just because your school's faculty reacted badly to what you said. Personally, I would have dismissed it as immature ranting from someone who didn't understand the service aspects of the organization. Then again, your school's chapter may have been run incorrectly as an elitist organization. Ours on the other hand just painted the largest computer lab in the school a couple weeks ago because the old paint was flaking off and the work order to repaint it would take two years to process in the district. But to be very honest, National Honor Society is not supposed to be something you're in just to add to your resume (although it often is) - it's supposed to enable and encourage you to participate in your community through volunteer service and leadership activities. Anything else means your school's advisor isn't doing his/her job.
A lot of people are arguing, "How is this art? How is this original? All he did was doodle a bunch of times and put it on a poster." This is a valid practical argument, but I think these posters are missing the point. A guy slapping together 1000 pixelated drawings may not be good art to a lot of people, but the original application of technology in an expressive form is as much art as anything else. It's all in how you define human expression.
Why do I think it's original? Simply because I don't think anyone has done anything like this before. Jim Dine, for example, usually uses hearts, skulls, robes and tools in his artwork, and while he manages to approach these subjects in a colorful and interesting way, the most original thing of his I've seen was a heart shape made of straw that measured about 5' by 3' by 1'. The heart shape itself is not original; making a large one out of straw and placing it on its side is - in my opinion, which is what it all really boils down to.
I tried selling a domain name on eBay (smashingpumpkins.org), but I gave up trying to transfer it over to the winner of the auction for a year. They required a form to be printed on my "company letterhead" (I was a college student when I registered the domain), and I had to have it stamped and notarized by a public notary. After I filled out all the information, I faxed it to them, and didn't hear anything for months. Tried calling, but couldn't get through to anyone; tried emailing, but god only knows where those went. Eventually, they sent me a paper letter several months later explaining that I left out some information or something to that effect (I don't know how much more you could complete a form). I called and faxed a couple more times, but eventually gave up because I had to get on with Real Life. I absolutely refuse to deal with them ever again, and I know there are many, many other people out there who feel the same way, simply because they are impossible to deal with.
How much would it take to get Slashdot to buy Natalie Portman for a year? Surely the buying power of frustrated geeks everywhere would be enough to woo her from the set of Episode 2 to spend a year hanging out behind a terminal, submitting articles and moderating comments.
In my 2+ years as a tech at the high school where I work, we've replaced at least 5 or 6 Maxtor hard drives, including one that arrived with a new Dell desktop machine and died within a month - made a nice clicking, turn-signal noise. Maybe they're trying to keep prices down, but costs will rise in the long run if they have to support dead hard drives along with the requisite clueless users. If I were to buy an X-Box (which I wouldn't), I would definitely consider switching out the cheap Maxtor drive in favor of something more reliable. I wonder if such a thing would be possible... I don't see Microsoft being as understanding about hardware hacking as Tivo.
The reason we love books is because we're used to books. I have no love for a newspaper because as I grew up and got interested in the news, I began to find it online much easier. I still prefer some magazines for longer articles, like Newsweek and New Scientist, but newspapers are unimportant to me. The same will be true of books when the younger generations still to come grow up with something better. We may be sentimental and decry the loss of the book as a form of communication, but we can't imagine days when books were originally manuscripts copied by hand and worth a fortune. Imagine what disgust typesetting brought about.
What high school student into computers doesn't have his/her own web page? Well, teach them how to generate dynamic server-side content with Perl. If they have any experience with BASIC, Perl isn't that tough, and if they have any C/C++ experience, it's a breeze. Plus, it will teach them how to hand-code HTML.
One of my students (who I had in Chemistry and then Physics, because I won't officially teach computers until this upcoming year) worked with me for most of the school year on setting up an online attendance program using a web server running Linux/Apache and Perl. This student was already good at C++, but he got a lot of sysadmin experience, as well as learning the ins and outs of Perl and good CGI programming. Our online attendance system is now something the principal shows off to teachers and parents visiting from other districts (ie, 'look what we can do because our kids are so smart'), and the student now has real working code that he can pull out at any time for use on his future resume (he just graduated and is going into CS).
A fun side note: once we clean up the code a bit, we're going to open source it under GPL and put the code on our school's web site (http://www.hamiltonhigh.net/) for other districts to use. Nothing like an Open Source project to give students a feeling of real accomplishment if someone else is interested in their code (we've already had some inquiries from neighboring districts).
Anyway, get O'Reilly's Learning Perl book and maybe their CGI Programming book (I think most of the CGI stuff is included in the 2nd edition now, I don't know where my copy is), set up an internal web server in the school, and have them design their own system. Maybe have them collaborate to build a web-based email system a la Yahoo Mail or Hotmail.
If you're going to get Linux into schools, you have to get teachers to do it. This could be through education or by hiring technologically-aware teachers (this is very very difficult, I admit, but the newer teachers are more tech-aware than the elders, by far), but it requires some special situations and a couple spare computers.
My background: I'm a 2nd-year Chemistry/Physics/Web Site Design teacher and Assistant Technical Coordinator for Hamilton High School in Hamilton, Ohio. I've been using Macs for 6 years, PCs running Dos/Win3.1/Win9x/WinNT for about 7 years (on and off), VMS for about 5 years in college and Linux for the past 3 or 4 (I've only been trying to admin Linux for the past year or so). Our high school has a mix of hundreds of computers, mostly PCs running Win9x. We have two computer labs running WinNT Workstation 4.0 sp4 (a nightmare), several NT Servers (two of which I admin - NT isn't a bad print server or FirstClass server if you get all the extra crap off of it and don't run IIS; IIS resulted in all of our crashes while our main print/proxy server also served the school web site), and 3 Linux boxen (running various versions of RedHat (2) and Mandrake (1) - I'm currently too swamped to get into any other distro's, although we played with Corel for a while).
We've been running the school's web site pretty stably on RH for the past year or so, after inheriting a Pentium-90 Netware print server and replacing a couple parts here and there. I've been interested in Linux ever since I ran a couple large-volume websites in college for some rock bands (Smashing Pumpkins (unofficial) and Foo Fighters (official), among others), and I got into CGI/Perl. When I started working here, I had a Junior in my Chemistry class who was also signed up for the Web Site Deisgn class (which is an independent study course). After I found out he was a programmer, and did HTML/Javascript, I said "Do you know Perl?", which received a blank look. I then spent every day of the next two weeks after school with him and the llama books, showing him some of my old source and giving him 'assignments'. For a while, we did our CGI/Perl on MS's IIS, but it was such a nightmare that I would install Linux on any spare machine lying around and hope that it wasn't needed back soon!
Finally we got this P-90, which we upgraded, and we could start some serious CGI/Perl work. In October of this year, I got the idea that we could "computerize" our attendance, since we passed a levy and put a computer in every classroom. So, after some very very basic coding by myself, I set Doug on the project and more or less managed/coached him while we worked with SWOCA to get all of the attendance data prepared. This was a big deal - if you screw up attendance, the state will kill you and basically ruin your funding, among other things. We finally went live with the attendance script today, and we plan on releasing it under the GPL to other local districts. Of course, we're not going to port it - they'll have to set up a Linux server for it just like we did (we snuck out a Dell P3-450 that was waiting to be set up in a computer lab, formatted NT off of it and installed RH 6.1), but it will be there for their use. Maybe we're forcing Linux on them, but who cares, they should learn how to use it.
In doing all of this, several of my students have become interested in Linux. They borrow distro's, play around with a P2-266 running Mandrake 6.0 (which netscape seems to crash regularly), play around on the web server with the accounts I've given them, talk about their troubles/successes installing it at home, and generally act like geeks. They read User Friendly every day, and some of them have even started reading/. on occasion. The trick was to get them excited about it (they sometimes teach each other HTML and Perl during and after school - how cool is that?) and give them some space to play around with it.
Our future projects include upgrading/migrating the current web server to a faster machine, and starting a school-wide Samba server so that students can access their data from anywhere. I will say this, though: Microsoft (especially Office) still rules in this school and in the minds of IT professionals I've worked with in developing an IT pathway for students at our high school. Because of that, I'm going to be teaching A+/Network+ next year, and the year after that I may teach MCP. In the meantime, I expect Linux to get better and develop more support, and I really look forward to the day when we can start replacing labs with easy-to-admin Linux workstations with a slick Office clone. As more machines are rotated out of their life-cycle, more machines can be used as Linux boxen to re-introduce students to the reason they became interested in computers in the first place - they're fun, they're challenging, and when they work correctly, they can be really really cool.
I'm not sure if this has already been mentioned, but if it really was a DoS attack against Yahoo, then the script-kiddies have been busy - Buy.com was also the target of a DoS, during their IPO, no less.
If you set up an iMac properly, and stay away from USB CD-R drives, there's no reason it should crash at all under Mac OS 8.6 I know that OS 9 is out, but I'm still waiting for all the bug fixes to be released before I make the plunge. The iMac gets a lot of flack for being a cute machine, but it actually is pretty snappy and easy to use, once you get used to the oddly-shaped mouse, and the MacOS can be pretty damn stable, too. Unfortunately, most people don't know how to set it up properly, so they end up with extensions and control panels they don't need (QuickDraw 3D comes to mind, as does QuickTime VR) clogging up the works. Even worse, they'll install Norton Utilities, which puts in CrashGuard, the most unstable and unusable piece of software ever created. I remember when CrashGuard would crash the system (ironic, isn't it?) whenever Netscape 3's JIT Java compiler kicked in. This just gives people a bad view of Macs when they're actually really good systems.
Oh, by the way, I don't know if there should be a follow-up or not, but someone's been spamming the Deja polls - Linux now has over 10000 votes, and has moved up to 3.3 in all categories. Also, MS Windows NT Server has even more votes, with 2.4 in each category. BSD only had about 5000. This poll seems to be getting more and more pointless as the day goes on.
My freshman year of college, I began suffering from severe pain in my wrists, probably caused by a combination of bass & guitar playing, mountain biking, taking a ridiculous amount of notes, and typing for at least 3 hours a day. I was at a point where the pain was enough to keep me from typing, and I would actually ride to class with my arms resting on the handlebars so I wouldn't put pressure on my wrists.
I tried a variety of things, from pain medication to wrapping my wrists in Ace bandages (sometimes with cold packs I kept in the freezer) to going to a sports medicine therapist and trying prescription pills. Ultimately, the single thing that made the most difference (besides cutting down on my acoustic guitar playing) was a $3 padded wrist rest that I bought at Walmart on a whim. Believe it or not, it really helps, and while my wrists are definitely weaker than they were before they started hurting, I can at least use them regularly without pain. You don't have to buy one of those $15-20 gel ones, either - mine is plain black, not terribly soft, and sits at the base of my keyboard. It annoyed the hell out of me for the first week or two, but I got used to it quickly, and really prefer it now. All geeks with wrist pain should get one.
If it becomes distressed too much, maybe it will become depressed at its insurmountable task of vacuuming while threatened... personally, if I were a robot, I'd be more distressed over the fact that I'm stuck vacuuming floors for the rest of my existence. They should really give the poor thing wireless internet via Airport and let it chat while it's cleaning. Otherwise it might end up lonely and sad like Marvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhiker's Guide.
As a high school science teacher, this discussion struck a nerve, because I often complain about the problems facing teachers and students today in our American education system, in which politics play a much larger role than meaningful education, but the only people who really understand are fellow teachers. Unfortunately, a lot of them have been in the system too long to try to do anything about it, and I'm starting to realize that the system itself is so difficult to change in major ways that it's usually better to find something you really like and make a difference there.
The major factor that prevents a science teacher or computer teacher from being totally up to date is time. At my school, I teach honors physics for two periods, basic chemistry for two periods, and some web design/programming during the two periods that I'm the unofficial technical coordinator for the high school, where I maintain a large writing & research computer lab, a FirstClass server, a linux web/cgi server, and the hundreds of PCs and Macs strewn about the school. I have a prep period where I'm supposed to have time to eat lunch and grade papers, but I'm usually running an errand or fixing a machine or trying to resolve a network problem, so I usually eat some stuff from the teachers' lounge vending machine while working on something unrelated to teaching. During the day, I have no time to prepare lessons or grade papers, so I do it after school or at night like most teachers. Usually, I'm still working on computer stuff after school, so I save the evening for grading/planning.
Realize that while our school day runs from 7:25 to 2:25, I never leave before 4pm at the very earliest, so when I get home, it's time to run quick errands before the bank/post office/any business except Meijer's closes, and then make dinner. It's 6 or 7pm before you're done with everything, and if I don't have an evening meeting for something, I can start working on school stuff.
Does anyone else see the problem here? Like lots of teachers, I'm heavily involved in the school; I advise National Honor Society, I'm on at least 3 committees that I can think of offhand, and I'm developing curricula for two new courses next year (one of which is A+ certification). When do I have time to stay current? It's nearly impossible to get everything done as it is, but to try to stay current while grading papers, making lessons, filling out the typical paperwork involved with education, dealing with students, dealing with parents, and maybe somehow in some way have a normal life... that's even more difficult.
There are solutions, however. I read lots of news web sites every day (CNN, Artigen, BBC, Yahoo, and of course good ol' Slashdot), and I turn around and bring that information into my classes. I've been teaching nuclear reactions in chemistry, which means you have to talk about The Bomb, and so I used the new Encyclopedia Britannica web site for lots of reference material that isn't in the book. More importantly, I make my chemistry and physics classes go out and find news articles related to the class, read them, and write a summary and response to them. Physics has to do it EVERY week, and even though they largely whine about the assignment, at least one student every week gets really excited about what they found. One student brought in an opinion article from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who believes there may be a Grand-Unified Theorem by 2050, and the kid actually read the article and understood some of it. Not all of it, of course, but the effort and the exposure were very important. I think this is a realtively easy assignment that nets great results (especially if your school has internet access like ours; the stuff they find online blows my mind, and I love reading the articles I hadn't seen yet).
Another thing I do for physics is introduce them to "new" physics by teaching them relativity, a very tiny amount of quantum mechanics, and some cosmology. I also have them read the Feynman book that someone mentioned earlier, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, because it's important that they learn to see scientists not as all-knowing demigods, but real people with real lives similar to their own. I think this year we might also read about another scientist, but I haven't had time to research another book. Any suggestions would be welcome! Anyway, it's extremely important for all physics students to have a basic understanding of mechanics, but to leave out the most important discoveries of this century really disgusts me. Do you know when I first learned about relativity? The very end of the second semester of first-year physics in college; we spent 3 days on it. Of course, it was covered in-depth in second-year physics, but there's no reason every high school physics student shouldn't graduate without the basic knowledge that makes up general and special relativity.
I apologize for rambling, but I hope people realize that we science teachers (most of us, at least) really do care that students get an up-to-date, appropriate education. We're just bogged down by all the other stuff that makes it very, very difficult to supplement the course of study. Hiring more teachers to reduce class size, providing money for teachers to attend workshops or take appropriate college classes, or even training the head of the science department to keep track of recent science developments to pass out appropriate information - this things will all help. Ultimately, it requires a sacrifice of free time by the teacher in order to improve their course. Doing this during the summer isn't always the answer, either; lots of stuff pops up during the year and then slips back into obscurity, and it's more difficult than you'd imagine to accomplish changes while you're off and you have a job just to keep paying the bills.
Slashdot Mirror
"The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic."
-- John F. Kennedy
The ship is quiet and dark. Everyone is asleep.
INT. MAIN DECK
The core glows with monitor light. Cypher is in the operator's chair as Neo cones up behind him.
CYPHER
Whoa! Shit, Neo, you scared the bejeezus out of ne.
NEO
Sorry.
CYPHER
No, it's all right.
NEO
What are you doing?
CYPHER
Midnight watch.
Neo's eyes light up as he steps closer to the screens that seem alive with a constant flow of data.
NEO
Is that... ?
CYPHER
An ASCII web-cam? Yeah.
The monitors are packed with bizarre characters and fuzzy shapes.
CYPHER
I've been watching it so long, I can make everything out. It used to be blonde, brunette, redhead... but now it's nothing more than a bunch of geeks with too much time on their hands.
Neo nods.
CYPHER
You want a drink?
He pours Neo a drink from a large plastic jug.
Neo takes a sip and it almost kills him. Cypher pounds on his back.
CYPHER
Good shit, huh? Dozer makes it... calls it Jolt. It's good for two things: degreasing engines and keeping coders awake.
Red-faced, Neo finally stops coughing.
I mentioned this in the "Spammer Gets Spammed" article, but I usually hop on this stuff too late to get modded up. Just remove, white-out, or marker over the tracking code (it's usually in the lower left or right-hand corner) and you've truly annoyed them, because not only do they pay for the postage, but they don't get anything useful out of it.
So, if you really want to piss them off, remove/white-out/use a black marker on that code first, because then they can't get any marketing data from it.
Imagine rooting your local ballot boxen!
This year, a good number of students didn't return their applications this year, for a variety of reasons. The most common reason was a lack of community service hours, so we're putting on a luncheon for sophomores and juniors to let them know what Honor Society does at our school, and how they can get involved. I'm sure there were other reasons they didn't turn in their applications, and that's fine - to each his/her own.
However, you shouldn't blame National Honor Society as a whole just because your school's faculty reacted badly to what you said. Personally, I would have dismissed it as immature ranting from someone who didn't understand the service aspects of the organization. Then again, your school's chapter may have been run incorrectly as an elitist organization. Ours on the other hand just painted the largest computer lab in the school a couple weeks ago because the old paint was flaking off and the work order to repaint it would take two years to process in the district. But to be very honest, National Honor Society is not supposed to be something you're in just to add to your resume (although it often is) - it's supposed to enable and encourage you to participate in your community through volunteer service and leadership activities. Anything else means your school's advisor isn't doing his/her job.
A lot of people are arguing, "How is this art? How is this original? All he did was doodle a bunch of times and put it on a poster." This is a valid practical argument, but I think these posters are missing the point. A guy slapping together 1000 pixelated drawings may not be good art to a lot of people, but the original application of technology in an expressive form is as much art as anything else. It's all in how you define human expression.
Why do I think it's original? Simply because I don't think anyone has done anything like this before. Jim Dine, for example, usually uses hearts, skulls, robes and tools in his artwork, and while he manages to approach these subjects in a colorful and interesting way, the most original thing of his I've seen was a heart shape made of straw that measured about 5' by 3' by 1'. The heart shape itself is not original; making a large one out of straw and placing it on its side is - in my opinion, which is what it all really boils down to.
Some Jim Dine links, fyi:
I tried selling a domain name on eBay (smashingpumpkins.org), but I gave up trying to transfer it over to the winner of the auction for a year. They required a form to be printed on my "company letterhead" (I was a college student when I registered the domain), and I had to have it stamped and notarized by a public notary. After I filled out all the information, I faxed it to them, and didn't hear anything for months. Tried calling, but couldn't get through to anyone; tried emailing, but god only knows where those went. Eventually, they sent me a paper letter several months later explaining that I left out some information or something to that effect (I don't know how much more you could complete a form). I called and faxed a couple more times, but eventually gave up because I had to get on with Real Life. I absolutely refuse to deal with them ever again, and I know there are many, many other people out there who feel the same way, simply because they are impossible to deal with.
How much would it take to get Slashdot to buy Natalie Portman for a year? Surely the buying power of frustrated geeks everywhere would be enough to woo her from the set of Episode 2 to spend a year hanging out behind a terminal, submitting articles and moderating comments.
In my 2+ years as a tech at the high school where I work, we've replaced at least 5 or 6 Maxtor hard drives, including one that arrived with a new Dell desktop machine and died within a month - made a nice clicking, turn-signal noise. Maybe they're trying to keep prices down, but costs will rise in the long run if they have to support dead hard drives along with the requisite clueless users. If I were to buy an X-Box (which I wouldn't), I would definitely consider switching out the cheap Maxtor drive in favor of something more reliable. I wonder if such a thing would be possible... I don't see Microsoft being as understanding about hardware hacking as Tivo.
The reason we love books is because we're used to books. I have no love for a newspaper because as I grew up and got interested in the news, I began to find it online much easier. I still prefer some magazines for longer articles, like Newsweek and New Scientist, but newspapers are unimportant to me. The same will be true of books when the younger generations still to come grow up with something better. We may be sentimental and decry the loss of the book as a form of communication, but we can't imagine days when books were originally manuscripts copied by hand and worth a fortune. Imagine what disgust typesetting brought about.
One of my students (who I had in Chemistry and then Physics, because I won't officially teach computers until this upcoming year) worked with me for most of the school year on setting up an online attendance program using a web server running Linux/Apache and Perl. This student was already good at C++, but he got a lot of sysadmin experience, as well as learning the ins and outs of Perl and good CGI programming. Our online attendance system is now something the principal shows off to teachers and parents visiting from other districts (ie, 'look what we can do because our kids are so smart'), and the student now has real working code that he can pull out at any time for use on his future resume (he just graduated and is going into CS).
A fun side note: once we clean up the code a bit, we're going to open source it under GPL and put the code on our school's web site (http://www.hamiltonhigh.net/) for other districts to use. Nothing like an Open Source project to give students a feeling of real accomplishment if someone else is interested in their code (we've already had some inquiries from neighboring districts).
Anyway, get O'Reilly's Learning Perl book and maybe their CGI Programming book (I think most of the CGI stuff is included in the 2nd edition now, I don't know where my copy is), set up an internal web server in the school, and have them design their own system. Maybe have them collaborate to build a web-based email system a la Yahoo Mail or Hotmail.
-Chris
I think we can be pretty sure that it won't be called "Download".
Geeks aren't interested in politics because government doesn't double its efficiency and speed once every 18 months.
My background: I'm a 2nd-year Chemistry/Physics/Web Site Design teacher and Assistant Technical Coordinator for Hamilton High School in Hamilton, Ohio. I've been using Macs for 6 years, PCs running Dos/Win3.1/Win9x/WinNT for about 7 years (on and off), VMS for about 5 years in college and Linux for the past 3 or 4 (I've only been trying to admin Linux for the past year or so). Our high school has a mix of hundreds of computers, mostly PCs running Win9x. We have two computer labs running WinNT Workstation 4.0 sp4 (a nightmare), several NT Servers (two of which I admin - NT isn't a bad print server or FirstClass server if you get all the extra crap off of it and don't run IIS; IIS resulted in all of our crashes while our main print/proxy server also served the school web site), and 3 Linux boxen (running various versions of RedHat (2) and Mandrake (1) - I'm currently too swamped to get into any other distro's, although we played with Corel for a while).
We've been running the school's web site pretty stably on RH for the past year or so, after inheriting a Pentium-90 Netware print server and replacing a couple parts here and there. I've been interested in Linux ever since I ran a couple large-volume websites in college for some rock bands (Smashing Pumpkins (unofficial) and Foo Fighters (official), among others), and I got into CGI/Perl. When I started working here, I had a Junior in my Chemistry class who was also signed up for the Web Site Deisgn class (which is an independent study course). After I found out he was a programmer, and did HTML/Javascript, I said "Do you know Perl?", which received a blank look. I then spent every day of the next two weeks after school with him and the llama books, showing him some of my old source and giving him 'assignments'. For a while, we did our CGI/Perl on MS's IIS, but it was such a nightmare that I would install Linux on any spare machine lying around and hope that it wasn't needed back soon!
Finally we got this P-90, which we upgraded, and we could start some serious CGI/Perl work. In October of this year, I got the idea that we could "computerize" our attendance, since we passed a levy and put a computer in every classroom. So, after some very very basic coding by myself, I set Doug on the project and more or less managed/coached him while we worked with SWOCA to get all of the attendance data prepared. This was a big deal - if you screw up attendance, the state will kill you and basically ruin your funding, among other things. We finally went live with the attendance script today, and we plan on releasing it under the GPL to other local districts. Of course, we're not going to port it - they'll have to set up a Linux server for it just like we did (we snuck out a Dell P3-450 that was waiting to be set up in a computer lab, formatted NT off of it and installed RH 6.1), but it will be there for their use. Maybe we're forcing Linux on them, but who cares, they should learn how to use it.
In doing all of this, several of my students have become interested in Linux. They borrow distro's, play around with a P2-266 running Mandrake 6.0 (which netscape seems to crash regularly), play around on the web server with the accounts I've given them, talk about their troubles/successes installing it at home, and generally act like geeks. They read User Friendly every day, and some of them have even started reading /. on occasion. The trick was to get them excited about it (they sometimes teach each other HTML and Perl during and after school - how cool is that?) and give them some space to play around with it.
Our future projects include upgrading/migrating the current web server to a faster machine, and starting a school-wide Samba server so that students can access their data from anywhere. I will say this, though: Microsoft (especially Office) still rules in this school and in the minds of IT professionals I've worked with in developing an IT pathway for students at our high school. Because of that, I'm going to be teaching A+/Network+ next year, and the year after that I may teach MCP. In the meantime, I expect Linux to get better and develop more support, and I really look forward to the day when we can start replacing labs with easy-to-admin Linux workstations with a slick Office clone. As more machines are rotated out of their life-cycle, more machines can be used as Linux boxen to re-introduce students to the reason they became interested in computers in the first place - they're fun, they're challenging, and when they work correctly, they can be really really cool.
-c
I'm not sure if this has already been mentioned, but if it really was a DoS attack against Yahoo, then the script-kiddies have been busy - Buy.com was also the target of a DoS, during their IPO, no less.
Linux appearing in Playboy may give new meaning to the term "Open Source"....
Oh, by the way, I don't know if there should be a follow-up or not, but someone's been spamming the Deja polls - Linux now has over 10000 votes, and has moved up to 3.3 in all categories. Also, MS Windows NT Server has even more votes, with 2.4 in each category. BSD only had about 5000. This poll seems to be getting more and more pointless as the day goes on.
I tried a variety of things, from pain medication to wrapping my wrists in Ace bandages (sometimes with cold packs I kept in the freezer) to going to a sports medicine therapist and trying prescription pills. Ultimately, the single thing that made the most difference (besides cutting down on my acoustic guitar playing) was a $3 padded wrist rest that I bought at Walmart on a whim. Believe it or not, it really helps, and while my wrists are definitely weaker than they were before they started hurting, I can at least use them regularly without pain. You don't have to buy one of those $15-20 gel ones, either - mine is plain black, not terribly soft, and sits at the base of my keyboard. It annoyed the hell out of me for the first week or two, but I got used to it quickly, and really prefer it now. All geeks with wrist pain should get one.
If it becomes distressed too much, maybe it will become depressed at its insurmountable task of vacuuming while threatened... personally, if I were a robot, I'd be more distressed over the fact that I'm stuck vacuuming floors for the rest of my existence. They should really give the poor thing wireless internet via Airport and let it chat while it's cleaning. Otherwise it might end up lonely and sad like Marvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhiker's Guide.
The major factor that prevents a science teacher or computer teacher from being totally up to date is time. At my school, I teach honors physics for two periods, basic chemistry for two periods, and some web design/programming during the two periods that I'm the unofficial technical coordinator for the high school, where I maintain a large writing & research computer lab, a FirstClass server, a linux web/cgi server, and the hundreds of PCs and Macs strewn about the school. I have a prep period where I'm supposed to have time to eat lunch and grade papers, but I'm usually running an errand or fixing a machine or trying to resolve a network problem, so I usually eat some stuff from the teachers' lounge vending machine while working on something unrelated to teaching. During the day, I have no time to prepare lessons or grade papers, so I do it after school or at night like most teachers. Usually, I'm still working on computer stuff after school, so I save the evening for grading/planning.
Realize that while our school day runs from 7:25 to 2:25, I never leave before 4pm at the very earliest, so when I get home, it's time to run quick errands before the bank/post office/any business except Meijer's closes, and then make dinner. It's 6 or 7pm before you're done with everything, and if I don't have an evening meeting for something, I can start working on school stuff.
Does anyone else see the problem here? Like lots of teachers, I'm heavily involved in the school; I advise National Honor Society, I'm on at least 3 committees that I can think of offhand, and I'm developing curricula for two new courses next year (one of which is A+ certification). When do I have time to stay current? It's nearly impossible to get everything done as it is, but to try to stay current while grading papers, making lessons, filling out the typical paperwork involved with education, dealing with students, dealing with parents, and maybe somehow in some way have a normal life... that's even more difficult.
There are solutions, however. I read lots of news web sites every day (CNN, Artigen, BBC, Yahoo, and of course good ol' Slashdot), and I turn around and bring that information into my classes. I've been teaching nuclear reactions in chemistry, which means you have to talk about The Bomb, and so I used the new Encyclopedia Britannica web site for lots of reference material that isn't in the book. More importantly, I make my chemistry and physics classes go out and find news articles related to the class, read them, and write a summary and response to them. Physics has to do it EVERY week, and even though they largely whine about the assignment, at least one student every week gets really excited about what they found. One student brought in an opinion article from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who believes there may be a Grand-Unified Theorem by 2050, and the kid actually read the article and understood some of it. Not all of it, of course, but the effort and the exposure were very important. I think this is a realtively easy assignment that nets great results (especially if your school has internet access like ours; the stuff they find online blows my mind, and I love reading the articles I hadn't seen yet).
Another thing I do for physics is introduce them to "new" physics by teaching them relativity, a very tiny amount of quantum mechanics, and some cosmology. I also have them read the Feynman book that someone mentioned earlier, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman , because it's important that they learn to see scientists not as all-knowing demigods, but real people with real lives similar to their own. I think this year we might also read about another scientist, but I haven't had time to research another book. Any suggestions would be welcome! Anyway, it's extremely important for all physics students to have a basic understanding of mechanics, but to leave out the most important discoveries of this century really disgusts me. Do you know when I first learned about relativity? The very end of the second semester of first-year physics in college; we spent 3 days on it. Of course, it was covered in-depth in second-year physics, but there's no reason every high school physics student shouldn't graduate without the basic knowledge that makes up general and special relativity.
I apologize for rambling, but I hope people realize that we science teachers (most of us, at least) really do care that students get an up-to-date, appropriate education. We're just bogged down by all the other stuff that makes it very, very difficult to supplement the course of study. Hiring more teachers to reduce class size, providing money for teachers to attend workshops or take appropriate college classes, or even training the head of the science department to keep track of recent science developments to pass out appropriate information - this things will all help. Ultimately, it requires a sacrifice of free time by the teacher in order to improve their course. Doing this during the summer isn't always the answer, either; lots of stuff pops up during the year and then slips back into obscurity, and it's more difficult than you'd imagine to accomplish changes while you're off and you have a job just to keep paying the bills.