I've lived outside the US (Holland, Israel, Egypt, Germany), and while I'm literate with the metric system and use it in Drafting and science measurments, I don't see why the United States needs to transition any farther into the Metric System than it is already.
Baring a Constitutional Amendment, it won't happen.
I think people in the US don't want to switch because there is no advantage to a switch. Really, what would the point be? There are 260 million people happy with the current system, why should they switch?
I'm in a Private School, where there are no beatings.
The three year thing ISN'T moot.
A three year old Thinkpad or iBook or PowerBook will run the latest Office suite, the latest browser or the latest MP3 player.
After 6 years in Public and Private education, 12 years being a public school student and living with School Board Presidents as my parents. I can say without a doubt that...
Children are NOT held responsable for thier actions in Public schools, and are not held responsable for thier actions as much as they should be in Private schools.
In no way, shape or form are the children in US schools held responsable.
As for avoiding responsibility, that trait isn't exclusive to the United States.
All our Thinkpads, iBooks and Powerbooks will come with 3 year warrenties.
If the kids lose or destroy them in a way that isn't covered by warrenty, they have to buy new ones.
I think that with competant educators, laptops should be in the hands of all High School level students. If there is a problem with porn, games, abuse, irresponsability, etc.
Hold the children responsable. Something that isn't done enough in Public Educations.
1. Hold teachers responsable for the performance of the students. All too many times teachers are either unwilling to learn new skills or incapable of learning new skills.
2. Make Science and Math a central part of a teacher's education in College. Math and Science teach one to think, and that's something missing in many teachers, the ability to think.
3. Eliminate the Department of Education at the Federal level.
4. Allow federal tax credits for sending kids to private school, up to 10,000 dollars a household.
5. Eliminate standardized testing across elementary and middle school. Prep students at 11th grade for ACT and SAT tests.
6. For each new house built in a sub division of 10 or more single family homes, tack on a School Expansion Fee of 1,000 dollars.
So is the Internet as a learning and research tool.
"history is history, the events of 1776 will not change"
Nope it won't except in history books used in Education. With a computer, a student can read things written by Samual Adams, diaries by soldiers at Valley Forge or Jamestown.
Instead of reading the paragraph in the text book about the Atomic Bombings of Japan, a student could go up and read raw materials about IJA weapons stockpiles, or the planned Commonwealth invasion of Singapore or the Joint Allied invasions of southern Japan and understand why the Americans were willing to nuke two cites, beyond the vauge and inaccurate stock answers in a text book.
At the school I work at, the kids are into German tactics of the Eastern Front, advanced Math, the Reformation, the evolution of the Catholic Church and digital video production.
Your attitude, while it might be in jest, is the attitude of someone that wants the students to fail.
At my work, this summer we will require all High School students to buy a Thinkpad, iBook or Powerbook G4.
Already, the English department requires everything to be done on a computer, we offer classes on photography without a darkroom (Photoshop/Gimp) and there is a huge amount of digital photography and video.
Our campus is 90% covered in 802.11b and we have a flexable attitude towards study locations and learning, so we think that laptops will be a great boon to education at this level.
"...but then I heard that the best and least expensive PC's are 'white box' systems that are custom build by small, local companies."
I've found this to be totally untrue.
I've worked in Public and Private education technology since 1997, and know people in the Private Sector and Public sector buying and working on computers, and the WORST Windows PCs are those made by small local companies.
Support sucks. Lowest end parts. Lowest amount of QA. Crappy workmanship. Terrible workplace standards when it comes to being clean, exact or even having clean power or CDs.
I'll build my own, but I will not buy, or tell someone to buy a locally built computer.
Never, ever.
I'm in Portland OR and I'll say there isn't a decent "white box" builder from Longview WA to Medford OR. Same goes for Denver, Rapid City, Pierre and Sioux Falls.
Many times, in a version switch, someone like Adobe will seriously mess with commands and the way things worked for no reason expect they wanted to.
An example, the great RGB switch on Photoshop 5.5. They changed the way that Mac Photoshop handled the gamma of RGB files and switched them by default to Windows gamma. Huge fucking nightmare for people that dealt with RGB files.
It was a "feature" change, really it's better for you guys. I was at an Adobe conference in Portland and it was ugly, people were pissed and Adobe was...smug about the change, it's for the better they said.
The "fatigue" comes into play when people change shit just to change it, not for a real reason. Switch command shortcuts around, move buttons on a tool bar.
Often software vendors force us to upgrade to fix a compatability issue and then toss in interface changes. Not upgrading isn't an option with some programs.
IBMs - Mercedes Dell - Chrysler Apple iMac - Smart, new VW Bug, new Mini Apple G4 Tower - BMW, Benz SLK, Caddy CTS, Z8 Sun Servers - Freightliners SGI - Peterbuilt New HP - Nissan/Renault Generic PC - Kia, Lada, Seat Gateway - Mid 80s Fiat Mid 90s Apple - Chevy, Pontiac, Ford family car G4 Powerbook - 911, Vette, BMW 850, Viper Sony - Concept Cars, it looks nice but it doesn't hold togeather
I don't think it's a sad state of affairs that computer-illiterate people drive the strong majority of the technology market.
A computer should have a simple enough interface that 95% of people can be sat down infront of it and do what they need to do. Computers should be as easy to run as the interface of a car.
I'm an avid slashdot reader, and all I want is for the computer to work. I understand the differences in RAM technology, cache size, all that garbage. But I just want a computer to work. I think Apple gets it, with the iMac, eMac, iMac LCD, Towers and the books. Just make computers that work.
When iPhoto came out I watched the ZD or Tech TV piece with John Dvorak and some other fellas talking about it. Dvorak was going on and on about how on Windows he could do the same thing with the combination of 3 programs for Windows that were free and he didn't get why iPhoto was a big deal.
That's the problem I have with Dvorak. He doesn't understand end users. I have 400 users at my work. None of them want to hook a digital camera up and have it take 3 programs to get thier pictures to a webpage.
I was going to say that very thing. Then I went and made a pizza and watched TV.
I don't understand what the point of the story was about in all honesty.
Someone puts something up on the web, and someone might see something later and he doesn't think that's fair? Crap, then lets yell at the brower makers for including the Save As Web Archive too.
The Wayback Machine is cool. If you publish to the web, expect to be archived.
"...where did they get such old copies of my websites, and who gave them permission to make those copies? I certainly didn't provide either. Perhaps I'm too much of a purist, but I've always seen the internet as an ever-changing medium, not a permanent one."
That's a statement from someone that must think the "internet" is a nebulous "thing" that exists without "borders" or "rules" beyond "nations". And doesn't understand that it lives on pieces of spinning disks with magnetic particles and can be easily saved elsewhere.
Frankly, it sounded more like a Jon Katz article.
Re:you have got to be kidding me
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 0, Troll
CAFE has been proposed and wrangled on and never, ever made into a binding law for the automakers.
Re:you have got to be kidding me
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Wrong.
At this time, in the United State there is NOT a government mandated fuel consumption, and vehicles are increasing thier fuel efficentcy, not because of government mandates, but because the marketplace demands it.
The Communications infrastructure should be nationalized like the Federal Highway System is, and the Department of Transportation should be given the expanded role of supervising that and the other transportation infrastructures under the gise of Department of Infrastructure.
The Feds will establish standards, like they did with the Interstate System and provide funds for it's upkeep and expansion. At the point where you leave the Federal Backbone, the private sector and local governments can take over, like it does with private streets or highways.
The Feds will decide on open protocals like TCP/IP, and furthermore, I think that there should be a minimum amount of fibre should be established so that whenever road construction or repair is underway, more fibre will be run in that right of way.
Numbers are numbers until you think of the human toll. I didn't ever say that the War in Israel is as bad as WW2. I said that the Israelis and Palestinians are happy to kill each other even though there are TV cameras everywhere. In fact, some instances, like the hanging of the Israelis at the Police Station may have been brought on by the fact that a TV crew was there.
Western TV crews were in Iran and Iraq during the war there in the 80s and that didn't stop hundreds of thousands from being killed.
There is no thing as "conventional warfare". War is a living, evolving thing, in 1916 armored units weren't conventional, in 1938 an offensive lead by armor wasn't conventional, in 1965 moving brigades by helicopter wasn't conventional, in 2000 leading a war with a few hundred troopers supported by stratigic bombers wasn't conventional, and on Sept 10th, attacking urban areas with captured airplanes wasn't conventional. Now all these things are. What is conventional, changes as technology and tactics evolve. Between 1941 and 1970, if you were attacking an urban area, you had to outnumber the defenders 5 to 1, and be prepared for 40-70% casualties, this was illustrated in Stalingrad, Warsaw, Berlin, Korea and Hue City. In 2002, the IDF showed that it could take a city wit a 2 to 1 force advantage and take 10% casualties, this wasn't conventional warfighting. Today the United State Marine Corps are in a serious study mode and learning the lessions from the IDF on how to take a city.
I saw alot of bloodshed. Just like a nuclear weapon going off, you don't see the blood on the walls, but you know many, many people are dying. On Sept 11th I watched mass murder happen, in a way that's as bloody and horrible as seeing a.45 splatter a brain on the wall infront of me.
And yes, the people that thought it was "cool" were citizens of a government that perpetrated the act. The planners were either in the Goverenment of the Islamic State of Afghanistan or under the protection of that Nation-State and it's rulers.
To argue otherwise is saying that the men that drop the bombs from a B-52 arn't citizens of the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
I've lived outside the US (Holland, Israel, Egypt, Germany), and while I'm literate with the metric system and use it in Drafting and science measurments, I don't see why the United States needs to transition any farther into the Metric System than it is already.
Baring a Constitutional Amendment, it won't happen.
I think people in the US don't want to switch because there is no advantage to a switch. Really, what would the point be? There are 260 million people happy with the current system, why should they switch?
Yes, the current system of time makes sense.
e .html
n it s/Time/Alternative_Schemes/
The time system in current use is a standard that the SI has signed off on, so it is Metric Time.
Actually, there is absolutly no reason to revamp how the global standards for time keeping are operated.
Good page about time history.
http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/tim
Here are Yahoo links to the page about alternative schemes.
http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Measurements_and_U
Yep. Just what I was thinking.
I remeber being on the way back from chemo when John Bonham died.
Crap crap crap.
Yesterday I was lecturing the summer workers (15, 18) at work about how great the Who, Zeppelin, Cream, Hendrix are and how today's music is crap.
At least I saw the Who before, in 89 and 96.
I cash my checks each and every month.
I buy my firearms, computers, games with that money.
Then my farm checks, etc goes in the bank for the real bills.
Congress will raise a terrible stink about this.
They went around and around with Tres over the last modification of the bills.
I doubt it will happen.
Nope.
Portland Oregon.
Yep, alot of people are so close to the poverty line in the US that buying things will force them into starvation.
Right.
I'm in a Private School, where there are no beatings.
The three year thing ISN'T moot.
A three year old Thinkpad or iBook or PowerBook will run the latest Office suite, the latest browser or the latest MP3 player.
After 6 years in Public and Private education, 12 years being a public school student and living with School Board Presidents as my parents. I can say without a doubt that...
Children are NOT held responsable for thier actions in Public schools, and are not held responsable for thier actions as much as they should be in Private schools.
In no way, shape or form are the children in US schools held responsable.
As for avoiding responsibility, that trait isn't exclusive to the United States.
A "cheap" laptop is just that.
A cheap laptop.
All our Thinkpads, iBooks and Powerbooks will come with 3 year warrenties.
If the kids lose or destroy them in a way that isn't covered by warrenty, they have to buy new ones.
I think that with competant educators, laptops should be in the hands of all High School level students. If there is a problem with porn, games, abuse, irresponsability, etc.
Hold the children responsable. Something that isn't done enough in Public Educations.
I sure did try to reason with them.
I told them to either allow just Macs or if they had to buy IA laptops, make sure it was RedHat.
I have a solution for American Public Education.
1. Hold teachers responsable for the performance of the students. All too many times teachers are either unwilling to learn new skills or incapable of learning new skills.
2. Make Science and Math a central part of a teacher's education in College. Math and Science teach one to think, and that's something missing in many teachers, the ability to think.
3. Eliminate the Department of Education at the Federal level.
4. Allow federal tax credits for sending kids to private school, up to 10,000 dollars a household.
5. Eliminate standardized testing across elementary and middle school. Prep students at 11th grade for ACT and SAT tests.
6. For each new house built in a sub division of 10 or more single family homes, tack on a School Expansion Fee of 1,000 dollars.
Computers are a waste.
So is the Internet as a learning and research tool.
"history is history, the events of 1776 will not change"
Nope it won't except in history books used in Education. With a computer, a student can read things written by Samual Adams, diaries by soldiers at Valley Forge or Jamestown.
Instead of reading the paragraph in the text book about the Atomic Bombings of Japan, a student could go up and read raw materials about IJA weapons stockpiles, or the planned Commonwealth invasion of Singapore or the Joint Allied invasions of southern Japan and understand why the Americans were willing to nuke two cites, beyond the vauge and inaccurate stock answers in a text book.
At the school I work at, the kids are into German tactics of the Eastern Front, advanced Math, the Reformation, the evolution of the Catholic Church and digital video production.
Your attitude, while it might be in jest, is the attitude of someone that wants the students to fail.
At my work, this summer we will require all High School students to buy a Thinkpad, iBook or Powerbook G4.
Already, the English department requires everything to be done on a computer, we offer classes on photography without a darkroom (Photoshop/Gimp) and there is a huge amount of digital photography and video.
Our campus is 90% covered in 802.11b and we have a flexable attitude towards study locations and learning, so we think that laptops will be a great boon to education at this level.
"...but then I heard that the best and least expensive PC's are 'white box' systems that are custom build by small, local companies."
I've found this to be totally untrue.
I've worked in Public and Private education technology since 1997, and know people in the Private Sector and Public sector buying and working on computers, and the WORST Windows PCs are those made by small local companies.
Support sucks.
Lowest end parts.
Lowest amount of QA.
Crappy workmanship.
Terrible workplace standards when it comes to being clean, exact or even having clean power or CDs.
I'll build my own, but I will not buy, or tell someone to buy a locally built computer.
Never, ever.
I'm in Portland OR and I'll say there isn't a decent "white box" builder from Longview WA to Medford OR. Same goes for Denver, Rapid City, Pierre and Sioux Falls.
The change sucked, because Photoshop switched RGB with no warning and it cost some people hours and thousands of dollars.
After a few monthes, they patched it, to offer a warning. But that conflicted with something else.
Since 6.0 it's offered a warning., for each file in RGB that is opened.
So the problem was never fixed, was patched and caused more problem and generally did nothing positive.
Why would someone on a Macintosh be forced to deal with another platform's gamma?
You don't get it.
Many times, in a version switch, someone like Adobe will seriously mess with commands and the way things worked for no reason expect they wanted to.
An example, the great RGB switch on Photoshop 5.5. They changed the way that Mac Photoshop handled the gamma of RGB files and switched them by default to Windows gamma. Huge fucking nightmare for people that dealt with RGB files.
It was a "feature" change, really it's better for you guys. I was at an Adobe conference in Portland and it was ugly, people were pissed and Adobe was...smug about the change, it's for the better they said.
The "fatigue" comes into play when people change shit just to change it, not for a real reason. Switch command shortcuts around, move buttons on a tool bar.
Often software vendors force us to upgrade to fix a compatability issue and then toss in interface changes. Not upgrading isn't an option with some programs.
Lets see...
IBMs - Mercedes
Dell - Chrysler
Apple iMac - Smart, new VW Bug, new Mini
Apple G4 Tower - BMW, Benz SLK, Caddy CTS, Z8
Sun Servers - Freightliners
SGI - Peterbuilt
New HP - Nissan/Renault
Generic PC - Kia, Lada, Seat
Gateway - Mid 80s Fiat
Mid 90s Apple - Chevy, Pontiac, Ford family car
G4 Powerbook - 911, Vette, BMW 850, Viper
Sony - Concept Cars, it looks nice but it doesn't hold togeather
USB was there.
Windows 95 didn't support it, Windows 98A had very crappy support for it. Remeber Bill Gates BSoD'ed Windows 98 by plugging in a scanner.
In the spring of '98 there were ports on some motherboards but there were very few USB devices to buy.
Then at WWDC '98 the iMac came out. Legacy free, just USB. Then it took off.
I don't think it's a sad state of affairs that computer-illiterate people drive the strong majority of the technology market.
A computer should have a simple enough interface that 95% of people can be sat down infront of it and do what they need to do. Computers should be as easy to run as the interface of a car.
I'm an avid slashdot reader, and all I want is for the computer to work. I understand the differences in RAM technology, cache size, all that garbage. But I just want a computer to work. I think Apple gets it, with the iMac, eMac, iMac LCD, Towers and the books. Just make computers that work.
When iPhoto came out I watched the ZD or Tech TV piece with John Dvorak and some other fellas talking about it. Dvorak was going on and on about how on Windows he could do the same thing with the combination of 3 programs for Windows that were free and he didn't get why iPhoto was a big deal.
That's the problem I have with Dvorak. He doesn't understand end users. I have 400 users at my work. None of them want to hook a digital camera up and have it take 3 programs to get thier pictures to a webpage.
I was going to say that very thing. Then I went and made a pizza and watched TV.
I don't understand what the point of the story was about in all honesty.
Someone puts something up on the web, and someone might see something later and he doesn't think that's fair? Crap, then lets yell at the brower makers for including the Save As Web Archive too.
The Wayback Machine is cool. If you publish to the web, expect to be archived.
"...where did they get such old copies of my websites, and who gave them permission to make those copies? I certainly didn't provide either. Perhaps I'm too much of a purist, but I've always seen the internet as an ever-changing medium, not a permanent one."
That's a statement from someone that must think the "internet" is a nebulous "thing" that exists without "borders" or "rules" beyond "nations". And doesn't understand that it lives on pieces of spinning disks with magnetic particles and can be easily saved elsewhere.
Frankly, it sounded more like a Jon Katz article.
CAFE has been proposed and wrangled on and never, ever made into a binding law for the automakers.
Wrong.
At this time, in the United State there is NOT a government mandated fuel consumption, and vehicles are increasing thier fuel efficentcy, not because of government mandates, but because the marketplace demands it.
Buy your guns person to person without going to a licenced gun dealer, then you don't have a background check.
But the Gun Control people want that monitored too, that's because people don't kill people, guns drive them to violence.
If the CDs are always taxed, then all the artists will be feed.
The Communications infrastructure should be nationalized like the Federal Highway System is, and the Department of Transportation should be given the expanded role of supervising that and the other transportation infrastructures under the gise of Department of Infrastructure.
The Feds will establish standards, like they did with the Interstate System and provide funds for it's upkeep and expansion. At the point where you leave the Federal Backbone, the private sector and local governments can take over, like it does with private streets or highways.
The Feds will decide on open protocals like TCP/IP, and furthermore, I think that there should be a minimum amount of fibre should be established so that whenever road construction or repair is underway, more fibre will be run in that right of way.
That's just what we don't need in the US, Federal subsidies for home internet access.
I look at the amount of money these companies should make and I just don't understand how they can lose money.
I know it's going into bad investments and corporate officer salery, but you'd think someone could manage one of these companies right...
I think the US Federal Government shouldn't bail anyone out. The Airline industry, no way, a car maker, no way.
Numbers are numbers until you think of the human toll. I didn't ever say that the War in Israel is as bad as WW2. I said that the Israelis and Palestinians are happy to kill each other even though there are TV cameras everywhere. In fact, some instances, like the hanging of the Israelis at the Police Station may have been brought on by the fact that a TV crew was there.
.45 splatter a brain on the wall infront of me.
Western TV crews were in Iran and Iraq during the war there in the 80s and that didn't stop hundreds of thousands from being killed.
There is no thing as "conventional warfare". War is a living, evolving thing, in 1916 armored units weren't conventional, in 1938 an offensive lead by armor wasn't conventional, in 1965 moving brigades by helicopter wasn't conventional, in 2000 leading a war with a few hundred troopers supported by stratigic bombers wasn't conventional, and on Sept 10th, attacking urban areas with captured airplanes wasn't conventional. Now all these things are. What is conventional, changes as technology and tactics evolve. Between 1941 and 1970, if you were attacking an urban area, you had to outnumber the defenders 5 to 1, and be prepared for 40-70% casualties, this was illustrated in Stalingrad, Warsaw, Berlin, Korea and Hue City. In 2002, the IDF showed that it could take a city wit a 2 to 1 force advantage and take 10% casualties, this wasn't conventional warfighting. Today the United State Marine Corps are in a serious study mode and learning the lessions from the IDF on how to take a city.
I saw alot of bloodshed. Just like a nuclear weapon going off, you don't see the blood on the walls, but you know many, many people are dying. On Sept 11th I watched mass murder happen, in a way that's as bloody and horrible as seeing a
And yes, the people that thought it was "cool" were citizens of a government that perpetrated the act. The planners were either in the Goverenment of the Islamic State of Afghanistan or under the protection of that Nation-State and it's rulers.
To argue otherwise is saying that the men that drop the bombs from a B-52 arn't citizens of the United States.