I'd forgotten to mention MACS in my rant later.. Thanks for pointing it out. I was one of those soldiers who had to spend many, many hours at MACS trying to improve my horrible reflexes.;)
Before you go yammering about how this man knows nothing about video games or their effect of youth, don't play hypocrites and start commenting on books you haven't read. Go buy the book, read it,/then/ make your commentary.
I'm familiar with one of Grossman's earlier books, "On Killing," which was aimed more at the military and talking about, well, you can probably guess from the book's title. I wish I had a copy here at work with me so I could quote some of the statistics he used, but I'll try to give you the gist.
In the Civil War, the accuracy of soldiers, measured by casualties in ratio to shots fired, was abominable.. Barely 2%, if memory serves. Even accounting for the lack of accuracy of their firearms, it was obvious that very few of the soldiers were hitting their targets. Compare this to their accuracy, on the range, against a simple round target, and you can see that they are doing far worse on the battlefield.
Grossman makes the suggestion that many of these men were unconsciously trying A) not to hit their target or B) trying not to get shot, and in a panic. He also notes that artillery weapons suffered much less of a discrepancy between in training and on the battlefield. He postulates that man has a natural, inbred aversion to killing his fellow man, which is common among most animals.
He goes on to describe this same discrepancy all over history, until we come to the modern era. He starts to make his point about video games with the Faulklands conflict. Here we have two forces, with similar amounts of training, similar weaponry and size of force. The only difference in their training is that the Faulklanders are training on shooting dummies.. Human silhouettes. The Brits are still training on a gentleman's target, the bullseye. He postulates that the fire/no-fire ratio is higher with the Faulklanders, because they have become desensitized to the idea of training their rifle on another human being.
Fast forward to Ft. Benning and the U.S. Army. The infantryman's accuracy takes a considerable jump right about the time that the Army standardizes to field training using pop up dummies. These dummies look very human, at a distance, and only appear for a brief few seconds. It's acquire, shoot and reshoot, before the target drops out of sight.. Grossman, and the Pentagon, believe that this greatly increases the infantryman's likelihood of shooting the enemy. From all appearences, they are correct, although we haven't had a good conflict to test the theory.
Now pause a moment, and compare our military pop up targets with Quake. Quake, the targets move.. Fast. People have to chase them.. Aggression is king. Grossman's theory is that this is eroding the natural instinct not to kill your species just like those dummies and pop-ups do. Think about all the blood you see in an action movie? People dying left and right, with the heroes just marching through. Do you think that maybe, just maybe, that might affect that disinclination to shoot?
I've gotten away from my point, here. READ THE DAMN BOOK. Don't go shooting down someone's theory as groundless until you've read it. Check his facts.. Don't go whining and flaming here until you've at least done that.
Would you rather, Mr. Katz, that we waited for corporate America to map out the Human Genome and patent it?
It is the nature of man to explore everything in his environment. To poke, prod, analyze, tear apart and put it back together. It is not a question of whether we will study something, but when.
I, for one, would rather see this research in the public domain than locked away under some bizarre Non-Disclosure-Act, which is exactly what will happen if the private sector gets its way.
As usual, Katz never cites any hard sources for his assumptions. For statistics and analysis of crime rates among students, please take a look at the NEA'sSchool Safety Facts. Please keep in mind that the NEA (National Educators Association) is a teachers' lobbyist concern, and does have some slant in the favor of public school teachers.
That said, I find Katz' immediate implication of 'educators' as proponents of the Mosaic 2000 program offensive. I can't think of many teachers who would support such an idiotic proposal, and also resent the implication that educators would support such an abomination to suppress free speech outside the classroom, using such media as the WWW.
While I agree that there/has/ been a failing of late for teachers to meet the needs of some of their brighter students, there is only a finite amound of work these people can do in the course of a day. When you have a class of at least 20-25 students, it is very difficult for the teacher to focus on just/one/ student. What these people need is support, not half-informed pundits shooting their mouth off.
As far as tight social groups go, I would suggest visiting your local Social MUD/MUCK/MUSH/MUVE/MOO/what-have-you. A good one to start off with would be Timescape MUCK, which is a light-roleplay, heavily social little muck that I pretty much live on. It's a lot like the old BBS days, except you really don't have file transfer. As for door games, the combat MUDs and heavy-roleplay MUSHes, like Shadowrun MUSH, Armageddon and the now defunct Hemlock MUSH seem to have taken over that role, as well as Asheron's Call, Ultima Online and the rest of the MMORPG pay-to-play services.
MUCKs, especially, have a very close-together feel to them, fostered by an open building policy. People can easily build new areas and add new code to the MUCK, allowing them to create homes, roleplaying areas and even games. The MUD community is in a bit of a transition right now, as the coders are moving on to fourth-gen servers, like ColdMUD and LambdaMOO, so we could certainly use an infusion of new blood.
Btw, you'll probably want to download a MUD client for connection.. I would suggest TkMOO-lite, since most everyone here has access to Tcl/Tk and probably has the urge to script and tweak things.
I can't think of any software that will provide application packages for ZEN aside from Novell's own servers.
I may be underestimating your school district, but I am surprised they would be using ZEN at all. As it stands right now, using ZEN for package deployment requires a massive initial commitment with experienced techs, to build those packages. Many apps have strange interdependencies that make it difficult to employ ZEN at an application-by-application level. (The Unholy Trinity comes to mind: IE, Outlook and Office.)
If you can justify that kind of initial commitment, you must realize that many application providers will not support apps installed via ZEN, since they have no way of testing your layout in-house. Again, Microsoft comes to mind, as does Adobe.
If you are using this simply to speed the building and development of workstations which don't vary greatly from user to user, I would suggest using Symantec's Ghost to build each one from a set of four or five images, one for each hardware base and user class, accompanied by careful setup to ensure the users maintain their data on a networked drives. Most application providers will support this arrangement.
This will still require an initial commitment to designing/good/ initial images, and, when you have to patch one of the built machines, you'll either have to do it by hand, or by slipping it into their login scripts.
Btw, LanManager, which is now free from microsoft, can be used to build a wonderful bootdisk which maps a drive to a shared directory containing Ghost and various build images. Sure beats running around with a stack of images on CDROM. It works even better when accompanied by a Xircom Pocket Etherlink Adapter, which converts a parallel port into a network interface. No NIC? No problem!
Heaven forfend that a smaller, slimmer company might take this OS, which the home user base is familiar with, and FIX it! (An action I find unlikely, but still fantasize about, having done quite a bit of desktop support.)
Then what would we have to gripe about, aside from the fact that we have to go down to the store and pay for a copy?
I am/very/ impressed by the coup for Corel. Instead of trying to break into the Microsoft stranglehold on OEM bundling with complete workstations, they're trying to leverage themselves in the Do-It-Yourself industry. This is an excellent manuever, if you stop to think about it. Most people who buy these motherboards as retail have some modicum of technical prowess. These are the exact same people who would install Linux, out of curiousity, simply because the disk was provided to them. Heck, this even leverages them in with existing Linux users, since we also buy motherboards, and very few Linux geeks can resist the urge to give a new distro a test drive. Nice trick, Corel!
I must apologize for not mentioning OSS; I'd glossed over it since it is only there to provide compatability to unsupported hardware. (Seems like a noble enough reason for me, but, then again, I'm focussed on usability and not how free the OS is.) I also shouldn't have ignored the heavy dependence of COL on KDE, which in turn depends on Qt, which still isn't completely free. But, before you declare Redhat more holy, remember that Redhat also includes KDE with their distributions and install it by default.
I do not regard Redhat nor Caldera as being free and open enough for the GPL purists among us. I believe the fix made over rdist merely occured because of the possibility of offending their slowly growing base of corporate developers and users.
Do not forget that BOTH of these companies are for-profit institutions and are deserving of special scrutiny by the open source community. Let's not delude ourselves about how many of Redhat's new stockholders believe in Open Source.
And all this time I thought that came from everyone playing Ultima IV when they were supposed to be studying! Another illusion ruined.;)
Re: This book changed my life
on
Snow Crash
·
· Score: 1
Personally, neither Cryptonomicon or Snow Crash really changed my life.. Frankly, Snow Crash wasn't too applicable to the world at hand, and felt more like a bit of satire, especially at the beginning, where Stepheson explained the natural evolution of Franchises into governments. (Don't get me wrong.. I'm a sucker for social parody.)
I think his earlier book, Zodiac, had more impact on the way I live.. Especially since, for quite some time, I lived in Boston, and saw/smelled the Charles for myself. Now I try to pay a little closer attention to my impact on the world around me, and try not to waste my time on many of the more futile 'green' gestures. (Paper vs. Plastic, anyone? Paper plants dump far more toxic chemicals into our water table than plastic manufacturers.. And it takes less energy to recycle plastic.)
One word for RedHat: rdist. Remember this from an earlierAsk Slashdot discussion? It appears the latest distro of RedHat had included some third-party tools that were NOT free for commercial use, and they also appear to be disinterested in such standardization as LSB (Linux Standards Base). Frankly, if you're looking for purely free open-source linux, you'd be better off with Debian.
RedHat is just as likely as Caldera to include proprietary third party tools. I believe that, in this case, either Bob Young was grasping at straws on that point or he was slinging a little old-fashioned mud. I personally prefer Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 for desktop machines.. It builds simply, and there are only a few packages that I need to add afterwards, including ripping out the usual dozen of services I don't like running on a client workstation.
In the commercial software world, if you state a requirement, you are expected to back it up. If Metrowerks says 'Linux 2.0.x+' and doesn't declare which libc they require, or GNOME and KDE version, which X11 they need, etc., they will invariably have a horde of screaming users asking for a refund. It is easier for their product development team to just say 'We will support SuSE up to and beyond version , and RedHat up to and beyond version ', and be done with the matter.
This makes life a LOT easier for their QA department to isolate testbeds for alpha testing since they don't have to simulate each and every possible environment. Metrowerks has always had a reputation of being people who test their products exhaustively and provide excellent support to their users.
That being said, I have installed CodeWarrior for SuSE on my virgin Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 workstation and it worked. Beautifully. The install script doesn't even bother checking whether I'm running SuSE or not, it merely assumes I'm literate enough to read the box and must know what I'm doing.
The Linux version of Codewarrior doesn't provide its own compiler, instead it depends on EGCS. In theory, you can cross-compile if you set up EGCS correctly. Therefore, with a modicum of tweaking it should be possible to compile for PalmOS, for example. (A traditional stronghold for Metrowerks.)
Since they didn't include their own libraries or compiler, you lose CodeWarrior's usual ability to create cross-platform GUI apps. This, coupled with the lack of a revision control interface implies that Metrowerks has decided to aim this newest incarnation at recreational programmers like myself who are familiar with using GNU tools for Linux development who would prefer using the excellent CodeWarrior IDE. (Slant warning: I've been a big fan of Codewarrior for some time and prefer it to the Visual Interdev suite. They even managed to convince me to abandon my venerable Borland C++ IDE, which is no mean feat since I cut my teeth on Turbo Pascal 3.0.)
According to Metrowerks' documentation, the reason CodeWarrior for Linux doesn't do its own debugging is tied to the fact that EGCS doesn't provide sufficient symbolic information to drive their debugger. I don't find Metrowerks' decision to rely on third party debuggers especially bad, since there are several good OpenSource debuggers for Linux.
I am curious, however, how easy it would be to extend Codewarrior for Linux with support for new target hosts and other, non-C/C++ programming languages.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd forgotten to mention MACS in my rant later.. Thanks for pointing it out. I was one of those soldiers who had to spend many, many hours at MACS trying to improve my horrible reflexes. ;)
Before you go yammering about how this man knows nothing about video games or their effect of youth, don't play hypocrites and start commenting on books you haven't read. Go buy the book, read it, /then/ make your commentary.
I'm familiar with one of Grossman's earlier books, "On Killing," which was aimed more at the military and talking about, well, you can probably guess from the book's title. I wish I had a copy here at work with me so I could quote some of the statistics he used, but I'll try to give you the gist.
In the Civil War, the accuracy of soldiers, measured by casualties in ratio to shots fired, was abominable.. Barely 2%, if memory serves. Even accounting for the lack of accuracy of their firearms, it was obvious that very few of the soldiers were hitting their targets. Compare this to their accuracy, on the range, against a simple round target, and you can see that they are doing far worse on the battlefield.
Grossman makes the suggestion that many of these men were unconsciously trying A) not to hit their target or B) trying not to get shot, and in a panic. He also notes that artillery weapons suffered much less of a discrepancy between in training and on the battlefield. He postulates that man has a natural, inbred aversion to killing his fellow man, which is common among most animals.
He goes on to describe this same discrepancy all over history, until we come to the modern era. He starts to make his point about video games with the Faulklands conflict. Here we have two forces, with similar amounts of training, similar weaponry and size of force. The only difference in their training is that the Faulklanders are training on shooting dummies.. Human silhouettes. The Brits are still training on a gentleman's target, the bullseye. He postulates that the fire/no-fire ratio is higher with the Faulklanders, because they have become desensitized to the idea of training their rifle on another human being.
Fast forward to Ft. Benning and the U.S. Army. The infantryman's accuracy takes a considerable jump right about the time that the Army standardizes to field training using pop up dummies. These dummies look very human, at a distance, and only appear for a brief few seconds. It's acquire, shoot and reshoot, before the target drops out of sight.. Grossman, and the Pentagon, believe that this greatly increases the infantryman's likelihood of shooting the enemy. From all appearences, they are correct, although we haven't had a good conflict to test the theory.
Now pause a moment, and compare our military pop up targets with Quake. Quake, the targets move.. Fast. People have to chase them.. Aggression is king. Grossman's theory is that this is eroding the natural instinct not to kill your species just like those dummies and pop-ups do. Think about all the blood you see in an action movie? People dying left and right, with the heroes just marching through. Do you think that maybe, just maybe, that might affect that disinclination to shoot?
I've gotten away from my point, here. READ THE DAMN BOOK. Don't go shooting down someone's theory as groundless until you've read it. Check his facts.. Don't go whining and flaming here until you've at least done that.
Would you rather, Mr. Katz, that we waited for corporate America to map out the Human Genome and patent it?
It is the nature of man to explore everything in his environment. To poke, prod, analyze, tear apart and put it back together. It is not a question of whether we will study something, but when.
I, for one, would rather see this research in the public domain than locked away under some bizarre Non-Disclosure-Act, which is exactly what will happen if the private sector gets its way.
As usual, Katz never cites any hard sources for his assumptions. For statistics and analysis of crime rates among students, please take a look at the NEA's School Safety Facts. Please keep in mind that the NEA (National Educators Association) is a teachers' lobbyist concern, and does have some slant in the favor of public school teachers.
That said, I find Katz' immediate implication of 'educators' as proponents of the Mosaic 2000 program offensive. I can't think of many teachers who would support such an idiotic proposal, and also resent the implication that educators would support such an abomination to suppress free speech outside the classroom, using such media as the WWW.
While I agree that there /has/ been a failing of late for teachers to meet the needs of some of their brighter students, there is only a finite amound of work these people can do in the course of a day. When you have a class of at least 20-25 students, it is very difficult for the teacher to focus on just /one/ student. What these people need is support, not half-informed pundits shooting their mouth off.
As far as tight social groups go, I would suggest visiting your local Social MUD/MUCK/MUSH/MUVE/MOO/what-have-you. A good one to start off with would be Timescape MUCK, which is a light-roleplay, heavily social little muck that I pretty much live on. It's a lot like the old BBS days, except you really don't have file transfer. As for door games, the combat MUDs and heavy-roleplay MUSHes, like Shadowrun MUSH, Armageddon and the now defunct Hemlock MUSH seem to have taken over that role, as well as Asheron's Call, Ultima Online and the rest of the MMORPG pay-to-play services.
MUCKs, especially, have a very close-together feel to them, fostered by an open building policy. People can easily build new areas and add new code to the MUCK, allowing them to create homes, roleplaying areas and even games. The MUD community is in a bit of a transition right now, as the coders are moving on to fourth-gen servers, like ColdMUD and LambdaMOO, so we could certainly use an infusion of new blood.
Btw, you'll probably want to download a MUD client for connection.. I would suggest TkMOO-lite, since most everyone here has access to Tcl/Tk and probably has the urge to script and tweak things.
Yes, it was used in that box-office bomb, 'House II', as a plot device. ;)
So? Amiga has its own Slashdot Icon. You think we're ever going to see /that/ come back to life? ;)
I can't think of any software that will provide application packages for ZEN aside from Novell's own servers.
I may be underestimating your school district, but I am surprised they would be using ZEN at all. As it stands right now, using ZEN for package deployment requires a massive initial commitment with experienced techs, to build those packages. Many apps have strange interdependencies that make it difficult to employ ZEN at an application-by-application level. (The Unholy Trinity comes to mind: IE, Outlook and Office.)
If you can justify that kind of initial commitment, you must realize that many application providers will not support apps installed via ZEN, since they have no way of testing your layout in-house. Again, Microsoft comes to mind, as does Adobe.
If you are using this simply to speed the building and development of workstations which don't vary greatly from user to user, I would suggest using Symantec's Ghost to build each one from a set of four or five images, one for each hardware base and user class, accompanied by careful setup to ensure the users maintain their data on a networked drives. Most application providers will support this arrangement.
This will still require an initial commitment to designing /good/ initial images, and, when you have to patch one of the built machines, you'll either have to do it by hand, or by slipping it into their login scripts.
Btw, LanManager, which is now free from microsoft, can be used to build a wonderful bootdisk which maps a drive to a shared directory containing Ghost and various build images. Sure beats running around with a stack of images on CDROM. It works even better when accompanied by a Xircom Pocket Etherlink Adapter, which converts a parallel port into a network interface. No NIC? No problem!
<derision>
Heaven forfend that a smaller, slimmer company might take this OS, which the home user base is familiar with, and FIX it! (An action I find unlikely, but still fantasize about, having done quite a bit of desktop support.)
Then what would we have to gripe about, aside from the fact that we have to go down to the store and pay for a copy?
</derision>
I would pay good money to see that one.. An OS, bundled with the browser, instead of vice versa.
So, by your benchmark, Linux, which is free, is worth nothing, correct?
I am /very/ impressed by the coup for Corel. Instead of trying to break into the Microsoft stranglehold on OEM bundling with complete workstations, they're trying to leverage themselves in the Do-It-Yourself industry. This is an excellent manuever, if you stop to think about it.
Most people who buy these motherboards as retail have some modicum of technical prowess. These are the exact same people who would install Linux, out of curiousity, simply because the disk was provided to them. Heck, this even leverages them in with existing Linux users, since we also buy motherboards, and very few Linux geeks can resist the urge to give a new distro a test drive.
Nice trick, Corel!
I must apologize for not mentioning OSS; I'd glossed over it since it is only there to provide compatability to unsupported hardware. (Seems like a noble enough reason for me, but, then again, I'm focussed on usability and not how free the OS is.) I also shouldn't have ignored the heavy dependence of COL on KDE, which in turn depends on Qt, which still isn't completely free. But, before you declare Redhat more holy, remember that Redhat also includes KDE with their distributions and install it by default.
I do not regard Redhat nor Caldera as being free and open enough for the GPL purists among us. I believe the fix made over rdist merely occured because of the possibility of offending their slowly growing base of corporate developers and users.
Do not forget that BOTH of these companies are for-profit institutions and are deserving of special scrutiny by the open source community. Let's not delude ourselves about how many of Redhat's new stockholders believe in Open Source.
And all this time I thought that came from everyone playing Ultima IV when they were supposed to be studying! Another illusion ruined. ;)
Personally, neither Cryptonomicon or Snow Crash really changed my life.. Frankly, Snow Crash wasn't too applicable to the world at hand, and felt more like a bit of satire, especially at the beginning, where Stepheson explained the natural evolution of Franchises into governments. (Don't get me wrong.. I'm a sucker for social parody.)
I think his earlier book, Zodiac, had more impact on the way I live.. Especially since, for quite some time, I lived in Boston, and saw/smelled the Charles for myself. Now I try to pay a little closer attention to my impact on the world around me, and try not to waste my time on many of the more futile 'green' gestures. (Paper vs. Plastic, anyone? Paper plants dump far more toxic chemicals into our water table than plastic manufacturers.. And it takes less energy to recycle plastic.)
One word for RedHat: rdist. Remember this from an earlierAsk Slashdot discussion? It appears the latest distro of RedHat had included some third-party tools that were NOT free for commercial use, and they also appear to be disinterested in such standardization as LSB (Linux Standards Base). Frankly, if you're looking for purely free open-source linux, you'd be better off with Debian.
RedHat is just as likely as Caldera to include proprietary third party tools. I believe that, in this case, either Bob Young was grasping at straws on that point or he was slinging a little old-fashioned mud. I personally prefer Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 for desktop machines.. It builds simply, and there are only a few packages that I need to add afterwards, including ripping out the usual dozen of services I don't like running on a client workstation.
In the commercial software world, if you state a requirement, you are expected to back it up. If Metrowerks says 'Linux 2.0.x+' and doesn't declare which libc they require, or GNOME and KDE version, which X11 they need, etc., they will invariably have a horde of screaming users asking for a refund. It is easier for their product development team to just say 'We will support SuSE up to and beyond version , and RedHat up to and beyond version ', and be done with the matter.
This makes life a LOT easier for their QA department to isolate testbeds for alpha testing since they don't have to simulate each and every possible environment. Metrowerks has always had a reputation of being people who test their products exhaustively and provide excellent support to their users.
That being said, I have installed CodeWarrior for SuSE on my virgin Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 workstation and it worked. Beautifully. The install script doesn't even bother checking whether I'm running SuSE or not, it merely assumes I'm literate enough to read the box and must know what I'm doing.
The Linux version of Codewarrior doesn't provide its own compiler, instead it depends on EGCS. In theory, you can cross-compile if you set up EGCS correctly. Therefore, with a modicum of tweaking it should be possible to compile for PalmOS, for example. (A traditional stronghold for Metrowerks.)
Since they didn't include their own libraries or compiler, you lose CodeWarrior's usual ability to create cross-platform GUI apps. This, coupled with the lack of a revision control interface implies that Metrowerks has decided to aim this newest incarnation at recreational programmers like myself who are familiar with using GNU tools for Linux development who would prefer using the excellent CodeWarrior IDE. (Slant warning: I've been a big fan of Codewarrior for some time and prefer it to the Visual Interdev suite. They even managed to convince me to abandon my venerable Borland C++ IDE, which is no mean feat since I cut my teeth on Turbo Pascal 3.0.)
According to Metrowerks' documentation, the reason CodeWarrior for Linux doesn't do its own debugging is tied to the fact that EGCS doesn't provide sufficient symbolic information to drive their debugger. I don't find Metrowerks' decision to rely on third party debuggers especially bad, since there are several good OpenSource debuggers for Linux.
I am curious, however, how easy it would be to extend Codewarrior for Linux with support for new target hosts and other, non-C/C++ programming languages.