Standardized testing, for all of its flaws, at least eliminates the worst of the cultural and personal bias of the admissions process, by stating more or less "you are required to know a modicum of the following, if you don't, learn it and come back for another try."
Maybe, maybe not. You seem to assume that standardized tests are perfectly objective, which is not necessarily true. When a test is designed, it will invariably reflect the cultural biases of those who design it. Nobody can be absolutely objective unless they have lived completely isolated from the world; at some point the test becomes a subjective assessment of what the test designers think is important to know. Testing someone then amounts to measuring how well they can think like the test designers. The designers presumably had some success in college but that doesn't mean that passing their test means that a high-school student will do similarly well.
That said, I do agree that interviews can often be far worse.
As to the notion of using legos for colleges admissions, I can only cringe at the value a college education received in the United States will have fifteen or twenty years from now.
Why so? I don't know exactly what the Lego test involves, but presumably it's not "build the spaceship from the step-by-step instructions". If done properly it could measure what's really important for potential college students, i.e. the ability to attack new and unfamiliar problems and find creative solutions. There's still some potential for testing bias, but at least in this case it doesn't appear to be a multiple-choice, only-one-answer-is-right situation but rather one in which creativity and inventiveness would be useful and where a person could apply their own background to the problem to come up with their own solution.
What about QNX OS for small embedded applications...
You might as well ask, what about Windows 98 for a desktop environment? That's not a flame, it's just that you're comparing open software with closed. Sure, QNX is an alternative, and (unlike Windows) reportedly a great one. But like Windows it's commercial closed-source software. Open, free software has obvious appeal to Slashdotters.:-) Probably enough that some would use a free DOS rather than QNX even if they had the budget for QNX.
There is already the demo disk, with several intressting apps...
Just keep in mind that the demo is "free beer" free and not "free speech" free. And it's just a demo, not something you could use in your own embedded systems.
for embedded system there's zillions of OS, like QNX/NTO and more at http://www.embedded.com
Yes, but how many of them are free? QNX is by all accounts a great embedded OS, but it'll cost ya if you want to use it in a product. Embedded Linux might be good, but might not, depending on system requirements. And I'm not sure how useable Cygnus' eCos is yet. In any case, though, DOS for embedded systems survives for reasons similar to Windows' continued survival: Lots of people already know how to use it, and when starting a new project this gives it an advantage over other OSs. I wouldn't want to use it if I could avoid it, but that doesn't mean there's not a demand for this sort of thing.
Here's an alternate idea that's more appealing from a Discordian sort of perspective....
With a little Perl/Python/whatever hackery, you could easily create a script to randomize you cookie files. It's easy, you just open the file, read the cookie values, change a few random digits here and there, and write it back out. Ideally the new cookie should have the same format as the old one, so that it looks like valid data even though it's random junk.
Then set up a cron job to run this script at regular intervals. And set your browser prefs to just accept all cookies, because you know they're going to get scrambled anyway. Voila, every day you are a different person to the likes of doubleclick. But they can't tell that they're getting bogus data, and so they aggressively attempt to target market these random non-persons.
The only thing to keep in mind is to periodically quit/restart your browser, so as to wipe out any memory-resident cookies.
I did this at my last job, but I lost the script in transition and haven't gotten around to re-creating it. But it's easy for anyone with even a little bit of Perl skill.
In order for a virus to have a real effect it would require someone to be stupid enough to run (log in) as root
And with this:
It's no so much about the product but about how you manage your system. We advise people never to do anything in root unless they absolutely have to
But the problem lies with people who run Linux but lack backgroud with Unix configuration and security policies. For a lot of people, the user/root distinction is a pain in the ass, because they're used to Windows. They don't want to learn new stuff to run Linux, they just want to use the latest cool thing. So they end up doing most everything as root, because it's easier that way. This is plainly stupid, and invites disaster, but some people will never learn until their noses are rubbed in the steaming pile of idiocy they've just laid.
So I wouldn't be too surprised to see some sort of Linux trojan horse emerge, even if it required full root access in order to be effective. Clueful users would not get directly infected, but if the trojan became widespread they might suffer some indirect trouble from it.
Also, given that this was reported on ZDNet, I can't help but wonder if the FUD is motivated by antivirus s/w companies scared of losing their market. But maybe I'm just too paranoid for my own good, eh?:-)
Harel acknowledges that our society could barely function without them. But he warns against the widespread mythology that computers will be able to do almost anything we can think up.
Either Harel or Katz is apparently living in some 1950s-era science fiction movie in which computers are mysterious, all-powerful, poorly understood devices. Because anyone who actually uses a computer for any length of time will be quickly disabused of any notion that they can do "almost anything that we can think up". And anyone with a CS degree will be familiar with the concept of NP-completeness and will therefore have a solid basis for having abandoned anything like the magical, worshipful view that Katz suggests here.
If Katz is reporting accurately here, I have to wonder what planet Harel is from where people still think like this. Katz's description makes the book sound like a 'keen grasp of the obvious' sort of tome.
We now know that not all algorithmic problems are solvable by computers, even with unlimited access to resources like time and memory space.
Excuse me? We now know this? Get serious. NP completeness is not a new idea. We've known this for a long time now. Either Katz or Harel is way off here in suggesting that this is some kind of recent discovery.
The limitless potential power of computing has all kinds of implications for technology, education, culture and politics.
Psst... Katz... You just said that this book demonstrates that computers are limited in what they can do. Now they're limitless? Please make up your mind...
In fact, why have any? Who needs 'em? Let someone else deal with the crappy diapers and the screaming, I've got better things to do with my life. Why do people have so many kids? Because most people don't think too much about their choices in life, they just follow the standard script that everyone else follows. You can have a fulfilling life without kids, all you need is the independence to realize that you can live life on your own terms, even if most everyone else acts like a sheep.
If the Open Goup's web pages are to be believed, then that's right. At least in a strictly legal sense. I don't know how NetBSD (and maybe other BSDs) gets away with calling themselves "Unix".
Linux ain't Unix because Unix is really "Unix(tm)".
Whether Linux is Unix really depends on what you mean by "Unix". If (like most sane people) you consider "Unix" to describe an operating system that works in certain specific ways (i.e. a functional description), then Linux is just as much Unix as anything else.
But "Unix" is still trademarked, and the trademark is owned by the Open Group. If you want to know what is and isn't "Unix(tm)", check out http://www.unix-systems.org/what_is_unix.html.
Reading through the Open Group's pages, it seems that the only thing that prevents Linux from being Unix is that nobody has paid for certification. Their fee is "from $25,000 for up to 1,000 units per annum, to $110,000 for more than 30,000 units per annum." It's not clear how (or if) they'd certify a free system. Red Hat or Caldera or someone could pay, but keep in mind that they're very picky and specific about it-- you have to certify a specific OS release on a specific piece of hardware. So even if Red Hat were to pay, that wouldn't mean that Linux was legally Unix, but rather something like "Red Hat 6.0 with kernel 2.2.13 running on a Compaq XXXX" is Unix, and that'd be the end of it. Current Unix(tm) licensees include Digital, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, NCR, SCO, Siemens Nixdorf, Siemens Pyramid, Sun, Bull, and SGI.
On Linux, they say:
Developed by Linus Torvalds, Linux is a product that mimics the form and function of a UNIX system, but is not derived from licensed source code. Rather, it was developed independently; by a group of developers in an informal alliance on the net. A major benefit is that the source code is freely available (under the GNU copyleft), enabling the technically astute to alter and amend the system; it also means that there are many, freely available, utilities and specialist drivers available on the net.
Recent versions of Glibc include much functionality from the Single UNIX Specification, Version 2 (for UNIX 98).
So, as I said, there's not much separating Linux from Unix(tm) save for a bunch of money. And there's nothing of substance separating Linux from Unix from the perspective of any reasonable person.
You will also see the exact opposite of open source happen. In order to successfully beat another team to the finish, people will hoard code. Not just for that one project, they will hoard their entire code base so that no other team will have the advantage of their tool set.
Presumably a condition for winning the bounty is to release the source code as open source, at least for the project in question. You're right that there would be unreleased tools used by each team, and there would be an incentive to hoard them from other teams. But still, paying bounties for open source is a step (however incomplete) in a good direction.
There's a different, but related issue as far as hoarding: As an AC pointed out, the bounty scheme would move people back from the bazaar into a cathedral. The benefit of OSS is bazaar development, in which you share your code around, and people contribute bug-fixes-- even while development is still in progress. But if you're developing for a bounty, you're not going to let anyone see the code until it's fully developed, lest they run with it and get the bounty with your work.
What you end up with is cathedral-style development followed by bazaar-style distribution. First releases will be as buggy as any commercialware. But even the bazaared distribution isn't going to work here-- who's going to contribute bug fixes on a bountied software when they could be working toward new bounties? So not only does the initial release suffer, but post-release improvements suffer as well.
Bounties may have some benefits, but they really miss most of the advantages of OSS.
"This indicates that Moore's law may be running into a brick wall in the next few years. With a limit in growth of CPU horsepower, you'll start to see limits on AI..."
Moore's law is only relevant here if you assume that future developments will do nothing but refine current technology. Sooner or later we'll run out of steam making silicon IC CPUs. But that doesn't mean that progress in computational processing will end. What about new technologies? Do you really suppose that none will ever be discovered? I don't know what will pick up where the Pentium XVIII leaves off, maybe quantum computers, maybe optical systems, or maybe something not yet discovered. But Moore's law as applied to ICs says nothing about the potential for increasing computational power in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
...head on over to freshmeat and look up cbrowser, a nice TCL/Tk graphical front-end.
Standardized testing, for all of its flaws, at least eliminates the worst of the cultural and personal bias of the admissions process, by stating more or less "you are required to know a modicum of the following, if you don't, learn it and come back for another try."
Maybe, maybe not. You seem to assume that standardized tests are perfectly objective, which is not necessarily true. When a test is designed, it will invariably reflect the cultural biases of those who design it. Nobody can be absolutely objective unless they have lived completely isolated from the world; at some point the test becomes a subjective assessment of what the test designers think is important to know. Testing someone then amounts to measuring how well they can think like the test designers. The designers presumably had some success in college but that doesn't mean that passing their test means that a high-school student will do similarly well.
That said, I do agree that interviews can often be far worse.
As to the notion of using legos for colleges admissions, I can only cringe at the value a college education received in the United States will have fifteen or twenty years from now.
Why so? I don't know exactly what the Lego test involves, but presumably it's not "build the spaceship from the step-by-step instructions". If done properly it could measure what's really important for potential college students, i.e. the ability to attack new and unfamiliar problems and find creative solutions. There's still some potential for testing bias, but at least in this case it doesn't appear to be a multiple-choice, only-one-answer-is-right situation but rather one in which creativity and inventiveness would be useful and where a person could apply their own background to the problem to come up with their own solution.
What about QNX OS for small embedded applications...
:-) Probably enough that some would use a free DOS rather than QNX even if they had the budget for QNX.
You might as well ask, what about Windows 98 for a desktop environment? That's not a flame, it's just that you're comparing open software with closed. Sure, QNX is an alternative, and (unlike Windows) reportedly a great one. But like Windows it's commercial closed-source software. Open, free software has obvious appeal to Slashdotters.
There is already the demo disk, with several intressting apps...
Just keep in mind that the demo is "free beer" free and not "free speech" free. And it's just a demo, not something you could use in your own embedded systems.
for embedded system there's zillions of OS, like QNX/NTO and more at http://www.embedded.com
Yes, but how many of them are free? QNX is by all accounts a great embedded OS, but it'll cost ya if you want to use it in a product. Embedded Linux might be good, but might not, depending on system requirements. And I'm not sure how useable Cygnus' eCos is yet. In any case, though, DOS for embedded systems survives for reasons similar to Windows' continued survival: Lots of people already know how to use it, and when starting a new project this gives it an advantage over other OSs. I wouldn't want to use it if I could avoid it, but that doesn't mean there's not a demand for this sort of thing.
Here's an alternate idea that's more appealing from a Discordian sort of perspective....
With a little Perl/Python/whatever hackery, you could easily create a script to randomize you cookie files. It's easy, you just open the file, read the cookie values, change a few random digits here and there, and write it back out. Ideally the new cookie should have the same format as the old one, so that it looks like valid data even though it's random junk.
Then set up a cron job to run this script at regular intervals. And set your browser prefs to just accept all cookies, because you know they're going to get scrambled anyway. Voila, every day you are a different person to the likes of doubleclick. But they can't tell that they're getting bogus data, and so they aggressively attempt to target market these random non-persons.
The only thing to keep in mind is to periodically quit/restart your browser, so as to wipe out any memory-resident cookies.
I did this at my last job, but I lost the script in transition and haven't gotten around to re-creating it. But it's easy for anyone with even a little bit of Perl skill.
OK, I think most of us can agree with this:
:-)
In order for a virus to have a real effect it would require someone to be stupid enough to run (log in) as root
And with this:
It's no so much about the product but about how you manage your system. We advise people never to do anything in root unless they absolutely have to
But the problem lies with people who run Linux but lack backgroud with Unix configuration and security policies. For a lot of people, the user/root distinction is a pain in the ass, because they're used to Windows. They don't want to learn new stuff to run Linux, they just want to use the latest cool thing. So they end up doing most everything as root, because it's easier that way. This is plainly stupid, and invites disaster, but some people will never learn until their noses are rubbed in the steaming pile of idiocy they've just laid.
So I wouldn't be too surprised to see some sort of Linux trojan horse emerge, even if it required full root access in order to be effective. Clueful users would not get directly infected, but if the trojan became widespread they might suffer some indirect trouble from it.
Also, given that this was reported on ZDNet, I can't help but wonder if the FUD is motivated by antivirus s/w companies scared of losing their market. But maybe I'm just too paranoid for my own good, eh?
Either Harel or Katz is apparently living in some 1950s-era science fiction movie in which computers are mysterious, all-powerful, poorly understood devices. Because anyone who actually uses a computer for any length of time will be quickly disabused of any notion that they can do "almost anything that we can think up". And anyone with a CS degree will be familiar with the concept of NP-completeness and will therefore have a solid basis for having abandoned anything like the magical, worshipful view that Katz suggests here.
If Katz is reporting accurately here, I have to wonder what planet Harel is from where people still think like this. Katz's description makes the book sound like a 'keen grasp of the obvious' sort of tome.
We now know that not all algorithmic problems are solvable by computers, even with unlimited access to resources like time and memory space.
Excuse me? We now know this? Get serious. NP completeness is not a new idea. We've known this for a long time now. Either Katz or Harel is way off here in suggesting that this is some kind of recent discovery.
The limitless potential power of computing has all kinds of implications for technology, education, culture and politics.
Psst... Katz... You just said that this book demonstrates that computers are limited in what they can do. Now they're limitless? Please make up your mind...
--
why have another kid?
In fact, why have any? Who needs 'em? Let someone else deal with the crappy diapers and the screaming, I've got better things to do with my life. Why do people have so many kids? Because most people don't think too much about their choices in life, they just follow the standard script that everyone else follows. You can have a fulfilling life without kids, all you need is the independence to realize that you can live life on your own terms, even if most everyone else acts like a sheep.
If the Open Goup's web pages are to be believed, then that's right. At least in a strictly legal sense. I don't know how NetBSD (and maybe other BSDs) gets away with calling themselves "Unix".
Whether Linux is Unix really depends on what you mean by "Unix". If (like most sane people) you consider "Unix" to describe an operating system that works in certain specific ways (i.e. a functional description), then Linux is just as much Unix as anything else.
But "Unix" is still trademarked, and the trademark is owned by the Open Group. If you want to know what is and isn't "Unix(tm)", check out http://www.unix-systems.org/what_is_unix.html.
Reading through the Open Group's pages, it seems that the only thing that prevents Linux from being Unix is that nobody has paid for certification. Their fee is "from $25,000 for up to 1,000 units per annum, to $110,000 for more than 30,000 units per annum." It's not clear how (or if) they'd certify a free system. Red Hat or Caldera or someone could pay, but keep in mind that they're very picky and specific about it-- you have to certify a specific OS release on a specific piece of hardware. So even if Red Hat were to pay, that wouldn't mean that Linux was legally Unix, but rather something like "Red Hat 6.0 with kernel 2.2.13 running on a Compaq XXXX" is Unix, and that'd be the end of it. Current Unix(tm) licensees include Digital, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, NCR, SCO, Siemens Nixdorf, Siemens Pyramid, Sun, Bull, and SGI.
On Linux, they say:
So, as I said, there's not much separating Linux from Unix(tm) save for a bunch of money. And there's nothing of substance separating Linux from Unix from the perspective of any reasonable person.What you end up with is cathedral-style development followed by bazaar-style distribution. First releases will be as buggy as any commercialware. But even the bazaared distribution isn't going to work here-- who's going to contribute bug fixes on a bountied software when they could be working toward new bounties? So not only does the initial release suffer, but post-release improvements suffer as well.
Bounties may have some benefits, but they really miss most of the advantages of OSS.
running into a brick wall in the next few years. With a limit in growth of CPU horsepower, you'll start to
see limits on AI..."
Moore's law is only relevant here if you assume that future developments will do nothing but refine current technology. Sooner or later we'll run out of steam making silicon IC CPUs. But that doesn't mean that progress in computational processing will end. What about new technologies? Do you really suppose that none will ever be discovered? I don't know what will pick up where the Pentium XVIII leaves off, maybe quantum computers, maybe optical systems, or maybe something not yet discovered. But Moore's law as applied to ICs says nothing about the potential for increasing computational power in the future.