The PPC is known to be one of the worst targets, right up there with Alpha.
With IBMs commitment to Linux on the RS/6000 series I'd assume that they are going to be throwing some weight behind a gcc optimization for PPC. If they come out with an updated RS/6000 Thinkpad, I'm there, baby, I'm soooo there...
Has this sort of hypothetical situation ever actualized itself, or is this yet another example of pie-in-the-sky paranoid pessimism that yet again shoves Slashdot into the realm of irrelevency?
If anyones heard of a situation were free beer software has been given away, then once dependence has been established, charged for up the ying-yang like so much virtual Crack, then please testify!
I've never heard of that other than the occasional anecdote from an unreliable/unverifiable source. Sounds like just another Paranoid Persecution Fantasy to me...
Bill gate was on the TV Sunday saying that if Microsoft was broken up, the individual companies couldn't react to a problem like ILUVYOU and cited this as another crappy reason why MS shouldn't be hammered into several competing pieces. The asshole totally sidestepped the fact that it's BECAUSE of this "feature" collusion that MS has now that a virus like this is able to shut down thousands of machines.
But if Microsoft really fixes their software, then Palm could have a problem. Spiff up their hardware, though, and it becomes a non-issue.
Now that Palm is licensing their OS, we should see a lot more variety in the Palm hardware. Recent changes in the OS (with more to come) allow for deployment of Palm OS on a variety of different hardware configurations, and with a variety of different Kernels.
I think that Palm is way ahead of MS as far as the software v. hardware race goes.
However... "Handwriting Recognition" really worries me. I used it in Apple's Newton and was not impressed at all with it. I don't think MS' HW recognition works any better (I haven't tried it yet though but I draw this from my experiences with lots of HW Recognition packages). Graffiti will be more reliable at the long run since it is very easily recognizable by the software and mismatch rate (i.e. recognizing 8 when you wrote B) is extremely low.
I have a Newton 130 and liked the HW recoginition when I first got it, but it became cumbersome and prone to error when your hand got tired. Guess what I did? I bought Graffiti (this was back when Palm was a software developer for Newton). Graffiti made the Newton HWR work soooo much better.
An "assault rifle" (any rifle that's unusually scary-looking or has a usably large magazine) would be scarcely more effective than a pistol against a standing army, and much harder to conceal or hold secretly, or find ammunition for.
Question: if they are so useless, why do we arm our armies with them?
It's easy to get 7.62mm and 5.56mm ammo in America. And if we are keeping these weapons to fight a war with (as I have posited), why do we need to conceal them?
We aren't getting them to commit crimes with, what do we have to fear? We can carry an assault rifle down the street and the police can do nothing if we don't attack or threaten anyone (caveat: there may be local laws against brandishing arms in public).
I put together a High quality DV editing system for a friend of mine last year. We used a P2-450, 256 megs RAM, 10 gig IDE hard drive, 9.1 gig SCSI-3 hard drive, 17 inch monitor, Diamond Viper 550 video card, and a DV Master card from Fast. The total cost was under $6000 not including a studio monitor which they added later for $700). The DV Master costs $3500 by itself.
This setup gives you a hardware DV codec, which makes editing sooo much faster. I wouldn't even consider a software codec (ie MacDV, or whatever chintzy capture card you can get for under $1000 for the PC) if you're planning on doing anything professional. It'll take forever. Software solutions are fine for editing your vacation videos, but will cost you money (ie time) for a pro job.
The system accepts DV format video via ieee 1394, or standard audio/video via rca(YUV and RGB in both NTSC and PAL/SECAM), 1/4 inch jack, and S-Video, and puts out signal to all of these formats.
The DV Master comes with a special version of Speed Razor made to interact specifically with the DV Master hardware. Because we have a hardware codec, we can edit DV format files, instead of capturing to quicktime files then dumping back to DV. It's a really great system.
Well then, ban firearms. IMHO it's a step that America should take since we are the country with the highest murder rate in the Western world, which is related to our Constitional "rights" to own guns and kill people.
Unfortunately for Americans, illegalizing guns plays right into yet another paranoid fantasy tht many Americans have: If guns are illegal, then the new World Order(ie Big Brother) will take over.
Personally, I don't think handguns should be legal. Handguns are for killing unarmored civilians. Assault rifles are for killing invaders, government troops, and Cops. Everyone should have an Assault rifle. It's the final check and balance in the Constitution: At any point the American people can take control of their country from the federal government. No unpopular governing power could survive here.
First of all, it is only natural to assume that "Geeko" is a play on the words "geek" and "gecko". This would be great, except that THE LOGO IS NOT A FREAKIN' GECKO!!! OK? HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO TELL YOU IDIOTS!!! IT IS A CHAMELEON!!! This makes absolutely no sense..
Technically, it's not a chameleon either, it's just a logo. Get over it.
Using a tool with a specific purpose implies pre-meditation on the part of the accused, dude.
You might get off with Murder in the second degree if you beat someone to death with your fists (or a even a crowbar), but if you kill someone with a high-power sniper rifle with a 30x night vision scope, most people would have a tough time believing that you didn't plan to kill anyone.
The same goes for breaking into computers.
You have the tools: this is a pre-meditated act and is worth a few extra years in the slammer.
IANAL, but I've seen enough 5-0 to know what consitutes a pre-meditated act, at least in Hawaii anyways.
You know there really isn't enough information in this article to determine what actually happened. It's all vague innuendo, and many of the charges may be thrown out before the trial, anyways.
Think of it this way: I own a set of lockpicks. That in and of itself is not illegal. If I were arrested for burglary and they found the lockpicks in my possession (either at home or on me) they'd add the charge of owning tools specific to the purpose of commiting a felony. It's now up to the DA to determine if those tools were actually used in any crime and are therefore relevent to this case. If they aren't, then those charges will be dropped.
The police can charge you with anything, that doesn't make it illegal. Contrary to popular belief, the police and the DA don't determine what is legal and what is not. Not directly anyways.
Now, it is illegal to own a device that's only use is to commit fraud, like a red box, or a tricked out cable descrambler. Simply owning one of those devices is a crime. That's because they have no legitimate purpose other than to facilitate the commission of a crime. L0phtcrack doesn't fit that description, but that may not be the software that this idiot was arrested for. We don't know. They have insinuated that was what it was for, but all the article stated was that he used L0phtcrack, and was arrested and charged with two counts for having in his possession software for busting passwords. I think the journalists could be trying to stir up a little controversy, by being intentionally vague.
It is logically fallacious to assume that because record sales increased that therefore the record industry is not harmed by pirating.
And it is equally fallacious to say that that because of pirating, the record industry is harmed, which is the obvious insinuation of your original statement. You can't lose what you never had. Therefore, an increase in CD sales of $1.4 Billion US does show that the record industry is still a viable industry in the world and therefore the paranoia surrounding the illicit trafficking of MP3's is unwarranted.
Suppose I swiped SlashDot pages and put them up on my site attracing 20 or 30 page views a month. At the end of the month Slashdot lawyers contact me and ask me to cease and desist. I point out that Slashdot page views actually increased over the month, so therefore Slashdot suffered no losses.
You know, I could set up hypothetical situations all day to more aptly "prove" my points, but we all know how illogical and inconsequential that is.
The multiple suites of design, illustration, photo-manipulation, layout and print management are all Mac-based, and the people who use them are all mac users. I previously worked at a company where the vunderkin new-hire in the design department was a PC guy, and he needed a new fully loaded PC instead of the standard Design Mac that everyone else with his role had. $16,000 later, his machine was ready, and he went to work....
Was his computer made of solid gold? I just set up a digital video editing suite, including expensive DVMaster w/hardware codec and software for $6K. $16K? this sounds little too anecdotal to be truth. Show me the parts list!
I know for a fact, that he kept having to hand projects back to the Mac people, because his machine couldn't match the work that they produced, and in many cases, tools existed on the Mac that had no counterparts on the PC platform.
Yet another anecdote form the big pile of Mac FUD. What tools are these that don't perform as well on PC as do on Mac? What are these tools that don't exist on the PC. Names, please, and manufacturers.
I have used Macs as firewalls,
How did you multi-home with the mac? That's a task that I've needed to accomplish on several occasions.
Please respond with no malice, otherwise you'll be ignored.
If MS is indeed split up, it will have either no consequences, as Bill Gates still holds the majority of shares (and rightfully so, since he owns the majority of MS currently), or the state will have to restrict Mr. Gates rights to his fortune, which is what happened during various communist revolutions, or the state will have to buy out Mr. Gates, which is propably the best thing that could ever happen to Mr. Gates, since all his wealth is currently paper money depending on the stock price of MSFT, but when he gets bought out, he will have "real" money (real as far as these green paper things can be...).
Those baby Bills will do what they have to to remain profitable. A lot of people believe that Bill Gates net worth will double, possibly triple with a break up.
That's of no real consequence. The companies will surely find it much more profitable to seek their own fortunes, with the Internet divison and the software division cut off from the cash cow of the OS division. The OS divison will have plenty of reasons to partner with other companies, not just the MS software divison.
The anti-trust action is not against Bill Gates and his personal fortune. He wasn't the one the suit listed. Microsoft is the culprit.
IMO, the split up will not change the world of software in any way, since Bill Gates (and the other people who hold the stock in MSFT) will see that the BabyBills work together.
Personally, I don't think that Bill Gates is that stupid. He has the second opportunity of a lifetime to be the worlds first Bazillionaire, and I don't think he's going to throw that opportunity away playing "business as usual" with the divided MS.
I agree with a lot of what you said. One thing that a lot of people gloss over when considering an MS breakup is that there will be no advantage for the baby MS's to continue to favor one another.
Some other developer could conceivably gain access to the undocumented API's that are now only for MS's internal developers.
It's good to know that NYPD is expanding their list of services available to the public. I suppose they had to find something to fill the day now that they can't shove plungers in peoples butts anymore.
Dr. Retzer (I was 10 years old I didn't know her first name) Or I could tell you about Dr. James Botti who was my high schools resident computer Guru until he retired. Why does it matter? The fact is that many people with masters degrees teach in public schools, and because of their dedication they are usually VERY good teachers.
There are many fine teachers in public schools, most of the teachers I had as a matter of fact, who are excellent teachers and can't be faulted. Remember the subject of our discussion. You say that all teachers should be subjected to discipline if their students fail to do as well on standardized tests as other student in other schools. Even all those excellent teachers that taught you well would be at the mercy of the classes that they recieve. I knew several teachers who were excellent but the vast majority of students didn't like them because they were hard-asses. If the student knew all they had to do to get rid of an UNPOPULAR teacher was to score poorly on a standardized test, I don't think Mrs. Peters or Mr. Hanna would still be teachers even though I (and anyone who tried hard in their classes) managed to learn quite a bit from them.
I know of no persecution of teachers in Texas however on Dateline NBC the statistics were quoted that back up my claims.
Oh, is this the same Dateline NBC that cracked the big story about how trucks explode when you hit them with a car rigged to ignite their gas tanks by remote control?
I see we've hit the intellectual wall on this thread. Your entire last post was all conjecture, hearsay, and opinions, hardly any worth commenting on.
1)If you read what I wrote you'd know that I was talking about a COLLEGE class. I paid tuition for that class.
Then you're a fool for going to a fool college. But I don't think you're a fool, I think you're a liar.
2)When I was in 5th grade we had a lady who held her doctorate who did just what you describe. She was a damned good teacher and was highly respected.
What was her doctorate in? Probably Education. There were several teachers at my high school who held advanced degrees in Education. What was her name? Or is this just another conjectural automaton you've created to bolster your argument?
3)Fine if we're going to trade anecdotes, here in Pittsburgh I had a graduating class of 125 or so students. Back in 1976 my step father (who went to the same high school) had a graduating class of over 400. Look back 20 years, look back 30 years, the averae class size is smaller today than it was then.
Where I graduated from High School (John Marshall High School in Portland, OR, Class of 1989), we had 400+ in our graduating class. My younger brother graduated from the same High School 8 years after me in a graduating class of 700. Look it up.
And again, please cite your sources as to the success of the Texas Teacher persecution.
In there US in many schools there are classes for students of different levels of ability. If a student can't learn the material he should be in a lower class. If he can't learn the material there he should be in a lower grade
Apparently you've never taught in American schools. Changing a students grade level is not a matter of sending them down the hall to the next class. You can't simply route a student the way you'd route a packet or telephone call. You must understand that reality is not so simple.
If you lower a students rated ability level, their parents (however disinterested they have been in the past) will come screaming to the principals office. I suppose you'd just lay the law down for them, hmm? Try it. I dare you.
If a teacher lacks mastery of a subject s/he has NO BUSINESS teaching it to our children.
If you want masters to teach your children, then the base pay is going to have to go up past $24K/year. In private schools, the pay is often worse than public institutions.
I've been lectured by masters, and do see their place in the educational system, but not at the primary school level. I don't think any highly decorated academic would be interested in breaking up fights or patrolling hallways during their lunch hour, when they could be researching at a major university. Has it ever occured to you that teaching is a discipline in and of itself? I didn't think so.
I've been to college in the past and am currently enrolled in college, I've had english teachers assigned to teach "computer classes", one woman in particular taught the class that a kilobyte was EXACTLY 1000 bytes. She may have been an excellent english professor but she had NO BUSINESS teaching a computer class.
she didn't have any business taching that class, and she probably DIDN'T ASK TO TEACH THE CLASS EITHER. Teachers teach what schools NEED them to teach. They don't get to pick and choose very often. Solution: Quit bitching abnout how high taxes are and hire teachers of appropriate credential. All of my high school computer teachers were also math teachers. They taught me well and knew that a Kilobyte was 1024 bytes.
I once heard a saying it goes like this "Those who can, do. Those who can', teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym." and as time goes on I've learned how true that is for about 75% of teachers in the US.
This last statement was puerile and anecdotal. Save it 'til after you've met an accurate random sample of teachers in America.
Considering the results that they get, this is to be expected.
Teachers have always been underpaid for the amount of education they are required to undergo, our society does not respect teachers or education and until that changes, no simple plan is going to make much of a difference.
In the US today we have some of the smallest class sizes that the world has seen for decades but the performance of our teachers and our students is abysmally low.
In the city were I live (Portland, OR) the average class size is 33 students. That's one teacher, 38 students. When I went to high school, ten years ago, a class with 25 students was considered huge. Tell me again how our classes are not overloaded? Speak not what you don't know.
Placement test can and DO show how well teachers are teaching the material to the students. If one class of students in DIstrict X's "College Preparation" program do substantially worse on the placement tests than do their counterparts in other classes and other schools either 1. there are too many children in that class who do not belong there or 2. the teacher isn't up to snuff.
This would be true, if all other things could be held equal. As such, your mostly logical arguement doesn't hold water. If there were no other factors involved in a child's education other than a teachers capacity to teach that student, I'd agree with you. There are SO many other factors involved. Factors that have nothing to do whatsoever with the teachers themselves. i'd like you to cite the source of your information regarding the validity of students results in placement tests as a test of a teachers competency, too. This sounds far too much like earthy wisdom and far too little like statistics.
While it's true that our society doesn't put enough emphasis on education, our school system is more to blame than the society is.
And just how do you figure? School didn't create society, dude. Our schools, our courts, our cities are all manifestations our peoples values, not the other way around. Changing the school system isn't going to change the way people think about education, no more than illegalizing abortion is going to change anyones opinions about that subject. Why? Because all things grow from the roots up. You're blaming the hood ornament because the car won't run. so get a new hood ornament, the car's still not going to run.
There are no quick fixes to this problem. I'm the first to admit that I had some crappy teachers when I was a kid, but you know what? Despite that, I was able to learn everything I needed to know from primary and secondary school.
Speak for yourself. There can bo no doing without thinking.
Not hardly those idiots in Texas enacted a plan to submit highly educated professionals to a series of tests that were thought up by politicians without thinking...
It's working in Texas. My theories are not "half-baked" when you hold someone accountable for the quality of their work they either do better work of find a new field of employment.
Is it working in Texas? Your theory is half-baked when there is no unbiased, scientific method of measuring those intangibles which will have a direct effect on the teachers and their careers.
As a matter of fact many young people are choosing not to become teachers in America and as such there is a glut of positions available all over the country. Particularly hard hit are the southern states that have shown an active interest in persecuting and demonizing teachers. To hell with that.
MY solution, every yead give all teachers a competency test and a placement test for every student.
Every teacher that fails the test can't teach until s/he takes and passes the next test.
Fine, IF AND ONLY IF the teachers have the right to reject a poor ranking student from their classes. Why should the teacher be responsible for the actions of a students parents? The teachers influence only goes as far as the classroom door.
Your simple-minded solution makes being a teacher a role of the dice, because no matter how simple you want to make the scenario of education, the teacher will NEVER be the sole influence on the students academic career.
And who would administer these teachers competency tests? Politicians? You? Anyone who has ever taught can tell you that teaching goes far beyond merely a mastery of subject material. Anyone who's been to college can tell you that simply knowing a subject does not make an instructor effective.
You don't go into teaching to seek fiscal reward. For mosty teachers, the act of teaching is rewarding in and of itself. One would think that bonuses and incentives would be highly effective motivators,a s they are in the private sector, considering these are the lowest paid professionals in the country. But believe it or not, most teachers would rather have smaller classes and better teaching materials than bonuses.
This emphasis on testing is the biggest crock of shit of your whole oversimplification. What evidence is there that placement tests measure any valuable information? Do they predict success in life? Do they showcase all facets of a students ability? Nope. They simply show how well a student does on placement tests.
American students do poorly in school because American society doesn't value education anywhere near to the same degree that societies in Asia and Europe do. We are do'ers not thinkers. Hell, Bill Gates didn't even finish college. So do get all high and mighty with your half-baked theories.
Slashdot Mirror
The PPC is known to be one of the worst targets, right up there with Alpha.
With IBMs commitment to Linux on the RS/6000 series I'd assume that they are going to be throwing some weight behind a gcc optimization for PPC. If they come out with an updated RS/6000 Thinkpad, I'm there, baby, I'm soooo there...
Has this sort of hypothetical situation ever actualized itself, or is this yet another example of pie-in-the-sky paranoid pessimism that yet again shoves Slashdot into the realm of irrelevency?
If anyones heard of a situation were free beer software has been given away, then once dependence has been established, charged for up the ying-yang like so much virtual Crack, then please testify!
I've never heard of that other than the occasional anecdote from an unreliable/unverifiable source. Sounds like just another Paranoid Persecution Fantasy to me...
Bill gate was on the TV Sunday saying that if Microsoft was broken up, the individual companies couldn't react to a problem like ILUVYOU and cited this as another crappy reason why MS shouldn't be hammered into several competing pieces. The asshole totally sidestepped the fact that it's BECAUSE of this "feature" collusion that MS has now that a virus like this is able to shut down thousands of machines.
But if Microsoft really fixes their software, then Palm could have a problem. Spiff up their hardware, though, and it becomes a non-issue.
Now that Palm is licensing their OS, we should see a lot more variety in the Palm hardware. Recent changes in the OS (with more to come) allow for deployment of Palm OS on a variety of different hardware configurations, and with a variety of different Kernels.
I think that Palm is way ahead of MS as far as the software v. hardware race goes.
However... "Handwriting Recognition" really worries me. I used it in Apple's Newton and was not impressed at all with it. I don't think MS' HW recognition works any better (I haven't tried it yet though but I draw this from my experiences with lots of HW Recognition packages). Graffiti will be more reliable at the long run since it is very easily recognizable by the software and mismatch rate (i.e. recognizing 8 when you wrote B) is extremely low.
I have a Newton 130 and liked the HW recoginition when I first got it, but it became cumbersome and prone to error when your hand got tired. Guess what I did? I bought Graffiti (this was back when Palm was a software developer for Newton). Graffiti made the Newton HWR work soooo much better.
An "assault rifle" (any rifle that's unusually scary-looking or has a usably large magazine) would be scarcely more effective than a pistol against a standing army, and much harder to conceal or hold secretly, or find ammunition for.
Question: if they are so useless, why do we arm our armies with them?
It's easy to get 7.62mm and 5.56mm ammo in America. And if we are keeping these weapons to fight a war with (as I have posited), why do we need to conceal them?
We aren't getting them to commit crimes with, what do we have to fear? We can carry an assault rifle down the street and the police can do nothing if we don't attack or threaten anyone (caveat: there may be local laws against brandishing arms in public).
I put together a High quality DV editing system for a friend of mine last year. We used a P2-450, 256 megs RAM, 10 gig IDE hard drive, 9.1 gig SCSI-3 hard drive, 17 inch monitor, Diamond Viper 550 video card, and a DV Master card from Fast. The total cost was under $6000 not including a studio monitor which they added later for $700). The DV Master costs $3500 by itself.
This setup gives you a hardware DV codec, which makes editing sooo much faster. I wouldn't even consider a software codec (ie MacDV, or whatever chintzy capture card you can get for under $1000 for the PC) if you're planning on doing anything professional. It'll take forever. Software solutions are fine for editing your vacation videos, but will cost you money (ie time) for a pro job.
The system accepts DV format video via ieee 1394, or standard audio/video via rca(YUV and RGB in both NTSC and PAL/SECAM), 1/4 inch jack, and S-Video, and puts out signal to all of these formats.
The DV Master comes with a special version of Speed Razor made to interact specifically with the DV Master hardware. Because we have a hardware codec, we can edit DV format files, instead of capturing to quicktime files then dumping back to DV. It's a really great system.
Well then, ban firearms. IMHO it's a step that America should take since we are the country with the highest murder rate in the Western world, which is related to our Constitional "rights" to own guns and kill people.
Unfortunately for Americans, illegalizing guns plays right into yet another paranoid fantasy tht many Americans have: If guns are illegal, then the new World Order(ie Big Brother) will take over.
Personally, I don't think handguns should be legal. Handguns are for killing unarmored civilians. Assault rifles are for killing invaders, government troops, and Cops. Everyone should have an Assault rifle. It's the final check and balance in the Constitution: At any point the American people can take control of their country from the federal government. No unpopular governing power could survive here.
My ideas were "ability to make folder names different colors"
I thought this was one of the innovations tauted by Mac OS 8, for reals.
First of all, it is only natural to assume that "Geeko" is a play on the words "geek" and "gecko". This would be great, except that THE LOGO IS NOT A FREAKIN' GECKO!!! OK? HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO TELL YOU IDIOTS!!! IT IS A CHAMELEON!!! This makes absolutely no sense..
Technically, it's not a chameleon either, it's just a logo. Get over it.
Using a tool with a specific purpose implies pre-meditation on the part of the accused, dude.
You might get off with Murder in the second degree if you beat someone to death with your fists (or a even a crowbar), but if you kill someone with a high-power sniper rifle with a 30x night vision scope, most people would have a tough time believing that you didn't plan to kill anyone.
The same goes for breaking into computers.
You have the tools: this is a pre-meditated act and is worth a few extra years in the slammer.
IANAL, but I've seen enough 5-0 to know what consitutes a pre-meditated act, at least in Hawaii anyways.
You know there really isn't enough information in this article to determine what actually happened. It's all vague innuendo, and many of the charges may be thrown out before the trial, anyways.
Think of it this way: I own a set of lockpicks. That in and of itself is not illegal. If I were arrested for burglary and they found the lockpicks in my possession (either at home or on me) they'd add the charge of owning tools specific to the purpose of commiting a felony. It's now up to the DA to determine if those tools were actually used in any crime and are therefore relevent to this case. If they aren't, then those charges will be dropped.
The police can charge you with anything, that doesn't make it illegal. Contrary to popular belief, the police and the DA don't determine what is legal and what is not. Not directly anyways.
Now, it is illegal to own a device that's only use is to commit fraud, like a red box, or a tricked out cable descrambler. Simply owning one of those devices is a crime. That's because they have no legitimate purpose other than to facilitate the commission of a crime. L0phtcrack doesn't fit that description, but that may not be the software that this idiot was arrested for. We don't know. They have insinuated that was what it was for, but all the article stated was that he used L0phtcrack, and was arrested and charged with two counts for having in his possession software for busting passwords. I think the journalists could be trying to stir up a little controversy, by being intentionally vague.
It is logically fallacious to assume that because record sales increased that therefore the record industry is not harmed by pirating.
And it is equally fallacious to say that that because of pirating, the record industry is harmed, which is the obvious insinuation of your original statement. You can't lose what you never had. Therefore, an increase in CD sales of $1.4 Billion US does show that the record industry is still a viable industry in the world and therefore the paranoia surrounding the illicit trafficking of MP3's is unwarranted.
Suppose I swiped SlashDot pages and put them up on my site attracing 20 or 30 page views a month. At the end of the month Slashdot lawyers contact me and ask me to cease and desist. I point out that Slashdot page views actually increased over the month, so therefore Slashdot suffered no losses.
You know, I could set up hypothetical situations all day to more aptly "prove" my points, but we all know how illogical and inconsequential that is.
The multiple suites of design, illustration, photo-manipulation, layout and print management are all Mac-based, and the people who use them are all mac users. I previously worked at a company where the vunderkin new-hire in the design department was a PC guy, and he needed a new fully loaded PC instead of the standard Design Mac that everyone else with his role had. $16,000 later, his machine was ready, and he went to work....
Was his computer made of solid gold? I just set up a digital video editing suite, including expensive DVMaster w/hardware codec and software for $6K. $16K? this sounds little too anecdotal to be truth. Show me the parts list!
I know for a fact, that he kept having to hand projects back to the Mac people, because his machine couldn't match the work that they produced, and in many cases, tools existed on the Mac that had no counterparts on the PC platform.
Yet another anecdote form the big pile of Mac FUD. What tools are these that don't perform as well on PC as do on Mac? What are these tools that don't exist on the PC. Names, please, and manufacturers.
I have used Macs as firewalls,
How did you multi-home with the mac? That's a task that I've needed to accomplish on several occasions.
Please respond with no malice, otherwise you'll be ignored.
Apparently you overestimate your peers, troll.
Those baby Bills will do what they have to to remain profitable. A lot of people believe that Bill Gates net worth will double, possibly triple with a break up.
That's of no real consequence. The companies will surely find it much more profitable to seek their own fortunes, with the Internet divison and the software division cut off from the cash cow of the OS division. The OS divison will have plenty of reasons to partner with other companies, not just the MS software divison.
The anti-trust action is not against Bill Gates and his personal fortune. He wasn't the one the suit listed. Microsoft is the culprit.
Personally, I don't think that Bill Gates is that stupid. He has the second opportunity of a lifetime to be the worlds first Bazillionaire, and I don't think he's going to throw that opportunity away playing "business as usual" with the divided MS.
I agree with a lot of what you said. One thing that a lot of people gloss over when considering an MS breakup is that there will be no advantage for the baby MS's to continue to favor one another.
Some other developer could conceivably gain access to the undocumented API's that are now only for MS's internal developers.
I think this will be a good thing.
It's good to know that NYPD is expanding their list of services available to the public. I suppose they had to find something to fill the day now that they can't shove plungers in peoples butts anymore.
Maybe it was really, really big.
And what does that "CE" stands for? "Crash Extremely fast"? "Carry Excess bagagge?" "Could not Exchange data with desktop?"
Caveat Emptor
...To get some new shoes and stuff. Maybe do a little X-mas "shopping". Anybody need anything?
Dr. Retzer (I was 10 years old I didn't know her first name) Or I could tell you about Dr. James Botti who was my high schools resident computer Guru until he retired. Why does it matter? The fact is that many people with masters degrees teach in public schools, and because of their dedication they are usually VERY good teachers.
There are many fine teachers in public schools, most of the teachers I had as a matter of fact, who are excellent teachers and can't be faulted. Remember the subject of our discussion. You say that all teachers should be subjected to discipline if their students fail to do as well on standardized tests as other student in other schools. Even all those excellent teachers that taught you well would be at the mercy of the classes that they recieve. I knew several teachers who were excellent but the vast majority of students didn't like them because they were hard-asses. If the student knew all they had to do to get rid of an UNPOPULAR teacher was to score poorly on a standardized test, I don't think Mrs. Peters or Mr. Hanna would still be teachers even though I (and anyone who tried hard in their classes) managed to learn quite a bit from them.
I know of no persecution of teachers in Texas however on Dateline NBC the statistics were quoted that back up my claims.
Oh, is this the same Dateline NBC that cracked the big story about how trucks explode when you hit them with a car rigged to ignite their gas tanks by remote control?
I see we've hit the intellectual wall on this thread. Your entire last post was all conjecture, hearsay, and opinions, hardly any worth commenting on.
1)If you read what I wrote you'd know that I was talking about a COLLEGE class. I paid tuition for that class.
Then you're a fool for going to a fool college. But I don't think you're a fool, I think you're a liar.
2)When I was in 5th grade we had a lady who held her doctorate who did just what you describe. She was a damned good teacher and was highly respected.
What was her doctorate in? Probably Education. There were several teachers at my high school who held advanced degrees in Education. What was her name? Or is this just another conjectural automaton you've created to bolster your argument?
3)Fine if we're going to trade anecdotes, here in Pittsburgh I had a graduating class of 125 or so students. Back in 1976 my step father (who went to the same high school) had a graduating class of over 400. Look back 20 years, look back 30 years, the averae class size is smaller today than it was then.
Where I graduated from High School (John Marshall High School in Portland, OR, Class of 1989), we had 400+ in our graduating class. My younger brother graduated from the same High School 8 years after me in a graduating class of 700. Look it up.
And again, please cite your sources as to the success of the Texas Teacher persecution.
In there US in many schools there are classes for students of different levels of ability. If a student can't learn the material he should be in a lower class. If he can't learn the material there he should be in a lower grade
Apparently you've never taught in American schools. Changing a students grade level is not a matter of sending them down the hall to the next class. You can't simply route a student the way you'd route a packet or telephone call. You must understand that reality is not so simple.
If you lower a students rated ability level, their parents (however disinterested they have been in the past) will come screaming to the principals office. I suppose you'd just lay the law down for them, hmm? Try it. I dare you.
If a teacher lacks mastery of a subject s/he has NO BUSINESS teaching it to our children.
If you want masters to teach your children, then the base pay is going to have to go up past $24K/year. In private schools, the pay is often worse than public institutions.
I've been lectured by masters, and do see their place in the educational system, but not at the primary school level. I don't think any highly decorated academic would be interested in breaking up fights or patrolling hallways during their lunch hour, when they could be researching at a major university. Has it ever occured to you that teaching is a discipline in and of itself? I didn't think so.
I've been to college in the past and am currently enrolled in college, I've had english teachers assigned to teach "computer classes", one woman in particular taught the class that a kilobyte was EXACTLY 1000 bytes. She may have been an excellent english professor but she had NO BUSINESS teaching a computer class.
she didn't have any business taching that class, and she probably DIDN'T ASK TO TEACH THE CLASS EITHER. Teachers teach what schools NEED them to teach. They don't get to pick and choose very often. Solution: Quit bitching abnout how high taxes are and hire teachers of appropriate credential. All of my high school computer teachers were also math teachers. They taught me well and knew that a Kilobyte was 1024 bytes.
I once heard a saying it goes like this "Those who can, do. Those who can', teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym." and as time goes on I've learned how true that is for about 75% of teachers in the US.
This last statement was puerile and anecdotal. Save it 'til after you've met an accurate random sample of teachers in America.
Considering the results that they get, this is to be expected.
Teachers have always been underpaid for the amount of education they are required to undergo, our society does not respect teachers or education and until that changes, no simple plan is going to make much of a difference.
In the US today we have some of the smallest class sizes that the world has seen for decades but the performance of our teachers and our students is abysmally low.
In the city were I live (Portland, OR) the average class size is 33 students. That's one teacher, 38 students. When I went to high school, ten years ago, a class with 25 students was considered huge. Tell me again how our classes are not overloaded? Speak not what you don't know.
Placement test can and DO show how well teachers are teaching the material to the students. If one class of students in DIstrict X's "College Preparation" program do substantially worse on the placement tests than do their counterparts in other classes and other schools either 1. there are too many children in that class who do not belong there or 2. the teacher isn't up to snuff.
This would be true, if all other things could be held equal. As such, your mostly logical arguement doesn't hold water. If there were no other factors involved in a child's education other than a teachers capacity to teach that student, I'd agree with you. There are SO many other factors involved. Factors that have nothing to do whatsoever with the teachers themselves. i'd like you to cite the source of your information regarding the validity of students results in placement tests as a test of a teachers competency, too. This sounds far too much like earthy wisdom and far too little like statistics.
While it's true that our society doesn't put enough emphasis on education, our school system is more to blame than the society is.
And just how do you figure? School didn't create society, dude. Our schools, our courts, our cities are all manifestations our peoples values, not the other way around. Changing the school system isn't going to change the way people think about education, no more than illegalizing abortion is going to change anyones opinions about that subject. Why? Because all things grow from the roots up. You're blaming the hood ornament because the car won't run. so get a new hood ornament, the car's still not going to run.
There are no quick fixes to this problem. I'm the first to admit that I had some crappy teachers when I was a kid, but you know what? Despite that, I was able to learn everything I needed to know from primary and secondary school.
Speak for yourself. There can bo no doing without thinking.
Not hardly those idiots in Texas enacted a plan to submit highly educated professionals to a series of tests that were thought up by politicians without thinking...
It's working in Texas. My theories are not "half-baked" when you hold someone accountable for the quality of their work they either do better work of find a new field of employment.
Is it working in Texas? Your theory is half-baked when there is no unbiased, scientific method of measuring those intangibles which will have a direct effect on the teachers and their careers.
As a matter of fact many young people are choosing not to become teachers in America and as such there is a glut of positions available all over the country. Particularly hard hit are the southern states that have shown an active interest in persecuting and demonizing teachers. To hell with that.
MY solution, every yead give all teachers a competency test and a placement test for every student.
Every teacher that fails the test can't teach until s/he takes and passes the next test.
Fine, IF AND ONLY IF the teachers have the right to reject a poor ranking student from their classes. Why should the teacher be responsible for the actions of a students parents? The teachers influence only goes as far as the classroom door.
Your simple-minded solution makes being a teacher a role of the dice, because no matter how simple you want to make the scenario of education, the teacher will NEVER be the sole influence on the students academic career.
And who would administer these teachers competency tests? Politicians? You? Anyone who has ever taught can tell you that teaching goes far beyond merely a mastery of subject material. Anyone who's been to college can tell you that simply knowing a subject does not make an instructor effective.
You don't go into teaching to seek fiscal reward. For mosty teachers, the act of teaching is rewarding in and of itself. One would think that bonuses and incentives would be highly effective motivators,a s they are in the private sector, considering these are the lowest paid professionals in the country. But believe it or not, most teachers would rather have smaller classes and better teaching materials than bonuses.
This emphasis on testing is the biggest crock of shit of your whole oversimplification. What evidence is there that placement tests measure any valuable information? Do they predict success in life? Do they showcase all facets of a students ability? Nope. They simply show how well a student does on placement tests.
American students do poorly in school because American society doesn't value education anywhere near to the same degree that societies in Asia and Europe do. We are do'ers not thinkers. Hell, Bill Gates didn't even finish college. So do get all high and mighty with your half-baked theories.