Re:No use without teachers who understand computer
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Laptops In Education
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I think there's at least two ways to look at how computers can be used in education:
1. To learn about computers themselves, about using computers, about programming, etc.
2. To use it as a tool for doing things that are common place in education now. Such as writing papers, doing research, distributing notes (by teacher) and keeping notes (by students).
I think people are lumping the two together, and granted, there's a very thin line (if at all, if you agree with my line of reasoning) between them.
But there would be a big difference, I think, in implementation depending on which one you are aiming for.
If you were aiming for number one, then you are most likely talking about more expensive hardware and possibly software. This is the traditional computer hardware/software give away that corporations have been doing.
If you were aiming for number two, then you are talking about cheap(er) hardware/software, I think. Because #2 is more of an appliance/device that lends itself to be implemented on a web pad kind of device.
Remember, computers nowadays are very general purpose and so extremely flexible that it really can be seen as in an ongoing experimental, use-as-you-go kind of thing. And this is the reason why there are problem such as bugs why people find them difficult to use. With appliances, people will find them easy to use and to accomplish work, instead of spending time trying to figure out why their computers crashed (more reason for linux based web pads).
So I think if we are to give kids computer tools, I would give appliance/devices(#2) rather than a laptop(#1) because it will be more useful to them in the process of learning what they are supposed to learn.
Very true, the web pads are kind of MIA right now. But we should have no doubt they will come - just like the sub $500 PCs that no one can imagine was possible 5 years ago.
If we collectively wish hard enough, it will come true.
Oh, ideally, it should be made from lightweight flexible plastic/fiber/composite material that can be tossed around (yeah, really take the abuse). Something about the size and consistency of a large mouse pad. Or so I wish.
No, not educational software, but education-related.
I was re-reading the article, and I thought, why can't we have open-sourced software that will allow the students to do their homeworks, say, type their papers on it, without having to shell out money for it (yes, I know they are out there already, but I mean something simple to use, geared to students and the educational system). The schools can say, we will accept your homework in the following formats, or something along that line. Tools for students to use for taking notes, for doing homeworks, for reviewing, etc.
The teachers will have their software that can be used to check the homeworks submitted by the students, can grade them, correct them, return them, etc. The teachers can even keep a copy of the student submitted works and later on use it to determine the grading for the students.
The main point again is: 1. Cheap 2. Easy to use 3. Accessible
I think that it would be really great if school systems can build on top of an open-source education-oriented platform, (say, a linux distribution) with a standard suite of software that the schools can use right away. Heck, if the open source movement is already volunteering time to write software, why not this?
I know there are some huge gaping holes in my idea, but isn't it worth considering?
I dunno...I got a couple of problems with laptops being used in schools. At the kind of laptop that most of us think of.
The best thing to do is probably for them to have sub $200 web pads that allows the students to save their notes and homework and stuff like that on the Internet somewhere (say if a storage service provider get a contract with an education system, etc.). I think if you are spending more money than that, it's too much.
It's either cheap portable computing appliances (not general-purpose devices like regular PCs) or ubiquitous computing, where the students can have access from almost anywhere. Of course, the trend right now looks like portable (wireless, mobile) is more popular, but maybe in a few years, it will swing back the other way again.
I think that for them to consider it at all, it's gotta be as cheap if not cheaper than the game consoles. Or at least that's the way I believe it should be (not necessarily the way I think it will be though).
I've seen a video web server box that allows a backdoor but that which is controllable by the admin of t he unit. It's rather clever, I thought. The admin can change the admin password, etc., it came with some simple default password. There's also a backdoor user called backdoor. You can't change the password on this one, it's known only to the company who made the box (supposedly). But you CAN change the backdoor user name. This is something that can be documented even. There's still security risks, but it's better than the simple backdoors, because there's a level of control over it, and they tell you there's a backdoor (if there's more, they didn't say).
This reminds me, since I'm not up on this stuff, are there standard embedded linux distributions? I mean a distribution of linux specifically for embedded applications that is intended for developers and manufacturers to use as a foundation to build upon? Are there APIs for this? I'm not doing a paper or anything (as I've seen some of the recent posts from students posting requests for their papers), I'm just curious, since Linux seems like a great choice for embedded apps from the examples that we've seen so far.
I think that for some people, the persona they build in the virtual world is a heck of a lot better than their real one. That may say a lot about the sad state of affairs of some people's lives. Some people don't have the great jobs and great future that some of us (especially here) may have. Some people just choose to be in a different world where the rules are different. You don't find too many wealthy people spending a lot of time in virtual worlds, I'll bet, unless it's out of curiosity and/or boredom.
If Sony wants EQ to be really big, it should just let it go - don't try to regulate it. After all, real cash changing hands just means that the game is THAT popular. Quite frankly, Sony should just say that they are aware of such occurrences, and they do not condone it, and that it will not be their problem if users decide to do this.
And what do overclockers do with these faster computers? Not much, actually. The most popular application involves running a measuring program that proves exactly how much faster the overclocked chip is running. Overclockers make printouts of these speed readings and send them to each other
Indeed, just like hot rodders or even third graders (My dad's stronger than yours. No he's not, MY dad is stronger than yours! Is not! Is too! Oh yeah, well he could life our house with one hand to clean the house! Oh yeah? well, my dad could...)
I have to agree. This was a good piece. I actually agreed with many of the points that Jon made, especially about corporatism being amoral. How true, how true! But that also means that whatever Pinkerton says can only be taken in the context of marketing (bottom-line). They have absolutely no sense of "real" moral responsibility. The false sense of moral responsibility comes from the fact that there is a market for dealing with moral issues.
Hmmm...no study says that the growth hormones are harmful, so no one knows it is harmful, just like no one knows what really causes cancer, right?
Does it have to come down to something so toxic that you get cancer within, let's say, a year, that people will be willing to say, "gee, I think it might be causing cancer"?
I'm not saying it causes cancer. But I certainly think it is a big health risk. I mean, if we were to take it directly, would it be a problem?
The big problem I have with a lot of the things that are "good" for you goes something like this: - Scurvy kills off thousands - citrus fruits found to ward off scurvy - Vitamin C deficiency isolated as reason for scurvy - Abundance in Vitamin C wards of colds and prevents scurvy. It's essential! - Orange Juice Industry: OJ got vitamin C! Therefore it is good for you! Come buy lots!
Is OJ good for reduced risk of heart disease because of Vitamin C? Compared to soft drinks, I would say it's much better in terms of nutritional contents. However, I don't think any food should need "fortification" with additional nutrients. That sends an alarm in my mind that says: there's something wrong here! Remember Olestra? The fat substitute that is supposed to pass right through your body instead of being absorbed by the body? They had to fortify it with nutrients because it leached nutrients from the body! And just because it is fortified with nutrients doesn't mean your body is absorbing those nutrients. It would still be truth in labeling of nutrients, though. Just like iron in spinach. It's there, but it doesn't mean it's easily absorbable.
I still say, processed foods are bad for you. If you have no choice, you have to eat. If you have a choice, avoiding processed foods is the best thing you could do.
Look, the best and richest country in the world, and we still have plenty of health problems, if not more than some of the other countries, even with all the available medical advancements. Maybe it's time to look at things from a different perspective?
Since people are living longer in first world nations which have things like "artificial" nuclear radiation and cars, it's safe to say that the new dangers are far less dangerous than the old dangers.
Agreed. But maybe, just maybe, some of the "new dangers" (not things so immediate like car accidents) manifest themselve in the form of diseases and cancers?
Life expectancy was 35 (the source says 37) around 1800 (Source: http://www.positive.net/perspective/archive/96-08- 04.html). My fingers typed "childbirth" when I meant to say "childhood." However, Women frequently died while giving birth. There are two people involved in that birth process, after all.
Ok, childbirth or childhood, point is they were young. Childhood, I think, we can agree, is younger than 35 (though I may disagree with that myself, sometimes:). But it still means that significant number of people were older than 35 if there were so many people dying so young. I'm not going to beat this one into the ground anymore than it already has.
I do, however, have a problem with the 1800's figure.
There's a couple of reasons why: 1. Whose life expectancy was being measured? From page you referred to, it looked like it was mostly Europeans, who suffered the bubonic plague and other sort of things. It pointed out that prehistoric times until 1400's, life expectancy was in the 20s and 30s. I think this was largely a European phenomenon. Great ancient civilizations could not have been built if the population had those kinds of life expctancies.
2. I forget, also, 1800's -> Industrial Revolution, no? People were dying left and right from lung cancer because of the coal and soot and stuff like that, right? It was the staple of authors like Charles Dickens (again, European).
Thank you for a vigorous discussion (really!). I learned a few things. I also learned that I should not be so cavalier in making generalizations. Next time I'll try to offer up more convincing evidence of the stuff I'm spouting here that are not much of the new age bullshit that I personally find distasteful as well.
You are right on one thing, I didn't take general statistics in school - I only took engineering statistics in school and I didn't do so well in it. I really should go back and study it some more.
The world we live in today, has lots of good things and lots of bad things. It's much safer world in terms of all the natural dangers that used to kill off all of our ancestors. I will venture to say there lots of new dangers in terms of, say, nuclear radiations from artifical sources, chemical pollution, and new dangers like car accidents. Can we agree on that so far?
Ok, I don't know if you remember a Breyer Ice Cream commercial from the '80s that touted how they used only natural ingrdients, unlike all the other Ice Cream makes that had ingredients like Polysorbate 80 and locust beans (yes, I remembered those exactly from the commercial). What the heck are those things? And why are we putting that stuff into our bodies?
Meats and milk - animal products from animals that have been injected with hormones to increase yield. We are putting yet more stuff into our bodies. Because we are on the top of the food chain here, we accumulate a lot of these chemicals in more concentrated doses, especially the fat soluble stuff. I'm not making this stuff up. You can look it up.
I'm not trying to spew all the New Age bullshit. A lot of those claims are just as bogus, just as bad. Where there's an opportunity to make money, people will try ot use it.
Maybe my linking cancer with these "unnatural" versions of natural products was a little severe considering that I'm not really offering up proof.
As for me, I don't buy into all of the New Age homeopathic stuff either. I just try to eat naturally. I try to avoid foods that are processed and comes in a package that has one of the RDA labels and lists ingredients that I can't pronounce. I don't think that's very unreasonable.
By the way, where and when was life expectancy around 35 for most of human existence? And if huge number of people died in childbirth, wouldn't say that of those who survived, quite a few of them lived well past 35? Statistically speaking, it would make sense in order for things to balance out, no?
I am catching a lot of hell (ok, a little bit) for my comments. But I will respectfully tell you why I'm saying what I'm saying.
Milk: Yes, I know that throughout history, people have been drinking milk, using dairy products like cheese and yogurt. Perhaps I should have mentioned some of the other things that bother me about milk. Nowadays, milk is gotten from hormone-laden milk-generating biological machines that resemble something akin to what we call cows. Am I wrong on this? Are the cows NOT being injected with hormones to increase their milk yield? And what effect does the milk that come from these cows have on the human body?
Orange Juice: Ok, scurvy was a problem - for people who did not have a good source of vitamin C. Was scruvy a problem with people who did not have a good source of vitamin C? Not likely, unless you ate a very unbalanced diet. Vitamin C is plentiful in many fruits and vegetables. We have all been taught since grade school that citrus fruits have a lot of vitamin C and that when the world was being explored by the Europeans, they got scurvy, until they started bringing and using lemons and limes. Those being too sour, the next best thing was oranges. But orange juice is not essential for well-being. Vitamin C may be, not OJ. Oranges are also a warm/hot climate fruit (I don't know if they are tropical, but the most well-known OJ brand is Tropicana, at least from where I am). Where did people who lived in colder climates get their vitamin C from before the advent of global shipping?
Why is that some people CAN live for a long time without succumbing to cancer and some cannot? Some people get cancer now in their 30's and 40's. There are lots more cancer causing factors. Why is that in this country, the most advanced of all countries in the world, we are constantly battling cancer? I don't need to know any statistics to know that cancer rate is pretty high.
You are right, though, I guess I should have known better than to open my mouth without having researched and being able to snow everyone with mountains of statistics.
I wish there was a better forum for this. I'm really not just mouthing off on this stuff.
Antibiotics did us a world of good, I suppose. But if you go through some of the science and medical journals, you will see a lot of people cautioning against use of antibiotics. One of the foremost reasons is that it allows antibiotic-resistant strains to proliferate by eliminating their competition - their non-antibiotic resistant kins.
Cancer should be as preventable as AIDS - our society lives in such a way that makes cancer happen more and more frequently.
We choose to put things into our body that are bad for us. When too much accumulates, we get cancer. There are many other ways, of course, and not always voluntary.
We allow ourselves to be led by marketing, and allow ourselves to be harmed.
Some examples: - Milk is good for you (says who? This should be an urban legend. For hundreds of thousands of years (at least) humans lived without drinking milk (and this means milk from another animal, and drinking milk as an adult, and drinking pasteurized milk), why is it now milk is so popular? Give you a hint: "Got Milk?" - Orange Juice is good for you (Again, the same argument. Our ancestors lived without pasteurized, Vitamin D fortified, Juicy bits of orange or not, for a long time, and they didn't have problems). - Smoking is cool (helps with digestion, as some of the older ads told us). - MS is the best OS, used by more people than any other OSes in the world (well, ok, I should know better, but it fits).
I know that this is way off topic. But heck, until people realize that the big corporations are using marketing to leverage our health and well-being for their bottom line, and that there are alternatives and people gotta stop being sheep.
Something a little off-topic. I recall that everyone was saying that now Microsoft will be targeted by states for new lawsuits/class-action suits.
I have a question about these so-called state lawsuits and/or class-action lawsuits. Are any of these lawsuits for the benefit of anybody besides the lawyers and/or possibly the state's coffers?
I mean, ok, there are smoe very anti-MS sentiments here at Slashdot, and then there are some who are not zealously anti-MS. And many people would like to see MS being eaten alive by the sharks. But seriously, how may we be served by these lawsuits except to be treated to a spectacle and (possibly) see a (again possibly) former glorious company limping into the future?
This is just like the big tobacco suits. While I applaud the original intent, I fear that all the sharks circling out there readying to pounce and to fatten their own wallet will do the public disservice.
From the sound of it, Esther Dyson can and is doing more than Martha Stewart. Or maybe I should say she's the Marth Stewart of the Internet? Or would that be too insulting (to Esther Dyson I mean).
In some ways, the Godwin guy's right - it's a tough job, and it took someone like Esther Dyson to give the organization credibility. Too bad that she's now also treated as the goat.
As with many technologies, especially that of communications related ones (which is most of them), the point of making advancements is so that they become so common place and so small and so fast that we no longer see it. It's just there, and is all around us. If you have such high bandwidth, you wouldn't be talking about "getting on the net". It would just be everywhere. We'd know it's there, but it'd be invisible because the networking hardware would be so small and the infrastructure so vast. We would not be aware of its speed, because everything would be instantaneous.
Reaction time, yes. For certain commands, yes. GUIs are slower in speed. But how much you can do with a single-click or a command-line is largely a design/logic issue. If you want, you can make a single button-click do everything that would take you a long time to type each command by command-line. Even if you put it all into a script, you still have to type that first line to run the script, even a single-letter script name.
Point is, how much and how quick things can get done is arbitrary, depending on the design of the system and/or the application.
I don't see why in order to accomplish useful things, it has to be typed at the command line. I could understand a LOVE for the command line, just not the assertion that it is always better, that remembering command lines and mnemonic and obscure parameters is a "real skill"
I have to ask, what's wrong with running 40K+ separate servers? I understand that Linux itself is multiuser, but why not both multiuser and multiserver? I had run across this site, www.rhyton.com recently and saw that they claim to offer this ability - that you can have your very own virtual server to do as you please - not an account, but a while (though virtual) server. If this is the same kind of stuff, I think the IBM has great potential of being a great ISP's dream come true. Am I wrong here? Do I have my facts wrong? Someone please tell me.
While I agree with the spirit of your argument, I'm not sure it's all that convincing (to me, at any rate). Here's why:
1. The way a particular system can be managed (via command-line or GUI) says nothing about the capabilities of the administrator (though it may lower the average abilities). That is, an administrator can be very capable without having to be an administrator of a "command-line" system. 2. Why is a "command-line" system necessarily better than a GUI system? I know you don't say that here, but the point you made was that by creating GUI administration into a system, the administrators are dumbed down. Learning to admin a windows machine, you state, means learning which button to cilck for the desired effect. What's the difference between that and learning which commands to type for the desired effect?
What I'm trying to say is that administration necessarily need to become easier and simpler beacuse systems are getting more complex. While the masochistic diehards must always insist that the command-line is the only way, more reasonable people will say, hey, there are something you can only do with the command line. For all the rest, I'll go with something simpler and easier, so that I could get more done. Things SHOULD be made easier. There's absolutely no reason why admins should be able to setup backups using some simple GUI application, if it helps to make things go quicker and easier.
I disagree that command-line admin skills=real skills, as you seem to imply. Real skills come from knowing how to choose and use the right tools for the job, and get the job done in the quickest and best possible way. Memorizing commands is NOT a "skill".
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1. To learn about computers themselves, about using computers, about programming, etc.
2. To use it as a tool for doing things that are common place in education now. Such as writing papers, doing research, distributing notes (by teacher) and keeping notes (by students).
I think people are lumping the two together, and granted, there's a very thin line (if at all, if you agree with my line of reasoning) between them.
But there would be a big difference, I think, in implementation depending on which one you are aiming for.
If you were aiming for number one, then you are most likely talking about more expensive hardware and possibly software. This is the traditional computer hardware/software give away that corporations have been doing.
If you were aiming for number two, then you are talking about cheap(er) hardware/software, I think. Because #2 is more of an appliance/device that lends itself to be implemented on a web pad kind of device.
Remember, computers nowadays are very general purpose and so extremely flexible that it really can be seen as in an ongoing experimental, use-as-you-go kind of thing. And this is the reason why there are problem such as bugs why people find them difficult to use. With appliances, people will find them easy to use and to accomplish work, instead of spending time trying to figure out why their computers crashed (more reason for linux based web pads).
So I think if we are to give kids computer tools, I would give appliance/devices(#2) rather than a laptop(#1) because it will be more useful to them in the process of learning what they are supposed to learn.
If we collectively wish hard enough, it will come true.
Oh, ideally, it should be made from lightweight flexible plastic/fiber/composite material that can be tossed around (yeah, really take the abuse). Something about the size and consistency of a large mouse pad. Or so I wish.
I was re-reading the article, and I thought, why can't we have open-sourced software that will allow the students to do their homeworks, say, type their papers on it, without having to shell out money for it (yes, I know they are out there already, but I mean something simple to use, geared to students and the educational system). The schools can say, we will accept your homework in the following formats, or something along that line. Tools for students to use for taking notes, for doing homeworks, for reviewing, etc.
The teachers will have their software that can be used to check the homeworks submitted by the students, can grade them, correct them, return them, etc. The teachers can even keep a copy of the student submitted works and later on use it to determine the grading for the students.
The main point again is:
1. Cheap
2. Easy to use
3. Accessible
I think that it would be really great if school systems can build on top of an open-source education-oriented platform, (say, a linux distribution) with a standard suite of software that the schools can use right away. Heck, if the open source movement is already volunteering time to write software, why not this?
I know there are some huge gaping holes in my idea, but isn't it worth considering?
The best thing to do is probably for them to have sub $200 web pads that allows the students to save their notes and homework and stuff like that on the Internet somewhere (say if a storage service provider get a contract with an education system, etc.). I think if you are spending more money than that, it's too much.
It's either cheap portable computing appliances (not general-purpose devices like regular PCs) or ubiquitous computing, where the students can have access from almost anywhere. Of course, the trend right now looks like portable (wireless, mobile) is more popular, but maybe in a few years, it will swing back the other way again.
I think that for them to consider it at all, it's gotta be as cheap if not cheaper than the game consoles. Or at least that's the way I believe it should be (not necessarily the way I think it will be though).
I've seen a video web server box that allows a backdoor but that which is controllable by the admin of t he unit. It's rather clever, I thought. The admin can change the admin password, etc., it came with some simple default password. There's also a backdoor user called backdoor. You can't change the password on this one, it's known only to the company who made the box (supposedly). But you CAN change the backdoor user name. This is something that can be documented even. There's still security risks, but it's better than the simple backdoors, because there's a level of control over it, and they tell you there's a backdoor (if there's more, they didn't say).
This reminds me, since I'm not up on this stuff, are there standard embedded linux distributions? I mean a distribution of linux specifically for embedded applications that is intended for developers and manufacturers to use as a foundation to build upon? Are there APIs for this? I'm not doing a paper or anything (as I've seen some of the recent posts from students posting requests for their papers), I'm just curious, since Linux seems like a great choice for embedded apps from the examples that we've seen so far.
I think that for some people, the persona they build in the virtual world is a heck of a lot better than their real one. That may say a lot about the sad state of affairs of some people's lives. Some people don't have the great jobs and great future that some of us (especially here) may have. Some people just choose to be in a different world where the rules are different. You don't find too many wealthy people spending a lot of time in virtual worlds, I'll bet, unless it's out of curiosity and/or boredom.
If Sony wants EQ to be really big, it should just let it go - don't try to regulate it. After all, real cash changing hands just means that the game is THAT popular. Quite frankly, Sony should just say that they are aware of such occurrences, and they do not condone it, and that it will not be their problem if users decide to do this.
Indeed, just like hot rodders or even third graders (My dad's stronger than yours. No he's not, MY dad is stronger than yours! Is not! Is too! Oh yeah, well he could life our house with one hand to clean the house! Oh yeah? well, my dad could...)
I have to agree. This was a good piece. I actually agreed with many of the points that Jon made, especially about corporatism being amoral. How true, how true! But that also means that whatever Pinkerton says can only be taken in the context of marketing (bottom-line). They have absolutely no sense of "real" moral responsibility. The false sense of moral responsibility comes from the fact that there is a market for dealing with moral issues.
Does it have to come down to something so toxic that you get cancer within, let's say, a year, that people will be willing to say, "gee, I think it might be causing cancer"?
I'm not saying it causes cancer. But I certainly think it is a big health risk. I mean, if we were to take it directly, would it be a problem?
The big problem I have with a lot of the things that are "good" for you goes something like this:
- Scurvy kills off thousands
- citrus fruits found to ward off scurvy
- Vitamin C deficiency isolated as reason for scurvy
- Abundance in Vitamin C wards of colds and prevents scurvy. It's essential!
- Orange Juice Industry: OJ got vitamin C! Therefore it is good for you! Come buy lots!
Is OJ good for reduced risk of heart disease because of Vitamin C?
Compared to soft drinks, I would say it's much better in terms of nutritional contents.
However, I don't think any food should need "fortification" with additional nutrients. That sends an alarm in my mind that says: there's something wrong here! Remember Olestra? The fat substitute that is supposed to pass right through your body instead of being absorbed by the body? They had to fortify it with nutrients because it leached nutrients from the body! And just because it is fortified with nutrients doesn't mean your body is absorbing those nutrients. It would still be truth in labeling of nutrients, though. Just like iron in spinach. It's there, but it doesn't mean it's easily absorbable.
I still say, processed foods are bad for you. If you have no choice, you have to eat. If you have a choice, avoiding processed foods is the best thing you could do.
Look, the best and richest country in the world, and we still have plenty of health problems, if not more than some of the other countries, even with all the available medical advancements. Maybe it's time to look at things from a different perspective?
Agreed. But maybe, just maybe, some of the "new dangers" (not things so immediate like car accidents) manifest themselve in the form of diseases and cancers?
Life expectancy was 35 (the source says 37) around 1800 (Source: http://www.positive.net/perspective/archive/96-08- 04.html). My fingers typed "childbirth" when I meant to say "childhood." However, Women frequently died while giving birth. There are two people involved in that birth process, after all.
Ok, childbirth or childhood, point is they were young. Childhood, I think, we can agree, is younger than 35 (though I may disagree with that myself, sometimes :). But it still means that significant number of people were older than 35 if there were so many people dying so young. I'm not going to beat this one into the ground anymore than it already has.
I do, however, have a problem with the 1800's figure.
There's a couple of reasons why:
1. Whose life expectancy was being measured? From page you referred to, it looked like it was mostly Europeans, who suffered the bubonic plague and other sort of things. It pointed out that prehistoric times until 1400's, life expectancy was in the 20s and 30s. I think this was largely a European phenomenon. Great ancient civilizations could not have been built if the population had those kinds of life expctancies.
2. I forget, also, 1800's -> Industrial Revolution, no? People were dying left and right from lung cancer because of the coal and soot and stuff like that, right? It was the staple of authors like Charles Dickens (again, European).
Thank you for a vigorous discussion (really!). I learned a few things. I also learned that I should not be so cavalier in making generalizations. Next time I'll try to offer up more convincing evidence of the stuff I'm spouting here that are not much of the new age bullshit that I personally find distasteful as well.
You are right on one thing, I didn't take general statistics in school - I only took engineering statistics in school and I didn't do so well in it. I really should go back and study it some more.
The world we live in today, has lots of good things and lots of bad things. It's much safer world in terms of all the natural dangers that used to kill off all of our ancestors. I will venture to say there lots of new dangers in terms of, say, nuclear radiations from artifical sources, chemical pollution, and new dangers like car accidents. Can we agree on that so far?
Ok, I don't know if you remember a Breyer Ice Cream commercial from the '80s that touted how they used only natural ingrdients, unlike all the other Ice Cream makes that had ingredients like Polysorbate 80 and locust beans (yes, I remembered those exactly from the commercial). What the heck are those things? And why are we putting that stuff into our bodies?
Meats and milk - animal products from animals that have been injected with hormones to increase yield. We are putting yet more stuff into our bodies. Because we are on the top of the food chain here, we accumulate a lot of these chemicals in more concentrated doses, especially the fat soluble stuff. I'm not making this stuff up. You can look it up.
I'm not trying to spew all the New Age bullshit. A lot of those claims are just as bogus, just as bad. Where there's an opportunity to make money, people will try ot use it.
Maybe my linking cancer with these "unnatural" versions of natural products was a little severe considering that I'm not really offering up proof.
As for me, I don't buy into all of the New Age homeopathic stuff either. I just try to eat naturally. I try to avoid foods that are processed and comes in a package that has one of the RDA labels and lists ingredients that I can't pronounce. I don't think that's very unreasonable.
By the way, where and when was life expectancy around 35 for most of human existence? And if huge number of people died in childbirth, wouldn't say that of those who survived, quite a few of them lived well past 35? Statistically speaking, it would make sense in order for things to balance out, no?
Milk: Yes, I know that throughout history, people have been drinking milk, using dairy products like cheese and yogurt. Perhaps I should have mentioned some of the other things that bother me about milk. Nowadays, milk is gotten from hormone-laden milk-generating biological machines that resemble something akin to what we call cows. Am I wrong on this? Are the cows NOT being injected with hormones to increase their milk yield? And what effect does the milk that come from these cows have on the human body?
Orange Juice: Ok, scurvy was a problem - for people who did not have a good source of vitamin C. Was scruvy a problem with people who did not have a good source of vitamin C? Not likely, unless you ate a very unbalanced diet. Vitamin C is plentiful in many fruits and vegetables. We have all been taught since grade school that citrus fruits have a lot of vitamin C and that when the world was being explored by the Europeans, they got scurvy, until they started bringing and using lemons and limes. Those being too sour, the next best thing was oranges. But orange juice is not essential for well-being. Vitamin C may be, not OJ. Oranges are also a warm/hot climate fruit (I don't know if they are tropical, but the most well-known OJ brand is Tropicana, at least from where I am). Where did people who lived in colder climates get their vitamin C from before the advent of global shipping?
You are right, though, I guess I should have known better than to open my mouth without having researched and being able to snow everyone with mountains of statistics.
I wish there was a better forum for this. I'm really not just mouthing off on this stuff.
Antibiotics did us a world of good, I suppose. But if you go through some of the science and medical journals, you will see a lot of people cautioning against use of antibiotics. One of the foremost reasons is that it allows antibiotic-resistant strains to proliferate by eliminating their competition - their non-antibiotic resistant kins.
We choose to put things into our body that are bad for us. When too much accumulates, we get cancer. There are many other ways, of course, and not always voluntary.
We allow ourselves to be led by marketing, and allow ourselves to be harmed.
Some examples:
- Milk is good for you (says who? This should be an urban legend. For hundreds of thousands of years (at least) humans lived without drinking milk (and this means milk from another animal, and drinking milk as an adult, and drinking pasteurized milk), why is it now milk is so popular? Give you a hint: "Got Milk?"
- Orange Juice is good for you (Again, the same argument. Our ancestors lived without pasteurized, Vitamin D fortified, Juicy bits of orange or not, for a long time, and they didn't have problems).
- Smoking is cool (helps with digestion, as some of the older ads told us).
- MS is the best OS, used by more people than any other OSes in the world (well, ok, I should know better, but it fits).
I know that this is way off topic. But heck, until people realize that the big corporations are using marketing to leverage our health and well-being for their bottom line, and that there are alternatives and people gotta stop being sheep.
I have a question about these so-called state lawsuits and/or class-action lawsuits. Are any of these lawsuits for the benefit of anybody besides the lawyers and/or possibly the state's coffers?
I mean, ok, there are smoe very anti-MS sentiments here at Slashdot, and then there are some who are not zealously anti-MS. And many people would like to see MS being eaten alive by the sharks. But seriously, how may we be served by these lawsuits except to be treated to a spectacle and (possibly) see a (again possibly) former glorious company limping into the future?
This is just like the big tobacco suits. While I applaud the original intent, I fear that all the sharks circling out there readying to pounce and to fatten their own wallet will do the public disservice.
Or am I completely wrong?
In some ways, the Godwin guy's right - it's a tough job, and it took someone like Esther Dyson to give the organization credibility. Too bad that she's now also treated as the goat.
As with many technologies, especially that of communications related ones (which is most of them), the point of making advancements is so that they become so common place and so small and so fast that we no longer see it. It's just there, and is all around us. If you have such high bandwidth, you wouldn't be talking about "getting on the net". It would just be everywhere. We'd know it's there, but it'd be invisible because the networking hardware would be so small and the infrastructure so vast. We would not be aware of its speed, because everything would be instantaneous.
I think it's Simon Singh you're talking about.
Point is, how much and how quick things can get done is arbitrary, depending on the design of the system and/or the application.
I don't see why in order to accomplish useful things, it has to be typed at the command line. I could understand a LOVE for the command line, just not the assertion that it is always better, that remembering command lines and mnemonic and obscure parameters is a "real skill"
I have to ask, what's wrong with running 40K+ separate servers? I understand that Linux itself is multiuser, but why not both multiuser and multiserver? I had run across this site, www.rhyton.com recently and saw that they claim to offer this ability - that you can have your very own virtual server to do as you please - not an account, but a while (though virtual) server. If this is the same kind of stuff, I think the IBM has great potential of being a great ISP's dream come true. Am I wrong here? Do I have my facts wrong? Someone please tell me.
1. The way a particular system can be managed (via command-line or GUI) says nothing about the capabilities of the administrator (though it may lower the average abilities). That is, an administrator can be very capable without having to be an administrator of a "command-line" system.
2. Why is a "command-line" system necessarily better than a GUI system? I know you don't say that here, but the point you made was that by creating GUI administration into a system, the administrators are dumbed down. Learning to admin a windows machine, you state, means learning which button to cilck for the desired effect. What's the difference between that and learning which commands to type for the desired effect?
What I'm trying to say is that administration necessarily need to become easier and simpler beacuse systems are getting more complex. While the masochistic diehards must always insist that the command-line is the only way, more reasonable people will say, hey, there are something you can only do with the command line. For all the rest, I'll go with something simpler and easier, so that I could get more done. Things SHOULD be made easier. There's absolutely no reason why admins should be able to setup backups using some simple GUI application, if it helps to make things go quicker and easier.
I disagree that command-line admin skills=real skills, as you seem to imply. Real skills come from knowing how to choose and use the right tools for the job, and get the job done in the quickest and best possible way. Memorizing commands is NOT a "skill".
Yeah, and as the movies and TV prove (it's on TV, so it must be true), alien babes are hot!