How much time and effort and money will be lost on battling over the significance of Evolution.
There should be a tax on 'Anti Evolution' churches to make them pay for their interference. Lets say $1 per worshipper per sabbath for every concept they impede and then subsequently embrace. I'm sure the scientists defending Evolution could have better spent their time actually creating something useful. If proof emerges that Evolution is fundamentally wrong, there would be a refund.
They know it's coming, it's only a matter of time before Evolution, along with other "heretic ideas" such as acceptance of Homosexuality, Heliocentricity, the concept of a vacuum, life elsewhere in the universe, Depictions of Human anatomy etc. become accepted by their own church (I hear that the Vatican is making progress on many of these issues)
If they held their beliefs to themselves it would be fine, If they came up with reasoned arguments they would be contributing to the debate and hence welcome. But to repeatedly spout the same nonsense over and over is just obstructive, and costly to defend children against. They should cough up some compensation.
I've reached the point where I'm passably good at many things. I'm an OK manager when I have to do it, I'm an OK coder, I design networks well etc. I'm well paid and I have lots of flexibility in what I do, but there's no career path to the boardroom from where I sit.
If I had to become a full-time Manager, there's no way I would be worth my current pay. I don't think the career path through management hierarchy is what it once was either though, so what's the point ?
I think if I were forced to quit I may find I have to become more entrepreneurial (I had to look up how to spell that - not a good sign) and maybe that would lead to a boardroom position, but it won't, in my case, have been my ability to manage people that got me there.
When I was younger I held onto many prejudices about the way to get ahead - thankfully the business world seems to be less sinister than I though it was back then. There's a world of difference between providing service and being servile.
It seems to me that multicast is little understood by many people that are otherwise very familiar with unicast IP behaviour, even though there are very few concepts to grasp and implement to have a successful system.
Plus it becomes self fulfilling - no multicast support because no-one wants it. No applications to drive demand because there's no multicast support etc.
It's a shame because it works really well in my (VSAT) network environment.
I'm not sure what people mean by TV nowadays. But surely multicast beats out every other method to distribute programming in the traditional scheduled sense.
I think that an adult that engages in taunting / hounding children over the internet or any other medium is being malicious and that is not behaviour that should be tolerated in any environment.
The passing of laws that clobber free speech seems to me to be unnecessary. There has always been a dividing line between free speech and abuse, I suspect all the laws that are needed are already on the books.
Now is not the time to treat the internet as if it were another planet. This is a old-fashioned, low-tech people on people issue.
If NYC is worried about bad geiger counters, have one of the universities create a low-cost calibration and test program and then offer all who pass an oppotunity to join in a web ring or something.
Seems to me like a good way to get the city monitored for almost free and to give the authorities a heads up if there are lots of spurious readings.
Sounds like a win-win to me, how expensive could a basic check be ?
I don't see what the children gain or lose from a dual boot system.
It seems to me that the 'view code' button will still be able to show application source code under windows, and that etoys-like environments etc. can be easily supported in Windows (look at scratch). After all - it's not the OS you're looking at, it's the application.
I also don't see what the OLPC project has to lose - MS will pump in money and quit blocking the distribution of these devices by spreading FUD.
Surely though, MS would do better to fill the memory that XP would take up with applications that actually add something to the user experience rather than supplant something that's perfectly adequate already.
It saddens me that MS will likely push to have the linux side of the Flash wiped prior to deployment. But I think Negroponte has made a calculated choice to make MS a backer not an enemy and focus on facilitating education for the children. I'm sure he's able to exert some pressure, even on the mighty MS.
Perhaps the best possibility is that teachers will be directed to tell children not to use Linux. There's nothing that makes my children more determined to try something than denying it.
Seriously, I told them they couldn't have broccoli once, they ate lots of it as a treat.
This will probably stop "john" trying to log in from Istanbul as he seems to try 100s of times each day, and I like the C3PO acronym - cute. So far, port knocking has also stopped 'john' and his friends.
It seems too easy to get locked out as one slip blacklists you.
I was shocked to read that even with NTP, some servers' clocks drift so far - I thought it could keep them +/- a fraction of a second worst case (ah, when reality bites)
I have been lucky to find an employer that allows me to work from home - in this case 1000s of miles away from the office in another state. I have put in extra effort to "justify" being allowed to do this, so I work 60+ hours per week and I'm constantly getting 'sucked in' to issues when I simply walked past my laptop on the way to the fridge and saw an email that looked interesting.
I don't think I have any 'point' I'm trying to make here. But the things I've found out by working from home are...
1) Tech makes it possible - without blackberry/DSL/WWW/VPN/putty there's no way I could have done this
2) Working from home means more hours than working from an office and the isolation is hard on the family and me. (I'm there, but I'm not there - it's like a tease to my wife)
3) I gain back the hours I would have wasted commuting, but I miss the daydreaming time that went with it (yes - I'm a terrible driver)
4) I was able to move to a non-urban area that otherwise would not have supported my employment. That's great for me, housing is inexpensive (I'm driving up the pricing for the locals - boo) but it means that I'm doubly eager to keep my job. There are few local alternatives to keep me employed at anything approaching my salary.
5) I drink way too much diet coke - the fridge is right at my feet
It seems to me that a lot of anti-western sentiment is born of a feeling that the west is only prepared to export culture. It would be nice to think of OLPC as a two-way exchange of things that can reasonably be called culture and values. However, I can't see many of these laptops being connected to the internet. Perhaps to other XOs, but not to the internet.
I wonder how much teaching support it will take to enable the kids to get the best from these machines. And how much their outlook on life will change just because of the new environment (all of a sudden a kid that does well with the laptops becomes more relevant as opposed to the fastest runner. What if the kid who does well is a girl ?) It seems to me that these machine will either catalyze liberalism or wind up discarded and broken in short order.
A friend of mine played records at a night club. He would pride himself in playing music that people wanted to hear but could not buy unless they hunted down the record at a collectors fair or yard sale. It's crazy in this day and age, here I am willing to pay top dollar for the music I want to hear and there's no-where to buy it. I may have non-mainstream musical tastes, but I know that the music I want to hear is locked up in some record company's vault and they won't take my money. I'd even buy the whole album since in many cases I want to hear more of that artist.
I saw this book a Borders and have recommended it to the Network Support Technicians at my company. These guys run our helpdesk and often refer basic questions about network performance to me. I've created a bunch of systems that store data for reports in mysql (current status, roundtrip response time, throughput, usage etc.). People are often amazed that I'm able to produce ad-hoc charts and tables about all sorts of aspects of the network's well-being. All I'm doing is simple queries on simple data and if this book helps others in my organization to query the data in even the most basic way, it will have been well worthwhile.
I find that more rigorous books sit on the shelf and never get read. These guys don't want to be DBAs or to design a database, they just want to be able to find out simple information.
I want to encourage them to at least start into this field, not just because it's career-expanding for them, but also because the more these tools get accepted, the less grief I'll get from management for implementing in-house the things we needed in the first place.
I've deployed plone extensively inside my organisation, it automates the monitoring and configuration of almost everything we do across Cisco, Windows and linux platforms, it's great. But I will say that the documentation I've read over and over again has failed to give me much confidence that I understand it.
Every time I've had a question the online forums have answered them fantastically quickly (better than any Cisco TAC case I've ever opened), and the answer has always seemed obvious and intuitive once I had the answer. But there's no-way I would have guessed what to do by reading 'The definitive guide to Plone' or just messing with the portal.
I remember when I first looked at Zope I instinctively thought it was what I wanted, but it took several hours of reading on their web site to figure out what it actually did. So far as I could tell on first reading it was some form of geek religion.
Real propellor heads out there may think me lame, but I consider myself to be a pretty smart guy, and there's just something about Zope and Plone that I find difficult to grok, the solutions I've made with it are wonderful solutions, better than anything I've been able to find to buy and better than anything I could have spec'd to a third party developer, but underneath I've implemented them clumsily and I've not yet found a book that will help me make the solutions elegant.
Maybe this book will be the one that makes me confident enough to let my Portal shine on the internet, rather than just lock it away on an internal network for fear of its security.
If Gordon Moore is watching - could you please tell us how rapidly these things are going to improve over the coming years.
To my mind well-oriented roof space is power-generating real-estate, after 5 years you may want to rip these things out and replace them with something better.
Also: I'd pay more for home-grown electricity than grid power. I'd feel like I had some security of supply (I don't need to buy that stinky, dangerous generator after all) and that I was 'doing the right thing'. I'd say that electricity from my own roof was worth paying a little more than the going commercial rate for.
I'm pretty sure that whenever I use a kWHr in my house, there was plenty of good energy being wasted by delivering it to me across the grid. So it's kind of like buying by groceries from local farmers, makes me feel good.
Seems to me that this raises two clear points in favour of these systems being open to inspection...
1) Univ. of Surrey's entry was presumably strong except for the random number generator, now that's been highlighted it should be easily fixed. So in a roundabout way, Surrey should be grateful that the problem was found, and we should all be grateful that there are two strong contenders for an OSS voting system.
2) It looks like the most direct way to find these issues is to look at the source, If Diebold were genuinely interested in making the best voting system available, wouldn't they want as many reviews of the source as they could get ?
Finally; I don't see why the people who've put all this effort into making a reliable voting system shouldn't reap some reasonable financial reward ? I'm sure the makers of the hardware will. I see why ot shoudl be open, but I don't see why it should be free in the monetary sense.
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How much time and effort and money will be lost on battling over the significance of Evolution. There should be a tax on 'Anti Evolution' churches to make them pay for their interference. Lets say $1 per worshipper per sabbath for every concept they impede and then subsequently embrace. I'm sure the scientists defending Evolution could have better spent their time actually creating something useful. If proof emerges that Evolution is fundamentally wrong, there would be a refund. They know it's coming, it's only a matter of time before Evolution, along with other "heretic ideas" such as acceptance of Homosexuality, Heliocentricity, the concept of a vacuum, life elsewhere in the universe, Depictions of Human anatomy etc. become accepted by their own church (I hear that the Vatican is making progress on many of these issues) If they held their beliefs to themselves it would be fine, If they came up with reasoned arguments they would be contributing to the debate and hence welcome. But to repeatedly spout the same nonsense over and over is just obstructive, and costly to defend children against. They should cough up some compensation.
I've reached the point where I'm passably good at many things. I'm an OK manager when I have to do it, I'm an OK coder, I design networks well etc. I'm well paid and I have lots of flexibility in what I do, but there's no career path to the boardroom from where I sit. If I had to become a full-time Manager, there's no way I would be worth my current pay. I don't think the career path through management hierarchy is what it once was either though, so what's the point ? I think if I were forced to quit I may find I have to become more entrepreneurial (I had to look up how to spell that - not a good sign) and maybe that would lead to a boardroom position, but it won't, in my case, have been my ability to manage people that got me there. When I was younger I held onto many prejudices about the way to get ahead - thankfully the business world seems to be less sinister than I though it was back then. There's a world of difference between providing service and being servile.
It seems to me that multicast is little understood by many people that are otherwise very familiar with unicast IP behaviour, even though there are very few concepts to grasp and implement to have a successful system. Plus it becomes self fulfilling - no multicast support because no-one wants it. No applications to drive demand because there's no multicast support etc. It's a shame because it works really well in my (VSAT) network environment.
I'm not sure what people mean by TV nowadays. But surely multicast beats out every other method to distribute programming in the traditional scheduled sense.
I think that an adult that engages in taunting / hounding children over the internet or any other medium is being malicious and that is not behaviour that should be tolerated in any environment.
The passing of laws that clobber free speech seems to me to be unnecessary. There has always been a dividing line between free speech and abuse, I suspect all the laws that are needed are already on the books.
Now is not the time to treat the internet as if it were another planet. This is a old-fashioned, low-tech people on people issue.
I think this is why HALE (High-Altitude Long-Endurance) Aircraft have been proposed as a more reasonable solution
So...
...It's foolproof !
If the west depresses living standards in axis-of-evil countries, it will foment terrorism, spurring more students to become engineers.
Voila - more H1B visa candidates to keep engineering salaries in check in the USA.
If NYC is worried about bad geiger counters, have one of the universities create a low-cost calibration and test program and then offer all who pass an oppotunity to join in a web ring or something. Seems to me like a good way to get the city monitored for almost free and to give the authorities a heads up if there are lots of spurious readings. Sounds like a win-win to me, how expensive could a basic check be ?
I don't see what the children gain or lose from a dual boot system.
It seems to me that the 'view code' button will still be able to show application source code under windows, and that etoys-like environments etc. can be easily supported in Windows (look at scratch). After all - it's not the OS you're looking at, it's the application.
I also don't see what the OLPC project has to lose - MS will pump in money and quit blocking the distribution of these devices by spreading FUD.
Surely though, MS would do better to fill the memory that XP would take up with applications that actually add something to the user experience rather than supplant something that's perfectly adequate already.
It saddens me that MS will likely push to have the linux side of the Flash wiped prior to deployment. But I think Negroponte has made a calculated choice to make MS a backer not an enemy and focus on facilitating education for the children. I'm sure he's able to exert some pressure, even on the mighty MS.
Perhaps the best possibility is that teachers will be directed to tell children not to use Linux. There's nothing that makes my children more determined to try something than denying it.
Seriously, I told them they couldn't have broccoli once, they ate lots of it as a treat.
This will probably stop "john" trying to log in from Istanbul as he seems to try 100s of times each day, and I like the C3PO acronym - cute. So far, port knocking has also stopped 'john' and his friends.
It seems too easy to get locked out as one slip blacklists you.
I was shocked to read that even with NTP, some servers' clocks drift so far - I thought it could keep them +/- a fraction of a second worst case (ah, when reality bites)
I have been lucky to find an employer that allows me to work from home - in this case 1000s of miles away from the office in another state. I have put in extra effort to "justify" being allowed to do this, so I work 60+ hours per week and I'm constantly getting 'sucked in' to issues when I simply walked past my laptop on the way to the fridge and saw an email that looked interesting.
I don't think I have any 'point' I'm trying to make here. But the things I've found out by working from home are...
1) Tech makes it possible - without blackberry/DSL/WWW/VPN/putty there's no way I could have done this
2) Working from home means more hours than working from an office and the isolation is hard on the family and me. (I'm there, but I'm not there - it's like a tease to my wife)
3) I gain back the hours I would have wasted commuting, but I miss the daydreaming time that went with it (yes - I'm a terrible driver)
4) I was able to move to a non-urban area that otherwise would not have supported my employment. That's great for me, housing is inexpensive (I'm driving up the pricing for the locals - boo) but it means that I'm doubly eager to keep my job. There are few local alternatives to keep me employed at anything approaching my salary.
5) I drink way too much diet coke - the fridge is right at my feet
It seems to me that a lot of anti-western sentiment is born of a feeling that the west is only prepared to export culture. It would be nice to think of OLPC as a two-way exchange of things that can reasonably be called culture and values. However, I can't see many of these laptops being connected to the internet. Perhaps to other XOs, but not to the internet.
I wonder how much teaching support it will take to enable the kids to get the best from these machines. And how much their outlook on life will change just because of the new environment (all of a sudden a kid that does well with the laptops becomes more relevant as opposed to the fastest runner. What if the kid who does well is a girl ?) It seems to me that these machine will either catalyze liberalism or wind up discarded and broken in short order.
I wonder what kind of computer I could get my son to let him enjoy exploring computing in the same way today - perhaps an XO
I remember being thrilled to get my Zx81 kit one Christmas - the whole thing was an adventure.
A friend of mine played records at a night club. He would pride himself in playing music that people wanted to hear but could not buy unless they hunted down the record at a collectors fair or yard sale. It's crazy in this day and age, here I am willing to pay top dollar for the music I want to hear and there's no-where to buy it. I may have non-mainstream musical tastes, but I know that the music I want to hear is locked up in some record company's vault and they won't take my money. I'd even buy the whole album since in many cases I want to hear more of that artist.
I saw this book a Borders and have recommended it to the Network Support Technicians at my company. These guys run our helpdesk and often refer basic questions about network performance to me. I've created a bunch of systems that store data for reports in mysql (current status, roundtrip response time, throughput, usage etc.). People are often amazed that I'm able to produce ad-hoc charts and tables about all sorts of aspects of the network's well-being. All I'm doing is simple queries on simple data and if this book helps others in my organization to query the data in even the most basic way, it will have been well worthwhile.
I find that more rigorous books sit on the shelf and never get read. These guys don't want to be DBAs or to design a database, they just want to be able to find out simple information.
I want to encourage them to at least start into this field, not just because it's career-expanding for them, but also because the more these tools get accepted, the less grief I'll get from management for implementing in-house the things we needed in the first place.
I've deployed plone extensively inside my organisation, it automates the monitoring and configuration of almost everything we do across Cisco, Windows and linux platforms, it's great. But I will say that the documentation I've read over and over again has failed to give me much confidence that I understand it.
Every time I've had a question the online forums have answered them fantastically quickly (better than any Cisco TAC case I've ever opened), and the answer has always seemed obvious and intuitive once I had the answer. But there's no-way I would have guessed what to do by reading 'The definitive guide to Plone' or just messing with the portal.
I remember when I first looked at Zope I instinctively thought it was what I wanted, but it took several hours of reading on their web site to figure out what it actually did. So far as I could tell on first reading it was some form of geek religion.
Real propellor heads out there may think me lame, but I consider myself to be a pretty smart guy, and there's just something about Zope and Plone that I find difficult to grok, the solutions I've made with it are wonderful solutions, better than anything I've been able to find to buy and better than anything I could have spec'd to a third party developer, but underneath I've implemented them clumsily and I've not yet found a book that will help me make the solutions elegant.
Maybe this book will be the one that makes me confident enough to let my Portal shine on the internet, rather than just lock it away on an internal network for fear of its security.
At last the American election process has found it's Screaming Lord Such
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Monster_Raving_Loony_Party.
It's a sign of maturity really - now see if you can get a cat to run for office.
Is socks available ?
If Gordon Moore is watching - could you please tell us how rapidly these things are going to improve over the coming years.
To my mind well-oriented roof space is power-generating real-estate, after 5 years you may want to rip these things out and replace them with something better.
Also: I'd pay more for home-grown electricity than grid power. I'd feel like I had some security of supply (I don't need to buy that stinky, dangerous generator after all) and that I was 'doing the right thing'. I'd say that electricity from my own roof was worth paying a little more than the going commercial rate for.
I'm pretty sure that whenever I use a kWHr in my house, there was plenty of good energy being wasted by delivering it to me across the grid. So it's kind of like buying by groceries from local farmers, makes me feel good.
Ion drives are used... http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive04/panamsata rch_082404.html May not be very reliable though !
Seems to me that this raises two clear points in favour of these systems being open to inspection... 1) Univ. of Surrey's entry was presumably strong except for the random number generator, now that's been highlighted it should be easily fixed. So in a roundabout way, Surrey should be grateful that the problem was found, and we should all be grateful that there are two strong contenders for an OSS voting system. 2) It looks like the most direct way to find these issues is to look at the source, If Diebold were genuinely interested in making the best voting system available, wouldn't they want as many reviews of the source as they could get ? Finally; I don't see why the people who've put all this effort into making a reliable voting system shouldn't reap some reasonable financial reward ? I'm sure the makers of the hardware will. I see why ot shoudl be open, but I don't see why it should be free in the monetary sense.