Montessori schools don't give grades. In fact, the philosophy of teaching is very similar to what the author described, "Persuading, Cajoling, Being a learning partner and instigator."
Of course, the kids that come out of the Montessori curriculum are either going to be world leaders, or pure dumb-asses. See, if the kid has any intellect at all, the Montessori system will stress that and make it bloom... to it's full potential. Grades are no longer a reward for achievement, rather the act of learning and progressing itself is. If the child has absolutely no intelligence, as unlikely as it may seem, the child would do no better in a regular school.
Granted, Montessori depends almost wholly upon the teacher. If the teacher cannot stimulate the children to learn at the rate at which they can... The children will suffer. In the current academic system, we have children that are pushed through, getting by with a "D," progressing into the next step... before the previous step is fully understood. Whether the teacher is good or not is irrelevant, because they can let people get by with a "D".
I remember back in the day, when I had to cross country ski to get to school. We used these things called abacus's. Ah well, what to do with the youth.
The same way that MacOS works. You can distribute the binaries that sit on top of the OS. Just make sure you don't link any of the OS code into your binaries, and you'll be ok.
Winter Carnival of 1998 at Michigan Technological University... There was some group of kids that turned a station wagon into a Sauna. I remember seeing people sitting in it, getting out, and steaming like a volcano.
This type of mechanism doesn't exist in TCPA, and would probably require some sort of support at the chipset level (which means it couldn't be implemented using current northbridge hardware). The total system impact isn't known, and it's any body's guess what this does to application development.
Yeah, the reason people give for staying with Microsoft is training. "I don't want to learn another way of doing this, if I already know this way of doing it."
You can clone the interface, but if you make one thing different, the person is going to throw a shit-fit... "It doesn't work the way MS works, I want MS back!"
We had that problem when we migrated everything to StarOffice. It was taken care of by the IT department doing two things:
Showing the dollar figures. $30,000 vs. $600,000 for a stupid office suite is... well convincing.
Told them to shut up. (In a polite way). There was no way that we were going to move back to MS Office as a platform, so the people who complained could either A)Shut up or B) find a new job.
A more accurate metaphore is that the Author is the cook, and the publishing house is the waiter. The publishing house is filled with your typical corporate idiots, much like the music industry is filled with musical imbeciles.
The companies only serve what the author has created up to the public. They should only really get a measily amount, and perhaps a tip.
I'd say that my biggest complaint is the update / install feature.
Red-hat has this rather nice update program that completely updates everything on your system (including all of the dependancies), without asking for CD's or user intervention. I could just say "Update," let it sit for four hours or so, and I'd come back to the latest edition of Red Hat.
Mandrake doesn't have anything near to that. It does have the install utility that lets you select individual packages, but when there's a list of 1000 packages, this can be inconvenient. If you select a package that has dependancies that need to be fulfilled, it stops the installation process altogether with a message saying that the dependant package needs to be installed. It doesn't just DO it.
Ah well, I use Gentoo anyhow. It's got the most wonderful update system of any distro out there, except that it may take a while to do it.
Conversely, if you have never been exposed to a 'good' apple, you wouldn't know what a good apple is. Consequently, if you're presented with a barrel of bad apples, and you've never been exposed to a good apple, you'll think highly of the bad apples.
The same thing shows up with eating tendancies. If you had to eat chocolate chip cookies and milk three times a day, every single day for the rest of your life, you would get very tired of chocolate chip cookies and milk. You would long for something different, something to contrast the cookies against.
It's like the Smashing Pumpkins say: "Could you believe in heaven, if heaven was all you had?"
Re:Chemistry is fun-damental
on
Uncle Tungsten
·
· Score: 1
Which leads us all to the ultimate destination: Philosophy.
There was no physics until there was Meta-physics. The Greeks thought the world was made up of Atoms thousands of years before Newton came up with Mechanical Laws. That was way before the time of quantum physics...
Sitting around thinking is a fabulous thing to do, if you are a good thinker.
Nah... the q-bit demo has infinite ops in 9 nanoseconds. The machine will provide that many correct solutions in that amount of time, perhaps, but what it really is doing is computing every single operation possible instantaneously, and the most probable answer is assumed as the "correct" answer.
Basically, cryptography as we know it will become useless, because a 2048 q-bit machine will crack a 2048 bit RSA code instantaneously. It's called infinite parallelism. Algorithms already exist for quantum cryptography, however, so we needn't worry about security.
Yeah, and it's the reliance on the calculator that has caused many of our teachers to be unable to do multi-digit addition in their heads. If we took a couple old grannies and let them add prices, they'd have the solution in a snap. Let an average 20 year try that, and they'll sit there and ponder where the calculator is.
Teachers have grown lazy, and in trying to advance students as far as possible, they've overlooked the basic foundation that they need to build upon. We expect kids to do algebra when they can't do arithmetic. We've undermined our children's ability to do arithmetic by making it easier.
I'm one of the lucky ones. I wasn't allowed to use a calculator until I hit the public school.
Except that those open-source products don't exist in the market, and they cannot compete with Microsoft. They don't have to compete. They are free, people don't have jobs that hinge on them (well, very few do), the source is out there.
Office doesn't ship with Windows. Neither do any compilers (except for Debug.exe... gotta love it). Windows is pure binary, there is very little need for uncompiled libraries. Second, TCL/TK doesn't provide a base for servers, no one makes money off of it, and Windows is not used as a leverage to get rid of it.
You don't have to ship other OS's with Windows, you just have to make sure that the OS does what you expect it to do. If you go to a website that uses a swing applet, you should be able to see it pop up in the browser. It's an open standard, and if IE is going to be shipped with Windows, then it is MS's responsibility to make sure that it works correctly with web technologies.
When MS decides that it wants to control web technologies, and makes it so that it does, we the people must step in and bitch-slap them. I can see MS being required to ship Mozilla or Netscape, or at least open up the source to IE (and incorporate UML into IE). MS does a lot of things that forces developers to have limited options. This is what they want to have... Developers don't want to write something for a product that may or may not support it correctly. A developer does not want to have to take the extra time and work to ensure that the software product from another maker is there.
It is the OS maker's responsibility to ensure that software makers have the simplest and most varied options and methods. A simple and clear API, for instance, or a VM that runs swing...
Except that it probably isn't about money. Sun wants to see Java succeed, because they are Java's daddy. I want to see Java succeed because I like it.
Java has an open spec. You can download open-source JDK's and JRE's (blackdown, Kaffe). I know that Mono is on it's way, but it still doesn't cover the entire language base and runtime. The others do. Sun doesn't hide things from the economy, they may not give out source code freely (though you can obtain it easily), but at least I've got a few options. It doesn't seem that Sun is bitching about that, either.
Sun has a lot to gain from this too. If Java is recognized as a universal base, there will be little incentive not to use it. Why build something in C# and have it run only on MS software, when you can build it in Java and have it run on nearly everything? Sun sells Unix boxen. Sun sells application servers. There is a LOT of money to be made on Application servers.
For those that may say "JBoss exists, why pay anything?" : Realize that Sun is a fantastic name to blame. That's what people are really buying there... "IBM never got someone fired... Sun never got someone fired..." They don't get someone fired because they provide an outlet for frustration. They must provide user / developer support. They must face that fact that there may be lawsuits boiling in the background. If an App server that provides all of the business logic that keeps a multi-billion dollar company afloat goes down, you'd better be sure that you have a big (and rich) entity to sue.
JBoss, JoNas, and others just don't provide that big entity - big money background.
An operating system is the core, the set of programs that run the hardware, and operate as the interim between the hardware and the rest of the software. When Microsoft ships an Operating system, they ought to ship it with either one of two configurations:
No middle-ware. This means no.NET, no Messenger, no Outlook Express, no IE. Nothing. Just the operating system (And maybe the gui. It seems that the gui is tied directly to the OS in MS's case.).
Every single peice of middle-ware that is suffiecient to run every peice of Windows compatible software out there. This includes Java programs, as they are Microsoft compatible.
The problem is that MS decided to bundle in.NET, Passport, IE, Outlook Express, etc., but skimp on the Java support. This gave.NET a better looking future, for one. The Java support that they do provide is minimal (sucks), and doesn't support a lot of things... swing, JDBC, JMX, JNDI, yada, yada.
Once I can run JBoss on my windows machine without a Sun Java SDK, then I'll consider MS playing 'fair.'
The one thing that they did wrong was to combine the middleware with the OS. If you ship an OS, you are shipping a foundation. You are shipping something that could possibly run on every machine. You have a responsibility to the rest of society to ensure that this peice of software works correctly with everything else out there. If it doesn't, and it is found that it doesn't because there is a product shipped with the system that is competitive with that which is broken, then there is definitely something foul.
Just cuz X does something for you in particular doesn't mean that it's in the best interest of the desktop / workstation community. Also if another software platform may be best for a particular job, it doesn't mean that development has to stop on X.
I think that X is cumbersome. If you let it sit for a while without touching, it loses it's snap. It's bloated. The shape of the pixel is messed up. etc. etc. etc. I'd rather have something that is really small and fast. I don't work on my computer through a network, so I don't need all of the overhead that the server creates. Perhaps another windowing platform is a better solution.
In the first place. Linux has a great UI. It's called a command line.
Now X, on the other hand, and the windowmanagers are a bit too windowsy.
I'd say that the current mindset is a result of a fermenting idea of using a "Window" to access different applications on the machine. If someone comes up with a better way of accessing applications, the all power to them. The problem is that when you decide to use a "Window," you have a limited number of options in how to implement it (menus, a button to make big, a button to make disappear, etc...).
Re:Some interesting quotes about the flick...
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If the reviewer had read the book, they would have known ahead of time that the real women's roles don't bloom until the last volume. Eowyn, one of the toughest chicks in existance, was given a secondary role/duty in the second book. There's really nothing that Peter could have done about that.
I can count the number of female characters on one hand. Granted, I saw quite a few women in the movie. Some of the evil soldiers were female, you could kinda tell by their eyes. Galadriel also had a rather long narrative, and Arwen also appeared. These things never did happen in the book (Aragorn was always smitten by Arwen, Eowyn was the one who was smitten by Aragorn... Not the way it's presented in the movie.)
This is just typical NYTimes Liberal PC Hot-headed bullshit.
Is that the case was turned on the wording, moreso the usage of the word "Willful." This case does not provide precedence for using the software to crack an eBook. Basically, we still cannot use our open source machines to do something that proprietary machines can.
There was no precedence established for the unconstitutionality of the DMCA, in part or in whole. Once that happens, we can be happy.
But doing anything like modifying ZA checksum code is a direct violation of the DMCA. If Record companies were shipping that kinda crap on CD's, they'd be brought down in a jiffy.
eh... I took a look at the offer. I'm not terribly excited about it. It is convenient to get the disc from Mandrake for almost the production of the disc and packaging, but I don't know if that's quite enough.
If we (as the linux community) want to reach out to the lost souls in the Windows world, then something more than just the CD should be offered. Anyone can download the Mandrake 9.0 CD for free, so offering a CD for a fee is maybe not the best idea. Instead, we take a small hit by sending them the CD, and offering free support for a limited time, say... 3 months.
Once everyone is acclamated and the three months are up, offer support for a fee, and ask them to pledge to a membership. This is all optional, of course, but it is a pathway for the moola.
I just don't think that the average consumer is going to put the effort into trading a Windows CD and License in, while paying a fee, for a non-supported Mandrake Linux cd.
Linux is not a geek factor, it's a real OS with real applications for real business tasks.
Quit bitching and write something then. If you want to go another operating platform and reap the benefits of it, then you'll have to put some effort into making the platform your home.
Sure, you'll have 25,000 amiga apps, and very few actual MorphOS applications. Does this actually affect your own ability to write code?
This is the point where Apple and Linuz were both at only a few years ago: Someone would say "Why not go with Apple (linux)?" and the reply would be: "Because Windows has all of the software."
People who were fond of linux and apple soon found that instead of bitching about the lack of applications, their energy would be better spent working on those applications.
Personally, I'm glad that there's a glimmer of a truly new OS. I've spent a lot of time in school, reading books on OS philosophy, only to see the majority of the business world tends to follow the least efficient methodologies. People think that software design doesn't matter, because they can just thrown money and hardware at the problem. Then we reach the actual limit of Moore's waL (it is not a law), and we're left with less "better" hardware to throw at a problem. At this point, our coding practices will suck ass, and we'll have to re-learn what efficiency really means.
Slashdot Mirror
Montessori schools don't give grades. In fact, the philosophy of teaching is very similar to what the author described, "Persuading, Cajoling, Being a learning partner and instigator."
Of course, the kids that come out of the Montessori curriculum are either going to be world leaders, or pure dumb-asses. See, if the kid has any intellect at all, the Montessori system will stress that and make it bloom... to it's full potential. Grades are no longer a reward for achievement, rather the act of learning and progressing itself is. If the child has absolutely no intelligence, as unlikely as it may seem, the child would do no better in a regular school.
Granted, Montessori depends almost wholly upon the teacher. If the teacher cannot stimulate the children to learn at the rate at which they can... The children will suffer. In the current academic system, we have children that are pushed through, getting by with a "D," progressing into the next step... before the previous step is fully understood. Whether the teacher is good or not is irrelevant, because they can let people get by with a "D".
Scoff... TI99
I remember back in the day, when I had to cross country ski to get to school. We used these things called abacus's. Ah well, what to do with the youth.
The same way that MacOS works. You can distribute the binaries that sit on top of the OS. Just make sure you don't link any of the OS code into your binaries, and you'll be ok.
Winter Carnival of 1998 at Michigan Technological University... There was some group of kids that turned a station wagon into a Sauna. I remember seeing people sitting in it, getting out, and steaming like a volcano.
It's just standard prefix notation. You wouldn't put "DIV 8 4" and expect 1/2 as an answer. Why would you expect MOV to be any different?
This type of mechanism doesn't exist in TCPA, and would probably require some sort of support at the chipset level (which means it couldn't be implemented using current northbridge hardware). The total system impact isn't known, and it's any body's guess what this does to application development.
This is what it does:
INVALID PAGE FAULT AT UNKNOWN ADDRESS
Yeah, the reason people give for staying with Microsoft is training. "I don't want to learn another way of doing this, if I already know this way of doing it."
You can clone the interface, but if you make one thing different, the person is going to throw a shit-fit... "It doesn't work the way MS works, I want MS back!"
We had that problem when we migrated everything to StarOffice. It was taken care of by the IT department doing two things:
A more accurate metaphore is that the Author is the cook, and the publishing house is the waiter. The publishing house is filled with your typical corporate idiots, much like the music industry is filled with musical imbeciles.
The companies only serve what the author has created up to the public. They should only really get a measily amount, and perhaps a tip.
It is only feelings of some of the programmers that were hurt. The actual Mozilla project is not affected by this. It's time to rename the article.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled program.
I'd say that my biggest complaint is the update / install feature.
Red-hat has this rather nice update program that completely updates everything on your system (including all of the dependancies), without asking for CD's or user intervention. I could just say "Update," let it sit for four hours or so, and I'd come back to the latest edition of Red Hat.
Mandrake doesn't have anything near to that. It does have the install utility that lets you select individual packages, but when there's a list of 1000 packages, this can be inconvenient. If you select a package that has dependancies that need to be fulfilled, it stops the installation process altogether with a message saying that the dependant package needs to be installed. It doesn't just DO it.
Ah well, I use Gentoo anyhow. It's got the most wonderful update system of any distro out there, except that it may take a while to do it.
Conversely, if you have never been exposed to a 'good' apple, you wouldn't know what a good apple is. Consequently, if you're presented with a barrel of bad apples, and you've never been exposed to a good apple, you'll think highly of the bad apples.
The same thing shows up with eating tendancies. If you had to eat chocolate chip cookies and milk three times a day, every single day for the rest of your life, you would get very tired of chocolate chip cookies and milk. You would long for something different, something to contrast the cookies against.
It's like the Smashing Pumpkins say: "Could you believe in heaven, if heaven was all you had?"
Which leads us all to the ultimate destination: Philosophy.
There was no physics until there was Meta-physics. The Greeks thought the world was made up of Atoms thousands of years before Newton came up with Mechanical Laws. That was way before the time of quantum physics...
Sitting around thinking is a fabulous thing to do, if you are a good thinker.
Nah... the q-bit demo has infinite ops in 9 nanoseconds. The machine will provide that many correct solutions in that amount of time, perhaps, but what it really is doing is computing every single operation possible instantaneously, and the most probable answer is assumed as the "correct" answer.
Basically, cryptography as we know it will become useless, because a 2048 q-bit machine will crack a 2048 bit RSA code instantaneously. It's called infinite parallelism. Algorithms already exist for quantum cryptography, however, so we needn't worry about security.
Yeah, and it's the reliance on the calculator that has caused many of our teachers to be unable to do multi-digit addition in their heads. If we took a couple old grannies and let them add prices, they'd have the solution in a snap. Let an average 20 year try that, and they'll sit there and ponder where the calculator is.
Teachers have grown lazy, and in trying to advance students as far as possible, they've overlooked the basic foundation that they need to build upon. We expect kids to do algebra when they can't do arithmetic. We've undermined our children's ability to do arithmetic by making it easier.
I'm one of the lucky ones. I wasn't allowed to use a calculator until I hit the public school.
Except that those open-source products don't exist in the market, and they cannot compete with Microsoft. They don't have to compete. They are free, people don't have jobs that hinge on them (well, very few do), the source is out there.
Office doesn't ship with Windows. Neither do any compilers (except for Debug.exe... gotta love it). Windows is pure binary, there is very little need for uncompiled libraries. Second, TCL/TK doesn't provide a base for servers, no one makes money off of it, and Windows is not used as a leverage to get rid of it.
You don't have to ship other OS's with Windows, you just have to make sure that the OS does what you expect it to do. If you go to a website that uses a swing applet, you should be able to see it pop up in the browser. It's an open standard, and if IE is going to be shipped with Windows, then it is MS's responsibility to make sure that it works correctly with web technologies.
When MS decides that it wants to control web technologies, and makes it so that it does, we the people must step in and bitch-slap them. I can see MS being required to ship Mozilla or Netscape, or at least open up the source to IE (and incorporate UML into IE). MS does a lot of things that forces developers to have limited options. This is what they want to have... Developers don't want to write something for a product that may or may not support it correctly. A developer does not want to have to take the extra time and work to ensure that the software product from another maker is there.
It is the OS maker's responsibility to ensure that software makers have the simplest and most varied options and methods. A simple and clear API, for instance, or a VM that runs swing...
Except that it probably isn't about money. Sun wants to see Java succeed, because they are Java's daddy. I want to see Java succeed because I like it.
Java has an open spec. You can download open-source JDK's and JRE's (blackdown, Kaffe). I know that Mono is on it's way, but it still doesn't cover the entire language base and runtime. The others do. Sun doesn't hide things from the economy, they may not give out source code freely (though you can obtain it easily), but at least I've got a few options. It doesn't seem that Sun is bitching about that, either.
Sun has a lot to gain from this too. If Java is recognized as a universal base, there will be little incentive not to use it. Why build something in C# and have it run only on MS software, when you can build it in Java and have it run on nearly everything? Sun sells Unix boxen. Sun sells application servers. There is a LOT of money to be made on Application servers.
For those that may say "JBoss exists, why pay anything?" : Realize that Sun is a fantastic name to blame. That's what people are really buying there... "IBM never got someone fired... Sun never got someone fired..." They don't get someone fired because they provide an outlet for frustration. They must provide user / developer support. They must face that fact that there may be lawsuits boiling in the background. If an App server that provides all of the business logic that keeps a multi-billion dollar company afloat goes down, you'd better be sure that you have a big (and rich) entity to sue.
JBoss, JoNas, and others just don't provide that big entity - big money background.
Yeah, the concept goes as such:
An operating system is the core, the set of programs that run the hardware, and operate as the interim between the hardware and the rest of the software. When Microsoft ships an Operating system, they ought to ship it with either one of two configurations:
The problem is that MS decided to bundle in .NET, Passport, IE, Outlook Express, etc., but skimp on the Java support. This gave .NET a better looking future, for one. The Java support that they do provide is minimal (sucks), and doesn't support a lot of things... swing, JDBC, JMX, JNDI, yada, yada.
Once I can run JBoss on my windows machine without a Sun Java SDK, then I'll consider MS playing 'fair.'
The one thing that they did wrong was to combine the middleware with the OS. If you ship an OS, you are shipping a foundation. You are shipping something that could possibly run on every machine. You have a responsibility to the rest of society to ensure that this peice of software works correctly with everything else out there. If it doesn't, and it is found that it doesn't because there is a product shipped with the system that is competitive with that which is broken, then there is definitely something foul.
Just cuz X does something for you in particular doesn't mean that it's in the best interest of the desktop / workstation community. Also if another software platform may be best for a particular job, it doesn't mean that development has to stop on X.
I think that X is cumbersome. If you let it sit for a while without touching, it loses it's snap. It's bloated. The shape of the pixel is messed up. etc. etc. etc. I'd rather have something that is really small and fast. I don't work on my computer through a network, so I don't need all of the overhead that the server creates. Perhaps another windowing platform is a better solution.
In the first place. Linux has a great UI. It's called a command line.
Now X, on the other hand, and the windowmanagers are a bit too windowsy.
I'd say that the current mindset is a result of a fermenting idea of using a "Window" to access different applications on the machine. If someone comes up with a better way of accessing applications, the all power to them. The problem is that when you decide to use a "Window," you have a limited number of options in how to implement it (menus, a button to make big, a button to make disappear, etc...).
If the reviewer had read the book, they would have known ahead of time that the real women's roles don't bloom until the last volume. Eowyn, one of the toughest chicks in existance, was given a secondary role/duty in the second book. There's really nothing that Peter could have done about that.
I can count the number of female characters on one hand. Granted, I saw quite a few women in the movie. Some of the evil soldiers were female, you could kinda tell by their eyes. Galadriel also had a rather long narrative, and Arwen also appeared. These things never did happen in the book (Aragorn was always smitten by Arwen, Eowyn was the one who was smitten by Aragorn... Not the way it's presented in the movie.)
This is just typical NYTimes Liberal PC Hot-headed bullshit.
Is that the case was turned on the wording, moreso the usage of the word "Willful." This case does not provide precedence for using the software to crack an eBook. Basically, we still cannot use our open source machines to do something that proprietary machines can.
There was no precedence established for the unconstitutionality of the DMCA, in part or in whole. Once that happens, we can be happy.
But doing anything like modifying ZA checksum code is a direct violation of the DMCA. If Record companies were shipping that kinda crap on CD's, they'd be brought down in a jiffy.
eh... I took a look at the offer. I'm not terribly excited about it. It is convenient to get the disc from Mandrake for almost the production of the disc and packaging, but I don't know if that's quite enough.
If we (as the linux community) want to reach out to the lost souls in the Windows world, then something more than just the CD should be offered. Anyone can download the Mandrake 9.0 CD for free, so offering a CD for a fee is maybe not the best idea. Instead, we take a small hit by sending them the CD, and offering free support for a limited time, say... 3 months.
Once everyone is acclamated and the three months are up, offer support for a fee, and ask them to pledge to a membership. This is all optional, of course, but it is a pathway for the moola.
I just don't think that the average consumer is going to put the effort into trading a Windows CD and License in, while paying a fee, for a non-supported Mandrake Linux cd.
Just my two cents tho.
Quit bitching and write something then. If you want to go another operating platform and reap the benefits of it, then you'll have to put some effort into making the platform your home.
Sure, you'll have 25,000 amiga apps, and very few actual MorphOS applications. Does this actually affect your own ability to write code?
This is the point where Apple and Linuz were both at only a few years ago: Someone would say "Why not go with Apple (linux)?" and the reply would be: "Because Windows has all of the software."
People who were fond of linux and apple soon found that instead of bitching about the lack of applications, their energy would be better spent working on those applications.
Personally, I'm glad that there's a glimmer of a truly new OS. I've spent a lot of time in school, reading books on OS philosophy, only to see the majority of the business world tends to follow the least efficient methodologies. People think that software design doesn't matter, because they can just thrown money and hardware at the problem. Then we reach the actual limit of Moore's waL (it is not a law), and we're left with less "better" hardware to throw at a problem. At this point, our coding practices will suck ass, and we'll have to re-learn what efficiency really means.
Geesh... MS-DOS didn't even boot in 3 seconds.
Haha...
I couldn't expect a suit to know that a grub could actually be needed for the everyday function.
I hope that salesdrones don't expect them too.