And the Challenger disaster was the same - as much as the entire space program was in the media after it happened, within one or two mission it again became a forgotten entity.
I'm not sure that's true at all. I was in 6th grade when the Challenger disaster happened, and here's how I remember it:
Up to then shuttle launches were regularly televised, and I mean on regular, broadcast, major network TV. I watched as many of them as I could. There were all kinds of Space Shuttle toys, even GI Joe had a shuttle-ish space fighter. Space ship toys that weren't white, winged, with those big bay doors didn't sell. No kid wanted a space ship that didn't look like the shuttle.
That Challenger launch was an even bigger deal. It was so hyped because of that teacher. That was actually the only launch I ever saw at school. Everyone was so excited about it that no one even considered doing regular class work during the launch, instead they crammed about 100 of us into classrooms designed for 30 kids just so we could all watch it on the limited number of TVs my school had.
After a few brief mentions of investigation into the accident, NASA disappeared. It was like they wanted to be forgotten. It was a couple of years before they even got passing mention on the evening news, and I was looking!
Challenger was the turning point, and it was a hairpin turn. NASA could have kept going, they could have been strong and overcome obstacles, but instead they decided to wallow in their misery and fade away into the background money-sink they are perceived as today.
Tech-wise firewire rules. It's really too bad Apple had to hamstring it in its infancy. Yeah, they got over it, but I'm afraid it may have been too little too late.
I'm hoping firewire2 will be more successful, but I think USB might be too ubiquitous for it to get a strong foothold.
If you've had failures that consistently the problem is not the drives. That's one of the first lessons I learned as a professional troubleshooter: If the replacement part fails, the part you replaced was not the problem. That doesn't mean the part you replaced wasn't bad, but it does mean that you're going to have to keep replacing that part until you take the time to get to the root of the problem, which is something else.
Power supplies are the most often overlooked problem causer, but it could easily your RAID controller or a poorly made data cable. It could also be that your drives are simply overheating.
I've built several computers for various friends, family, and small businesses over the last 6 years and I've used Deskstars exclusively for the last 3 years. I follow a few basic rules when mounting them: (1) always leave an empty space between the hard drive and any other device for air flow, and (2) never stuff excess cable or other crap into that empty space. I have never had a hard drive fail in any of those systems.
If your case doesn't have space for you to do that, then your case is too small. It's that simple. Having parts fail due to inadequate airflow is much more expensive than getting the right case.
As for second hand drives, that's always going to be a dodgy issue. The manufacturers do test them, and they don't send them out if they don't pass their tests. The problem is, though, that none of the drive test utilities really stress the drive enough, IMO.
I torture-test SCSI RAIDs for a living, and we've found that the standard test suites were letting too many drives through that couldn't hold up to the demands our customers placed on them (we're talking top-end digital video production), so we had to develope our own tests. I typically push a drive/LUN/controller card at the threshhold of it's advertised performance for at least 2 days before I call it good. The funny thing is that spending more time doing a more serious test actually reduces my work load, since I very rarely get any of those drives back, and those I do get back are usually because the customer was moving their equipment and wanted to have spare drives on hand just in case.
Not everyone has $15,000 realtime MPEG encoder cards lying around to hammer their drives with, but I'm sure there are other ways to achieve similar results.
I actually spend far more on Open Source software than I ever have on Closed Source software. At minimum I buy every other SuSE Pro release (at $80 each), and it's quickly becoming every release as my income increases. Additionally, I'm much more likely to throw down some cash for a game that's ported to Linux, so long as it's at all interesting to me.
For a Windows-only game, though, it's got to be something that I ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE before I'll even think about buying it, and even then there is some debate before I do. In fact, only 2 games have overcome that barrier since I started using Linux almost 3 years ago: Morrowind and Diablo 2, and I only got D2 because it was on sale.
Additionally, I have no intention of upgrading beyond Win98SE, and my last bit of pirated software (MS Office 2k) hit the round file in January. The only non-OSS apps I use on Windows are Nero and PowerDVD, both of which were bundled with hardware.
I know plenty of other people that feel the same way. Unfortunately for you, though, I don't have even the vaguest interest in IM, free, proprietary, or otherwise. But the market does exist, and it's growing. You just need to find some people who are a little more serious about it than those who download a couple of ISOs just so they can say they run Linux.
I'd also looove to see a lot of games - particularly MP games so you guys can go to the local LAN party and show off your latest RedHat/Debian box and then frag some of your boys - get ported because it would probably be like porn was to videotape.
The only MP game I play that isn't ported to Linux is Counter-Strike, and that's mostly because Halflife is so freaking old that Sierra doesn't see a point in making the port. It still runs just fine on Linux, though.
But Quake (various versions and derivatives) and Unreal Tournament (and UT2003) are both ported. So was Tribes2.
If you're not into FPS, I've heard that Civilization and StarCraft both run on Linux. StarCraft isn't ported, but I believe Civ3 is (RTS isn't my thing, so I haven't really payed attention).
My point is, most of the people I know who actually know Linux (as opposed to just downloading the Mandrake ISOs and trying it out for a week) have been LANing on Linux for over a year without any serious issues.
I would like to see "time-locked" shareware Linux software releases; and I bet some of the office software will end up like that
I really don't think that's ever going to happen, at least not in the same sense that it has happened in the MS world. It really doesn't work, for one thing. People don't like time-locked software, it's even more irritating than nag-ware. It's fairly uncommon for people to pay for shareware. Generally they either crack it (if it's time-locked), ignore the nag screen (if it's nag-ware), or go look for another "free" app that fulfills the same need. Feel free to ask some shareware developers if you don't believe me.
The WineX guys seem to be doing just fine, though. Same with CodeWeavers. Perl (IIRC) has 2 full-time developers supported by donations, and Blender quite likely will also have a couple of donation-supported developers soon. Mandrake's donation thing seems to have worked as well.
First, there are tons of "Open Source" licenses, and not all of them grant rights of redistribution. In fact, the default is that they don't; meaning that if a license doesn't specifically grant rights to distribute, you don't have them.
Second, the GPL specifically says that you can charge no more than the cost of physical transfer for the source. It also states that you can charge whatever you want for binaries, warranties, or other added value, and that you only have a responsibility to provide source to those you have distributed binaries to.
While the GPL is not the license I would choose for software I really wanted to make money on, there is certainly nothing in the GPL that precludes making money.
Outside of keeping your lawyer on the ball; what physical measures do you have in place to prevent them from releasing your source publicly; or selling it themselves?
Copyright, and (in the US anyway) punitive damages. Although there are certainly problems with punitive damages, they do make it possible to make an action MUCH more costly than what anyone could hope to gain through that action.
Additionally, most companies will go to great lengths to avoid being involved in this kind of lawsuit, if for no other reason than the effect it will have on their stock price.
For example, you have CAD software specific to a chemical manufacturing process. There are only a few thousand facilities in the world that use this software. What, really, is to keep one facility from buying it and then sharing with others?
Greed? Seriously, lets just look at the situation here:
"Hey, I know we're competing companies, but I just paid for this great software package that has really increased our productivity, and they gave me the source code to it. I was just wondering if you might be interested in getting it for free?"
Are you insane?!? Do you have even the slightest clue of how businesses operate? That's never going to happen! And in the rare instances where it might, like if multiple facilities are owned by the same company, having the source or not isn't going to be the deciding factor.
I know I'm going to get a "EULA" answer, and probably from someone who has previously harshly criticized EULAs.
And here it is! Regardless of how I feel about it, though, software companies have been doing exactly this for decades, especially in niche markets like the one you describe.
My response is that you still haven't described anything that couldn't be done 10-20 years ago using *nix filesystems and CLI tools. That interface is quite nice, and far more powerful than any GUI I've encountered, once you learn to use it. Perhaps that would change if someone came up with a graphical equivalent of pipe, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
I agree that shortcuts will not work for what you describe, but don't make the mistake of assuming that *nix links suffer the same limitations as the pathetic MS shortcut.
When it comes down to it, the user will still have to create all those relations manually, and slapping a nice GUI on that process isn't going to make it easier, just "prettier" and more resource intensive.
Perhaps you are implying that the system would set up these relationships automatically, to which my response is that it might try, in the same sense that the MS Word Auto-(In)Correct "feature" tries to correct my grammar. For that to work, the user will have to train the system to "think" the way they do, and they'd likely spend more time doing the training than they would setting up all the relationships by hand.
Maybe it will be practical if we find a way to upload a copy of our brains to a computer, but I very much doubt that the level of intelligence you're talking about is going to be achieved through programming, at least in our lifetimes. The human mind is simply too complex, and from what I've been reading lately, the closer we look at it the more complex it becomes.
I think there are other ways to achieve it, which perhaps are possible in the near future, but I think they will still be getting that information from the user, just not through a keyboard or mouse.
Still, though, I see no justification for an underlying system that's any different from what we currently have, since it's already capable of doing the things you describe. Perhaps it needs a new interface, but I'd have to question that. With each level of abstraction one loses a certain amount of detail and control. I used to think it was worth the trade-off, but then I learned Unix.
Basically what everyone seems to be talking about here is coming up with ways to circumvent the artificial barriers placed before them by the MS paradigm. The easiest way to circumvent those issues is to use a system created by people that don't have a vested interest in the forced upgrade path those limitations enable. Plenty of options exist.
How are these problems any different from kids going to public school? I've found them much less prevalent in the people I know who were home schooled.
Percentage of population. My experience has been that all or nearly all of those whom I know have been homeschooled exhibit at least one of the problem I describe, vs. far less than half among those whom I know have not been home schooled, and only 10-20 percent for serious drug/alcohol/sex problems.
Now, it is entirely possible that things are simply skewed in my area. I live in a small town, and there aren't the kind of problems in our public schools that I hear about in other areas. It's possible that I have merely been unfortunate and met only those who were home schooled specifically for the purpose of overly sheltering them (like my neighbor, who home schooled all his kids because he didn't want them to learn about evolution, and they're the most screwed up of anyone I know).
I believe some of the current trends in education will be far more harmful than anyone could even imagine from home schooling.
In some ways I agree, but I don't have time to stray that much from my main point. Most of these trends should be reversable if the colleges would simply speak up about the quality of education, especially WRT math, that their incoming students have recieved.
The massive over-prescription of drugs like Ritalin is going to screw up a lot of kids.
While I agree that this is a horrible thing, it also has nothing to do with schools. Schools don't hand out Ritalin, and any teacher that suggests a kid should be taking it needs to be taken to task. Parents are the arbiters of what prescription drugs their kids will take, and it is parents who are to blame for this epidemic.
On a side note, I have noticed that my own daughter displays many of the symptoms of a hyperactivity disorder when she gets too much sugar. I wonder how many of these poor kids could be "cured" simply by a change of diet?
Even worse are the schools banning all competitive sports & activities, so nobody has to be a loser. When those kids graduate, they're going to find a world that just isn't fair, and be utterly unprepared to deal with it.
This isn't just a problem with schools, and it's actually much more prevelant in non-school affiliated child sports leagues. Obviously the leagues aren't removing the sports themselves, but rather removing the competition from sports that have always been competitive, or at least trying to.
However, I have a 9 year old nephew who is very much into baseball, and has played since he was old enough. Even though the official policy is that they don't keep score and there are no winners or losers and everyone gets their turn, the kids do keep score, and they know very well who won and who lost, even though the adults like to pretend that isn't happening.
That doesn't completely mitigate the damage done by these policies, unfortunately.
I believe kids can receive an equal or better social education outside of school.
I believe that having to learn to deal with people you don't get along with on a day-to-day basis is the most important part of social education, and that it needs to be learned before one enters the workplace. If you have ideas regarding how this can be achieved in a non-school environment, I'd like to hear them, because I can't think of any.
Did you ask everyone, or do you just assume it because they don't fit your prejudiced view?
No, I don't ask everyone, but neither have I assumed anything. My opinion is based entirely on people who I know have been home schooled or not.
And what about all the drunkards and drug addicts I know that weren't home schooled? I could argue that it's the school system that caused their problems too!
Hmmm... 100 percent for home schooled vs. 10-20 percent for non-home schooled. I know that correlation does not imply causation, but still...
Bullshit. In case you hadn't noticed, kids are supposed to go to school to learn to read and write, not to socialize.
A common, though inaccurate, belief among the home schooled.
Social education is a matter of parenting - if your parents are lousy communicators, then you'll get a lousy social education - simply putting someone in a school won't fix that. After school hours and vacation gives kids lots of time to socialize.
Bullshit. Socializing with only those you want to be around does not comprise a social education any more than studying only those subjects you are interested in comprises an academic education. Dealing with people you don't like is something you have to do eventually anyway, and it's better to learn it before it really matters.
I am 30 years old, have been happily married for 4 years, have a good job, and am well-adjusted. I have a lot of friends, who generally say that I'm an OK guy.
I have never used drugs (I saw what it did to my friends, and decided it wasn't for me), and although I used to be a social drinker (typically wine at parties), I haven't had any since I got engaged (my wife's family has a history of alcoholism, and she asked me to say away from it.)
If this is true, then congratulations: you are the exception to the rule. I never said there weren't exceptions (in fact my statement about generalization strongly implies that there are), just that I don't know any personally.
Coming from someone who WAS homeschooled, you're full of crap.
I never liked being around people, and I still don't.
Seems to me that you've just verified my position. The place to "learn to tolerate the presence of others" is NOT the workplace. Working well with others is a basic skill that your employer should not have to teach you.
It can be argued, and has been successfully, but not specifically regarding a network.
An example I'm thinking of is Humbodlt State in CA. They built a new library and, as is usually the case, there were cost and time overruns. The students sued the school since they were paying for access to this new library, which wasn't available to them, and won.
The difference here, of course, is the non-academic use.
Creating a tree, then drawing a bunch of lines/links changes it from a tree to a blob.
And switching over to a relational database solves this how? By removing the part where you start off with a simple tree?
You can't even search by the links that exist.
Huh? If you mean that find doesn't search symlink directories, then I suppose that's true, at least on QNX which is the only *nix available to me at the moment. I don't see how that really matters since it's the exact same information under a different name. Whether it shows up under me/4th_grade or me/mrs_woods_class is totally irrelevant, since the two are synonymous and the information in each exactly the same.
However, find will certainly locate all instances of a file name, be they hardlink or symlink. I'm not sure how hardlinked directories since I've never had a reason to create one, and QNX doesn't support them.
Perhaps I've totally misunderstood what you were trying to say?
Yes, but then you could limit it to "me" "4-th grade" "friends" and get a lot of info quickly.
Well, you'd still have to create all those relationships manually, since automating that kind of process is very complex. Of course, you could just create/home/me,/home/4th_grade, and/home/frinds, add symlinks to taste, and search for things that show up only in all of those directories.
The point is, there is nothing being proposed here that is fundamentally different than what we have already.
True, but they'd be even less likely to spend their extra time being social if the only time they're around other people is when they're suffering through boring, lowest common denominator, high school classes.
With that said the "no social life" bugaboo is a red herring that detractors use. Any kid can have a social life. I know families with public only educated, private bricks and mortar only educated, and home schooled. On a scale of adjusted-normal to weird I'd give the nod to the public school kids as being more or less less educated, less informed, and their only acceptable normal behavior seems to revolve around wearing the same clothes in a trendy manner.
Let's see where those home schooled kids are when they're 25.
The idea that the social aspects of school are a red herring seems to be based entirely only the immediately observable. The home schooled kids don't belong to cliques or follow trends, and they seem to have more "book learning" (which I assume is what you mean by saying they are more informed/better educated). OK, great, but where does that get them?
5 years down the road they still haven't learned to fit in. They have serious social problems, which all to often lead to other problems with drugs and alcohol (and sex, well, the girls anyway) which only exacerbate the social problems making it even more difficult for them to find/make friends. They often have difficulty handling pressure or criticism, but at the same time are very arrogant and have no trouble criticizing others.
Yes, these are generalizations, and yet they hold true for every single person I've met who was home schooled. Some of them have been tolerable, but all too many have been highly irritating.
It is not an issue of "no social life", obviously that is easily worked around. The issue is one of social education, which is very hard to get without putting the kid in a school situation. If that valuable social experience is a red herring, well, so is your assertion that all kids learn in public school is to "conform and be politically correct and to not 'think', only parrot approved dogma."
I couldn't agree more. I have not known anyone who has done HS online, but I've known plenty of people who were home schooled, and they all have the same basic problems you describe. Some of them are OK, but all to many of them are impossible to be around.
I imagine online schooling would be even worse. At least with normal home schooling they need to go in and meet with their teacher once a week.
Check government agencies for kids sites. The NSA, for example, has a good kids page with a lot of math games and puzzles. I don't know how many agencies have such pages, but it would seem really odd (and more than a little creepy) if the NSA were the only one.
It's in the Samba configuration. It's something like "OS Level" and it will be set to some number, like maybe 50.
This number is how MS machines determine who is the Primary Domain Controller, basically the one with the highest OS level gets it, unless things are specifically configured otherwise. IIRC, Windows NT 4 has an OS level in the low 30s. Newer versions of Windows have higher OS levels, and server versions have higher levels than workstation or desktop versions.
So, all you have to do is use SWAT, or otherwise edit smb.conf, and set your OS level to some low number, like 1.
This site is a good introduction with lots of useful tips. If you really need to know Samba, though, I highly recomend this book.
Slashdot Mirror
And the Challenger disaster was the same - as much as the entire space program was in the media after it happened, within one or two mission it again became a forgotten entity.
I'm not sure that's true at all. I was in 6th grade when the Challenger disaster happened, and here's how I remember it:
Up to then shuttle launches were regularly televised, and I mean on regular, broadcast, major network TV. I watched as many of them as I could. There were all kinds of Space Shuttle toys, even GI Joe had a shuttle-ish space fighter. Space ship toys that weren't white, winged, with those big bay doors didn't sell. No kid wanted a space ship that didn't look like the shuttle.
That Challenger launch was an even bigger deal. It was so hyped because of that teacher. That was actually the only launch I ever saw at school. Everyone was so excited about it that no one even considered doing regular class work during the launch, instead they crammed about 100 of us into classrooms designed for 30 kids just so we could all watch it on the limited number of TVs my school had.
After a few brief mentions of investigation into the accident, NASA disappeared. It was like they wanted to be forgotten. It was a couple of years before they even got passing mention on the evening news, and I was looking!
Challenger was the turning point, and it was a hairpin turn. NASA could have kept going, they could have been strong and overcome obstacles, but instead they decided to wallow in their misery and fade away into the background money-sink they are perceived as today.
Tech-wise firewire rules. It's really too bad Apple had to hamstring it in its infancy. Yeah, they got over it, but I'm afraid it may have been too little too late.
I'm hoping firewire2 will be more successful, but I think USB might be too ubiquitous for it to get a strong foothold.
If you've had failures that consistently the problem is not the drives. That's one of the first lessons I learned as a professional troubleshooter: If the replacement part fails, the part you replaced was not the problem. That doesn't mean the part you replaced wasn't bad, but it does mean that you're going to have to keep replacing that part until you take the time to get to the root of the problem, which is something else.
Power supplies are the most often overlooked problem causer, but it could easily your RAID controller or a poorly made data cable. It could also be that your drives are simply overheating.
I've built several computers for various friends, family, and small businesses over the last 6 years and I've used Deskstars exclusively for the last 3 years. I follow a few basic rules when mounting them: (1) always leave an empty space between the hard drive and any other device for air flow, and (2) never stuff excess cable or other crap into that empty space. I have never had a hard drive fail in any of those systems.
If your case doesn't have space for you to do that, then your case is too small. It's that simple. Having parts fail due to inadequate airflow is much more expensive than getting the right case.
As for second hand drives, that's always going to be a dodgy issue. The manufacturers do test them, and they don't send them out if they don't pass their tests. The problem is, though, that none of the drive test utilities really stress the drive enough, IMO.
I torture-test SCSI RAIDs for a living, and we've found that the standard test suites were letting too many drives through that couldn't hold up to the demands our customers placed on them (we're talking top-end digital video production), so we had to develope our own tests. I typically push a drive/LUN/controller card at the threshhold of it's advertised performance for at least 2 days before I call it good. The funny thing is that spending more time doing a more serious test actually reduces my work load, since I very rarely get any of those drives back, and those I do get back are usually because the customer was moving their equipment and wanted to have spare drives on hand just in case.
Not everyone has $15,000 realtime MPEG encoder cards lying around to hammer their drives with, but I'm sure there are other ways to achieve similar results.
I actually spend far more on Open Source software than I ever have on Closed Source software. At minimum I buy every other SuSE Pro release (at $80 each), and it's quickly becoming every release as my income increases. Additionally, I'm much more likely to throw down some cash for a game that's ported to Linux, so long as it's at all interesting to me.
For a Windows-only game, though, it's got to be something that I ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE before I'll even think about buying it, and even then there is some debate before I do. In fact, only 2 games have overcome that barrier since I started using Linux almost 3 years ago: Morrowind and Diablo 2, and I only got D2 because it was on sale.
Additionally, I have no intention of upgrading beyond Win98SE, and my last bit of pirated software (MS Office 2k) hit the round file in January. The only non-OSS apps I use on Windows are Nero and PowerDVD, both of which were bundled with hardware.
I know plenty of other people that feel the same way. Unfortunately for you, though, I don't have even the vaguest interest in IM, free, proprietary, or otherwise. But the market does exist, and it's growing. You just need to find some people who are a little more serious about it than those who download a couple of ISOs just so they can say they run Linux.
I'd also looove to see a lot of games - particularly MP games so you guys can go to the local LAN party and show off your latest RedHat/Debian box and then frag some of your boys - get ported because it would probably be like porn was to videotape.
The only MP game I play that isn't ported to Linux is Counter-Strike, and that's mostly because Halflife is so freaking old that Sierra doesn't see a point in making the port. It still runs just fine on Linux, though.
But Quake (various versions and derivatives) and Unreal Tournament (and UT2003) are both ported. So was Tribes2.
If you're not into FPS, I've heard that Civilization and StarCraft both run on Linux. StarCraft isn't ported, but I believe Civ3 is (RTS isn't my thing, so I haven't really payed attention).
My point is, most of the people I know who actually know Linux (as opposed to just downloading the Mandrake ISOs and trying it out for a week) have been LANing on Linux for over a year without any serious issues.
I would like to see "time-locked" shareware Linux software releases; and I bet some of the office software will end up like that
I really don't think that's ever going to happen, at least not in the same sense that it has happened in the MS world. It really doesn't work, for one thing. People don't like time-locked software, it's even more irritating than nag-ware. It's fairly uncommon for people to pay for shareware. Generally they either crack it (if it's time-locked), ignore the nag screen (if it's nag-ware), or go look for another "free" app that fulfills the same need. Feel free to ask some shareware developers if you don't believe me.
The WineX guys seem to be doing just fine, though. Same with CodeWeavers. Perl (IIRC) has 2 full-time developers supported by donations, and Blender quite likely will also have a couple of donation-supported developers soon. Mandrake's donation thing seems to have worked as well.
First, there are tons of "Open Source" licenses, and not all of them grant rights of redistribution. In fact, the default is that they don't; meaning that if a license doesn't specifically grant rights to distribute, you don't have them.
Second, the GPL specifically says that you can charge no more than the cost of physical transfer for the source. It also states that you can charge whatever you want for binaries, warranties, or other added value, and that you only have a responsibility to provide source to those you have distributed binaries to.
While the GPL is not the license I would choose for software I really wanted to make money on, there is certainly nothing in the GPL that precludes making money.
Outside of keeping your lawyer on the ball; what physical measures do you have in place to prevent them from releasing your source publicly; or selling it themselves?
Copyright, and (in the US anyway) punitive damages. Although there are certainly problems with punitive damages, they do make it possible to make an action MUCH more costly than what anyone could hope to gain through that action.
Additionally, most companies will go to great lengths to avoid being involved in this kind of lawsuit, if for no other reason than the effect it will have on their stock price.
For example, you have CAD software specific to a chemical manufacturing process. There are only a few thousand facilities in the world that use this software. What, really, is to keep one facility from buying it and then sharing with others?
Greed? Seriously, lets just look at the situation here:
"Hey, I know we're competing companies, but I just paid for this great software package that has really increased our productivity, and they gave me the source code to it. I was just wondering if you might be interested in getting it for free?"
Are you insane?!? Do you have even the slightest clue of how businesses operate? That's never going to happen! And in the rare instances where it might, like if multiple facilities are owned by the same company, having the source or not isn't going to be the deciding factor.
I know I'm going to get a "EULA" answer, and probably from someone who has previously harshly criticized EULAs.
And here it is! Regardless of how I feel about it, though, software companies have been doing exactly this for decades, especially in niche markets like the one you describe.
I'm even less hairy, but that might just be because I shave my head.
It makes sense if you need more RAM than your mobo can handle.
I'm not sure it makes more sense then puting the $2k towards a machine that can handle more RAM in the first place, though.
My response is that you still haven't described anything that couldn't be done 10-20 years ago using *nix filesystems and CLI tools. That interface is quite nice, and far more powerful than any GUI I've encountered, once you learn to use it. Perhaps that would change if someone came up with a graphical equivalent of pipe, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
I agree that shortcuts will not work for what you describe, but don't make the mistake of assuming that *nix links suffer the same limitations as the pathetic MS shortcut.
When it comes down to it, the user will still have to create all those relations manually, and slapping a nice GUI on that process isn't going to make it easier, just "prettier" and more resource intensive.
Perhaps you are implying that the system would set up these relationships automatically, to which my response is that it might try, in the same sense that the MS Word Auto-(In)Correct "feature" tries to correct my grammar. For that to work, the user will have to train the system to "think" the way they do, and they'd likely spend more time doing the training than they would setting up all the relationships by hand.
Maybe it will be practical if we find a way to upload a copy of our brains to a computer, but I very much doubt that the level of intelligence you're talking about is going to be achieved through programming, at least in our lifetimes. The human mind is simply too complex, and from what I've been reading lately, the closer we look at it the more complex it becomes.
I think there are other ways to achieve it, which perhaps are possible in the near future, but I think they will still be getting that information from the user, just not through a keyboard or mouse.
Still, though, I see no justification for an underlying system that's any different from what we currently have, since it's already capable of doing the things you describe. Perhaps it needs a new interface, but I'd have to question that. With each level of abstraction one loses a certain amount of detail and control. I used to think it was worth the trade-off, but then I learned Unix.
Basically what everyone seems to be talking about here is coming up with ways to circumvent the artificial barriers placed before them by the MS paradigm. The easiest way to circumvent those issues is to use a system created by people that don't have a vested interest in the forced upgrade path those limitations enable. Plenty of options exist.
How are these problems any different from kids going to public school? I've found them much less prevalent in the people I know who were home schooled.
Percentage of population. My experience has been that all or nearly all of those whom I know have been homeschooled exhibit at least one of the problem I describe, vs. far less than half among those whom I know have not been home schooled, and only 10-20 percent for serious drug/alcohol/sex problems.
Now, it is entirely possible that things are simply skewed in my area. I live in a small town, and there aren't the kind of problems in our public schools that I hear about in other areas. It's possible that I have merely been unfortunate and met only those who were home schooled specifically for the purpose of overly sheltering them (like my neighbor, who home schooled all his kids because he didn't want them to learn about evolution, and they're the most screwed up of anyone I know).
I believe some of the current trends in education will be far more harmful than anyone could even imagine from home schooling.
In some ways I agree, but I don't have time to stray that much from my main point. Most of these trends should be reversable if the colleges would simply speak up about the quality of education, especially WRT math, that their incoming students have recieved.
The massive over-prescription of drugs like Ritalin is going to screw up a lot of kids.
While I agree that this is a horrible thing, it also has nothing to do with schools. Schools don't hand out Ritalin, and any teacher that suggests a kid should be taking it needs to be taken to task. Parents are the arbiters of what prescription drugs their kids will take, and it is parents who are to blame for this epidemic.
On a side note, I have noticed that my own daughter displays many of the symptoms of a hyperactivity disorder when she gets too much sugar. I wonder how many of these poor kids could be "cured" simply by a change of diet?
Even worse are the schools banning all competitive sports & activities, so nobody has to be a loser. When those kids graduate, they're going to find a world that just isn't fair, and be utterly unprepared to deal with it.
This isn't just a problem with schools, and it's actually much more prevelant in non-school affiliated child sports leagues. Obviously the leagues aren't removing the sports themselves, but rather removing the competition from sports that have always been competitive, or at least trying to.
However, I have a 9 year old nephew who is very much into baseball, and has played since he was old enough. Even though the official policy is that they don't keep score and there are no winners or losers and everyone gets their turn, the kids do keep score, and they know very well who won and who lost, even though the adults like to pretend that isn't happening.
That doesn't completely mitigate the damage done by these policies, unfortunately.
I believe kids can receive an equal or better social education outside of school.
I believe that having to learn to deal with people you don't get along with on a day-to-day basis is the most important part of social education, and that it needs to be learned before one enters the workplace. If you have ideas regarding how this can be achieved in a non-school environment, I'd like to hear them, because I can't think of any.
Did you ask everyone, or do you just assume it because they don't fit your prejudiced view?
No, I don't ask everyone, but neither have I assumed anything. My opinion is based entirely on people who I know have been home schooled or not.
And what about all the drunkards and drug addicts I know that weren't home schooled? I could argue that it's the school system that caused their problems too!
Hmmm... 100 percent for home schooled vs. 10-20 percent for non-home schooled. I know that correlation does not imply causation, but still...
Bullshit. In case you hadn't noticed, kids are supposed to go to school to learn to read and write, not to socialize.
A common, though inaccurate, belief among the home schooled.
Social education is a matter of parenting - if your parents are lousy communicators, then you'll get a lousy social education - simply putting someone in a school won't fix that. After school hours and vacation gives kids lots of time to socialize.
Bullshit. Socializing with only those you want to be around does not comprise a social education any more than studying only those subjects you are interested in comprises an academic education. Dealing with people you don't like is something you have to do eventually anyway, and it's better to learn it before it really matters.
I am 30 years old, have been happily married for 4 years, have a good job, and am well-adjusted. I have a lot of friends, who generally say that I'm an OK guy.
I have never used drugs (I saw what it did to my friends, and decided it wasn't for me), and although I used to be a social drinker (typically wine at parties), I haven't had any since I got engaged (my wife's family has a history of alcoholism, and she asked me to say away from it.)
If this is true, then congratulations: you are the exception to the rule. I never said there weren't exceptions (in fact my statement about generalization strongly implies that there are), just that I don't know any personally.
Coming from someone who WAS homeschooled, you're full of crap.
I never liked being around people, and I still don't.
Seems to me that you've just verified my position. The place to "learn to tolerate the presence of others" is NOT the workplace. Working well with others is a basic skill that your employer should not have to teach you.
It can be argued, and has been successfully, but not specifically regarding a network.
An example I'm thinking of is Humbodlt State in CA. They built a new library and, as is usually the case, there were cost and time overruns. The students sued the school since they were paying for access to this new library, which wasn't available to them, and won.
The difference here, of course, is the non-academic use.
Creating a tree, then drawing a bunch of lines/links changes it from a tree to a blob.
And switching over to a relational database solves this how? By removing the part where you start off with a simple tree?
You can't even search by the links that exist.
Huh? If you mean that find doesn't search symlink directories, then I suppose that's true, at least on QNX which is the only *nix available to me at the moment. I don't see how that really matters since it's the exact same information under a different name. Whether it shows up under me/4th_grade or me/mrs_woods_class is totally irrelevant, since the two are synonymous and the information in each exactly the same.
However, find will certainly locate all instances of a file name, be they hardlink or symlink. I'm not sure how hardlinked directories since I've never had a reason to create one, and QNX doesn't support them.
Perhaps I've totally misunderstood what you were trying to say?
If you have a problem with slashes then I suppose you could use backslashes instead, but that's hardly innovative.
:: or -> would be much more innovative!
/ and \ are so dated, I say we replace them with scope operators. Using
Yes, but then you could limit it to "me" "4-th grade" "friends" and get a lot of info quickly.
/home/me, /home/4th_grade, and /home/frinds, add symlinks to taste, and search for things that show up only in all of those directories.
Well, you'd still have to create all those relationships manually, since automating that kind of process is very complex. Of course, you could just create
The point is, there is nothing being proposed here that is fundamentally different than what we have already.
I wish I had something to actually contribute to this thread, because its brilliant. Alas, all I have to offer is a "thanks for the belly laughs!"
True, but they'd be even less likely to spend their extra time being social if the only time they're around other people is when they're suffering through boring, lowest common denominator, high school classes.
With that said the "no social life" bugaboo is a red herring that detractors use. Any kid can have a social life. I know families with public only educated, private bricks and mortar only educated, and home schooled. On a scale of adjusted-normal to weird I'd give the nod to the public school kids as being more or less less educated, less informed, and their only acceptable normal behavior seems to revolve around wearing the same clothes in a trendy manner.
Let's see where those home schooled kids are when they're 25.
The idea that the social aspects of school are a red herring seems to be based entirely only the immediately observable. The home schooled kids don't belong to cliques or follow trends, and they seem to have more "book learning" (which I assume is what you mean by saying they are more informed/better educated). OK, great, but where does that get them?
5 years down the road they still haven't learned to fit in. They have serious social problems, which all to often lead to other problems with drugs and alcohol (and sex, well, the girls anyway) which only exacerbate the social problems making it even more difficult for them to find/make friends. They often have difficulty handling pressure or criticism, but at the same time are very arrogant and have no trouble criticizing others.
Yes, these are generalizations, and yet they hold true for every single person I've met who was home schooled. Some of them have been tolerable, but all too many have been highly irritating.
It is not an issue of "no social life", obviously that is easily worked around. The issue is one of social education, which is very hard to get without putting the kid in a school situation. If that valuable social experience is a red herring, well, so is your assertion that all kids learn in public school is to "conform and be politically correct and to not 'think', only parrot approved dogma."
I couldn't agree more. I have not known anyone who has done HS online, but I've known plenty of people who were home schooled, and they all have the same basic problems you describe. Some of them are OK, but all to many of them are impossible to be around.
I imagine online schooling would be even worse. At least with normal home schooling they need to go in and meet with their teacher once a week.
Check government agencies for kids sites. The NSA, for example, has a good kids page with a lot of math games and puzzles. I don't know how many agencies have such pages, but it would seem really odd (and more than a little creepy) if the NSA were the only one.
Emacs is much more feature-rich and robust, and is an industry standard.
Yes, emacs is available for every *nix, but vi is included with every *nix. So, which one is "industry standard", again?
Its menus make those difficult-to-reach key commands unnecessary.
vi has front-ends, too.
Is this book worthy of my money or is it antiquated piece of shit? The author of this review didn't include any sort of this question.
From the article:
The fact that it's still very useful is testimony to the quality of the material.
That would appear to answer your question.
It's in the Samba configuration. It's something like "OS Level" and it will be set to some number, like maybe 50.
This number is how MS machines determine who is the Primary Domain Controller, basically the one with the highest OS level gets it, unless things are specifically configured otherwise. IIRC, Windows NT 4 has an OS level in the low 30s. Newer versions of Windows have higher OS levels, and server versions have higher levels than workstation or desktop versions.
So, all you have to do is use SWAT, or otherwise edit smb.conf, and set your OS level to some low number, like 1.
This site is a good introduction with lots of useful tips. If you really need to know Samba, though, I highly recomend this book.