Apple released a program called HeaderDoc under the APSL (now 20% friendlier!), written in Perl:
"HeaderDoc is a tool for generating HTML reference documentation from comments in C or C++ header files. It is written in Perl for easy portability. Similar to JavaDoc, it allows developers to easily document their interfaces and export that information into HTML."
Realistically, I'm not sure if this helps your cause, but I hope it does!
Re:Computers don't do squat for education.
on
Kids and Computers
·
· Score: 1
A good point about ink.
People should learn to spell correctly regardless of what we depend on to write. We should be able to communicate in our own language, rather than giving up on proper communication and relying on machines to do it for us. Being dependent on ink is not a major loss for the human race, because we will always be dependent on some sort of material to write. But we give up a part of natural human behavior when we rely on machines to correct us - it teaches us that we don't have to worry about our mistakes, we can let somebody else or something else deal with them. It comes back to the machines making us more "productive".
Between ink and spell check or grammar check, there's a significant difference in the amount of intelligence required. Anyone can use ink properly, but if a grown adult cannot spell or create grammatically correct sentences, then the adult requires no more intelligence than a child that, due to maturity, is incapable of proper spelling and grammar to begin with.
I think that's it - we are intelligent if we can write properly.
Some day we will have neural interfaces - will we let machines tell our friends when we're hungry? Will we let AI machines choose the restaurant for us? Choose the food for us? After all, doing those things requires thought, just as writing a legible sentence does.
How much will we let machines do work for us? Where is the line?
Who knows... all I know is that, so long as kids are taught that they can use the machine to correct their mistakes, then they are associating a computer with allowing them to be lazy, rather than associating a computer with any beneficial content that may be present on it.
Same thing with Internet access - if we assume that just having access to the Internet will bridge the gap, then we're basically validating all of the content on the Internet as being acceptable - and we all know just what there is on the Internet.
We have to establish boundaries between the stuff that will allow us to become better human beings - the educational material that will let us recognize and celebrate differences, rather than use them as a means to classify people. We need to have valuable educational content that teaches kids about the topics of their own interest, rather than the usual "this is beyond the scope of this course/textbook" line. Kids must be able to pursue learning as much as possible.
Confusing them by fooling ourselves into believing that there is a "gap" and that the gap must be closed in order to give everyone equal opportunities is a mistake.
How that relates to ink, I don't know.;) Needless to say, I believe between knowing how to make ink and knowing how to communicate, there's a big difference and not being able to do the later says a lot about just what we are - people that use machines, or machines hooked up to a human.
"I don't know what it is with you weath haters, why did you have your heads in the sand?"
And I don't know what it is, but with great consistency the people who use subject titles like "Are You An Idiot?" invariably seem to be the true idiots - gross generalizations, assumptions, ignorance, lack of any meaningful education, deprived of age and wisdom.
Example - calling me a "weath hater", which I'll assume you mean as "wealth hater". Here's a piece of advice for you Freshman... don't go calling people names when you've never met them. You have no clue who you're talking to, and that wholeheartedly earns you the title of "idiot" here.
Further compounding your title is the fact that you're using a public opinion poll and statements from politicians as evidence to claim that the breakup won't happen. You're assuming, as so many genuine idiots do, that statistics mean anything, and that a public opinion poll is actually telling the truth.
You go on to claim that Bush and Gore both stated they are against the MS breakup - gee, there's a couple of reliable and trustworthy guys to rely on to tell the truth. Don't you recall anything else politicians have said, like "I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" from Clinton, or "we agreed to do our best to heal our country after this hard-fought contest" from Bush? Big mistake - using the opinions of politicians as factual evidence of their future actions.
So nice try Freshie, but your idiocy is the one that shines through here.
Computers don't do squat for education.
on
Kids and Computers
·
· Score: 1
You can celebrate the virtues of technology and all the research that shows computers help disadvantages people get better education - the problem with that is that it is based on the delusion that information technology is noble and has no side effects or implications for the degradation of our society.
Jon Katz, you have the opinion of an idealistic computer geek. No disrespect intended, because in many regards I'm exactly the same as you, except that your message advises people to do one thing:
Accept current information technology even more than we do, and use it to the exclusion of other forms of social progress, such as better teachers, better curriculum, and other alternatives.
The more you emphasize the computer as an effective learning tool, the more you mandate its acceptance by our society and other societies, and the more people will believe that computers should be available and used by all people.
However, there is one fundamental problem with computers - they deliver much more than just educational content. They also deliver entertainment, and alternative "realities" for people that are so strong that people become literally addicted to computers. Don't tell me there's no such thing as Internet addiction or computer addiction, because I've seen it and been a part of it myself.
Computers are not inherently dangerous - the physiological impact of the entertainment and escapism that people get from computers IS dangerous. My point: computers are addictive.
As market penetration of computers has grown, so has the use of games and the quantity of time people spend playing them. As the Internet has matured, so has the use of chat rooms, websites, and everything else. Some women now believe the only way to meet men is on the Internet. Some people meet others on the Internet and travel around the country and the world just to meet their friends. Some people spend 17 and 24 hours in a day playing computers, see their grades drop, see relationships break apart, and they start falling between the cracks.
It is time to see alternatives to this notion being pushed a lot by Jon Katz that information technology SHOULD be pushed by US Presidents, SHOULD be more accessible to people, SHOULD be used more in education to bridge the "gap" between fortunate and less-than-fortunate.
Present-day information technology is not even coming close to fulfilling the mandate that idealists envision. It is training far more people to become mental invalids than it is helping differently-abled people overcome their own challenges. How many people are dependent on spell-check, grammar check and synonyms/thesaurus for their writing?! How many are dependent on MS Excel to do the most basic arithmetic calculations for them?!
Many people even refuse to read an entire article or message forum post in Slashdot, because they don't have enough mental endurance or interest in reading an article from start to finish!
No, present-day computers are worthless for education - they deliver benefits to some, but teach far more people to be mental sloths. They increase our dependence on devices other than our own, making all people less able, including the ones that are already differently-abled.
What is the solution? We need to give up this geek notion that computers are cool and the mandate of information technology is to change the world, empower people, and deliver information to them.
We need to recognize that computers are not both good and bad - the content of computers determines whether the use of the computer is good or bad.
We need a new focus: not on the availability of Internet and computers in all classrooms, but on the availability of competent teachers, sufficient supporting resources and supportive environments in schools!
We need to drastically improve not only the educational value of the content and function of computers in the classroom, but we need to improve the message of the content as well. Students need to know that the computer has nothing to do with learning - the message has everything to do with the learning. Computers are not powerful information tools unless the CONTENT is a powerful information tool.
We need to tell people that it isn't the computer that is the valuable tool - it is the CONTENT, and content can be just as poor and/or harmful as content in anything else, like television, books, conversations, or whatever.
(from Katz's article) "Few people in the new or old administration -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- seems to get that the most powerful moral issue affecting many kids and the Net isn't that they are online too much, but that so many aren't online at all, or find their Net and Web lives bounded by disparities in family income."
This is absolutely delusional - this message is all wrong and totally misses the significant issue at hand.
The issue is not that there aren't enough people online and that income is the reason why.
The issue is that no matter whether you are rich or poor, the significant majority of content and software available on a computer, whether online or not, is fulfilling only one mandate of information technology: to simplify our lives.
However, that same content is absolutely NOT educating people properly about the benefits and disadvantages of a computer and the Net.
That content is NOT effective and of sufficient quality to justify pushing computers into every school.
And that content is currently so expensive that the mere notion of Katz claiming that access to the Net is a problem is only furthering the divide between who is REALLY rich and poor in our understanding. Specifically, the real divide is between the rich first world that CAN afford even the cheapest modern day computer, and the poor third world that can't even afford a single book on proper hygiene or agricultural techniques.
Jon Katz, you're a computer geek and this article does more to further that which you think you oppose, than it does to correct the real issues at hand, which IMO are:
1. Computer content is giving everyone the wrong message, and people think that the mere presence of computers and the Net in all first-world classrooms will bridge some sort of "gap" between "rich" and "poor" - "rich" and "poor" being identified, respectively, as those above and below the first-world poverty line, which is set at several thousands of dollars of income.
2. Computer content today is almost entirely focused on making things "easier", rather than focused on serving as an educational tool.
3. Computers are so expensive today that the REAL gap between rich and poor is not in the US at all - it is outside of the cushy United States, where the real poor people can't even clean themselves or grow their own food, let alone dream of having $500 to buy a computer and AOL.
Only when the price of computer technology drops to within the same range as the price of an AK-47 on the African continent will it be worth anything.
And only when computer content abandons a "productivity" focus and embraces an "educational" focus will it then stop the harm it is doing to most people who currently use a computer.
Enough ranting. The solution may just come from this company:
http://www.rolltronics.com/
This company understands the true mandate of information technology, and has enough people with sufficient social and environmental awareness to be dangerous enough that they just might end up putting an educational tool in the hands of every student around the world.
The computer and the Internet are damaging unless the CONTENT is valuable. Current educational content will always be damaging until the focus of that content is changed.
"You obviously know nothing about mass politics or economics. What public backlash are you talking about? Remember that for the vast majority of the population Windows is the only thing remotely usable and they automatically perceive doing anything bad to Microsoft as a bad thing."
And you, in turn, know nothing about the history of big business, anti-trust cases, what Bill Gates thinks, what Gates' competitors will push for, and about a dozen other issues.
When you get an education, feel free to come back and play with the big boys. Till then, you can just sit and wonder why the breakup will go through...
WE'RE NOT IN KANSAS ANY MORE, TOTO!
And you probably want the breakup anyway... the irony.
It's hard to tell whether this is a genuine reply, or a waste of a troll.
Figure it out - Gates wants the breakup, Gates' competitors want the breakup, the general public wants the breakup.
Obviously you've forgotten Bill Gates' ownership stake in various media companies... you can trust "every major poll" all you want; you're delusional if you trust statistics coming from those organizations.
Shoot, you're delusional anyway - you can't even figure out Gates' own reasons for wanting the breakup, let alone figure out that public opinion polls mean about jack squat in the matter.
The public backlash of squashing the breakup would lead to Gore in 2004.
Bush can't abandon something that has received so much popular media attention, and has been so well received by the general public. Microsoft's high-tech opponents would also lend their own PR to the campaign to continue the breakup plans.
Money and lobbying is one thing - going against public opinion is another, and makes politicians think twice. Bush is a politician as much as anyone else; he wants to save his backside for the next election.
Besides - doesn't everyone realize that breaking up large companies like Microsoft actually creates far more value than it destroys? Gates is playing the public for suckers - he WANTS the breakup.
E.g. Standard Oil. AT&T and regional bells.
In both cases, the pieces came to represent market value far in excess of the assembled whole. When it comes to market cap of monopolistic companies, market value works opposite of Gestalt.
The only reason why Gates is fighting the breakup, is because of the sheep-mentality that investors have, thinking that one company is more valuable. They do not realize the truth, so unless Gates wants a market value collapse and shaken confidence in his leadership abilities, he will continue to hide his cards, pretend to fight the breakup, and just coast into his new, greater wealth.
Even AT&T is breaking itself up again, and already the parts are more valuable than when the company was one.
Remember one more thing: Gates is an incredibly cunning businessman, and has acted in precisely this two-faced manner before... he wants the breakup, and he knows how to make it happen while still making him look like the martyr.
On further inspection, it's obvious that the writer of the article is the suspect:
"U.S. scientists aim to blast a comet with a copper projectile to learn about the formation of the solar system as part of a $270 million project funded by NASA (news - web sites), the head of the project said on Tuesday.
The project, called Deep Impact and which will cause an explosion capable of destroying a small town, would be the first space mission to probe inside a comet, whose primitive core could reveal clues about evolution of the solar system."
It seems to me that language reveals the underlying psychology of how people envision a situation. For example, if I keep referring to Linux as "Open Source", it may be that I don't like RMS and consider him a communist. That is not what I think, btw, but it illustrates a point - people use langauge according to how they think and perceive issues. Glass half empty, glass half full.
So the language in the article is decidedly of a violent nature. I'm not a wussy and want to see the world hold hands - it just illustrates what seems to be the underlying psychology of a lot of people within the US, and especially government agencies, who always seem to express violent intentions.
Back to the point - Can we explore at least ONE new world without doing so at gunpoint - crushing things and people as we do it?
Right... it's the same as a geologist breaking a rock open, but the language and the way it is described is very different... you don't hear of geologists describing what they do with violent terminology like "projectile", and "shoot", do you?
It's nice to see that the United States is now pursuing its foreign policy in space - opting to start "shooting" objects first, and gathering data later.
I know this is for scientific purposes, but doesn't the mere concept of the idea of "shooting" an object with a "projectile" carry the notion of violence with it?
Why start exploring yet another new world the same way humans have done so in the past - through violence?
Many companies producing the popular gaming titles for Windows seem reluctant to support the Open Source, FSF and MacOS platforms with their products. However, Apple is about to join the BSD party with Darwin, offering the potential to add several million new BSD installations over the next few years. With that in mind, adding up the various *BSD communities and Darwin yields a large, growing group of users. Add GNU/Linux, and that total becomes even larger. Growth of these platforms is significant, as is the potential for game sales.
What can these communities do to allow a game developer to write one title and port it easily across platforms, while retaining performance and quality?
Can you comment on what would be required to put something like this together, in terms of software, standards and effort on the part of the developers?
Thank you, and good luck with your TrustedBSD efforts.
Microsoft would bundle an offer for WebTV with newborn children, if only Bill Gates could figure out how to pitch to the allmighty creator .
And if BG could talk to the four horsemen of myth in a particular religious belief, then Microsoft would make you migrate to WebTV with Microsoft-branded plague, famine, pestilence and death.
"That 533 will sit idle all the time if you load OS9 on it. Wanna wait 6 months for OS X?"
Incorrect - Darwin and Linux for PPC are MP-capable right now, in addition to half a dozen of the most important MacOS apps. Focussing specifically on MacOS 9's MP capabilities, the most important apps for the PowerMac's target market (content creators) are MP capable, and nobody would buy an MP system if they were not going to utilize those apps, and both of the processors. There are plenty of ways to utilize the MP systems right now. Shoot, even the available OSX Public Beta supports MP.
So there is no waste of money or CPU even today; you will get MP performance from the MP systems, and perhaps even OpenBSD will deliver MP performance on the new PMac 533MP, if OpenBSD gets support for the new systems soon.
OSX commercial will include Apache and should have options for the full BSD layer, so in terms of its server capbilities it will be formidable for the hardware Apple wants it to run on. And if that doesn't work, you can grab Darwin, which has been code synched with the OSX commercial release (OSX is feature-frozen now), so you'll be able to serve from Apache on Darwin, and with any other server apps that will run on Darwin.
Good news today... major drool for that new PBook.
"(Do we want a data cloud full of the digital pictures millions of people couldn't bring themselves to delete?)"
It's a quaint thought, but the answer to this cynical question is YES, people do want that. Mass storage such as the type described in the article will provide one more avenue for Net Clogging. SPAM, virus alerts, tag-you're-it, love emails, Microsoft Outlook viruses, sob stories.... they may all be email, but when people can anonymously store large files such as graphics and audio/video, the people in the world that want to clog up the Internet and make it unusable will have one more avenue through which to do so - distributed, secure storage.
These people will upload tons of files that are junk to a lot of people - that is, many people will upload tons of junk; some people will have good intentions and others will have malicious intentions.
Freedom has a price - on the Internet that price is giving equal treatment to all data transmissions, whether they be from people with good intentions, or people who just want to disrupt the Internet as much as possible.
I'm facing a similar situation as the person who posted the questions to/.
I am considering going back to University for a second degree, this time a B.Sc. in Computer Science. I would like to learn to program everything from low-level drivers and kernel work, up to end-user applications. I'm not sure if one person can cover that scope of programming... is that possible?
Does anyone have advice on how a person can learn to write low-level device drivers?
I once was reading about DEC's commercial Unix OS, and the fact that it had (according to the Byte article) highly-optimized drivers. If I wanted to write such drivers, what level of detail will I have to get into?
For example, a hard drive driver. Does a highly-optimized driver require writing assembly code for the DSP in the actual drive? Or assembly code for the IDE/SCSI controller?
The company in question, which is sampling epitaxy wafers to two "major" semiconductor manufacturers (according to the website) is Isonics, a company trading on the NASDAQ (Symbol ISON) and based in Colorado. All of their operations are based in the US, the USSR organization developed the technology, but that technology is now available through a US vendor.
So yes, it's true that the technology exists. The Max Planck Society has verified that the technology does indeed increase thermal conductivity as well. The Max Planck article here.
Beyond the fact that the technology works, Isonics seems to believe that it will scale... why would they be shipping wafers to large semiconductor vendors if they couldn't deliver?
As for the proliferation risk, that is entirely likely. Isonics already offers isotopically pure Oxygen 18, Carbon 12 and 13, and several other pure elements. As I understand it, they're also working to offer isotopically pure Germanium, so they're clearly going for products relevant to semiconductor manufacturers.
MIT is currently working on project "Oxygen", which uses FPGA technology as its foundation. The FPGA project is called "RAW"
The idea as I understand it, is that as chip complexity increases, circuit pathways grow longer and longer, creating inefficiencies. So the folks at MIT have designed a repeatable CPU core (RAW project) that is highly parallel in nature and uses FPGA technology. As transistor density increases, more power can be added just as easy as new blocks can be added to Lego, because the design is modular.
The DVD roadmap has this level of storage potential - I think the spec called for 4 layers of data per side of a DVD disk, and double-sided disks, for somewhere in the 1XX Gigabyte storage capacity range. The rollout wasn't for another 3 or 4 years though.
"OK, not just naive, ignorant too.Here's a few examples of how corporations are dictating policies which are in their interest, and against the public interest (this includes _you_, Angelwrath)"
Well you've provided four examples that, for the most part, are entirely US-centric, and presume that these four are examples of forces working against the "public interest", including me.
Out of curiosity, are you claiming that the general public is all subjected to the will of the Tobacco industry? Of US HMO corporations? Of the WTO? Of MacDonalds?
The other thing that's curious is how on earth you have come to conclude that HMO corporations somehow have any effect on my healthcare system.
Didn't you try to claim that it was _me_ that was ignorant, earlier in your post? You may be right - you seem to be an expert on being ignorant yourself.
Canada doesn't have "HMOs" mon ami. I suppose you didn't know that.
"1/ Tobacco. Heck, the gov't even set up a watchdog agency to protect us from harmful, chemical stuff. And cut a huge exemption for one of their large$t contributors."
A US-Centric example, but I do see and hear of the "big Tobacco lobby groups" on CNN and NBC from time to time, so to a certain extent you are correct. On the other hand, I don't smoke, and millions of your fellow American citizens don't smoke, and most of the world doesn't smoke Tobacco, or so I would presume.
In other words, you're wrong, Tobacco doesn't act against the public interest - they act against a lot of people, but those people do not make up the public interest. And there are millions of people that will never, ever smoke, so the effects of "big Tobacco" are far smaller than any fanatic will admit.
Further, consider this - smoking is known to kill people. Everyone knows that. What fault is it of a company if people are so stupid and weak-willed that they continue to smoke even when the health hazards are literally in their face?
The problem with Tobacco isn't the Tobacco industry; the problem is the fools that continue to smoke.
"2/ Health care. HMOs have jumped to become one of the top contibutor$, in the short time they've been around. Average service during this period has dropped dramatically. No correlation there, right?"
I'll pass over this one, because US HMOs are not really relevant, nor are they "greedy multinationals". They may be greedy, but I'd be keen to know what % of US HMOs operate outside of the US, and can therefore are actually multi-national, which is one of the key requirements when talking about greedy multinational corporations (which I'd like to stick with in this thread).
"3/WTO. Oooo, the people in the western countries have implemented horridly anti-capitalist ideas like retirement funds, health care, and living wages. Let's make more money by exploiting the labour in places that don't have such ideas."
I'd be interested in hearing what people honestly suggest as viable alternatives. Please, what do you suggest would solve the problem?
"4/ McDonalds (to pick on just one), Multinational Corp, 1: The public and truth, 0."
Oh, gee, a horribly greedy multinational. This has to be one of the weakest multi-national corporations in the world - same with every other fast food restaurant operating internationally, for that matter. All you do is two things friend - ignore the logo, don't eat in the restaurant - and that company is absolutely powerless over you. There are thousands of families in every country where MacDonalds operates that refuse to eat in the restaurant, and refuse to eat fast food at all - and the numbers of people doing just that are growing all the time. MacDonalds has been plagued in recent years with slowing revenues - that means anti-MacDonalds awareness is growing at a rate that threatens the very future of the company.
Further, do you realize again that you are brining up that example just because you are saturated by US-centric information every day? There are millions and millions of people around the world that never have, and never will eat at MacDonalds, or ANY fast food restaurant for that matter.
The US doesn't yet own the world, friend. Rather than being so dead-set against the multinational corporations, and various other irrelevant companies, why don't you start working on your own extreme cultural ignorance instead?
"200+ years later, the trend hasn't changed, except for getting worse."
This is utter rubbish. How many people had access to information technology 200+ years ago? What happened when all of a sudden the Bible was translated into English and made available to the Christian religious masses?
No, Christians were still long oppressed after the Reformation, so let's deny the role accessible information played in it. Let's ignore the inevitable outcome of a new paradigm in education or information, like the printing press or translated documents or instant global communications.
Let's ignore the fact that huge percentages of first world nations are highly educated today, and education is exploding in two of the largest population centers in the world (China and India).
What do you think the Cell Phone + Internet paradigm is going to do for the world, once the 1 billion predicted people have them in 2003?
Naw, it's going to be just the same thing over again, "except for getting worse". Information is pretty useless - it doesn't liberate people at all, and giving it to a billion people won't do a single thing...
la la la... I don't think we're in Kansas any more, Toto!
"I guess that depends on which world you're talking about. How did you post here without submitting to the dominance of a multi-national corp?"
I post to/. the same as you do, and "dominant, greedy" multinationals had nothing to do with it. Some multi-national companies supplied the equipment necessary to support certain components of software and hardware from my computer to the/. server, but not a single one of them is dominant or greedy - they all have fierce competitors and none of them is able to control prices or influence markets with their behavior.
Some people think as soon as they can identify a company that is "multi-national", that it is somehow different from the corner mom & pop grocery store, and it is greedy and evil and should be the subject of ridicule and cynical comments, rather than it being just a very large business able to conduct its business in more than one country.
"Oops. you're a troll, aren't you..."
It's trolling to call people trolls, troll.;) I am not a troll, and I do not presume that you are either - we can debate this and perhaps enjoy an intellectual discourse, or we can do something else in which case I will not be participating. What's it going to be?
Slashdot Mirror
Apple released a program called HeaderDoc under the APSL (now 20% friendlier!), written in Perl:
"HeaderDoc is a tool for generating HTML reference documentation from comments in C or C++ header files. It is written in Perl for easy portability. Similar to JavaDoc, it allows developers to easily document their interfaces and export that information into HTML."
Realistically, I'm not sure if this helps your cause, but I hope it does!
A good point about ink.
;) Needless to say, I believe between knowing how to make ink and knowing how to communicate, there's a big difference and not being able to do the later says a lot about just what we are - people that use machines, or machines hooked up to a human.
People should learn to spell correctly regardless of what we depend on to write. We should be able to communicate in our own language, rather than giving up on proper communication and relying on machines to do it for us. Being dependent on ink is not a major loss for the human race, because we will always be dependent on some sort of material to write. But we give up a part of natural human behavior when we rely on machines to correct us - it teaches us that we don't have to worry about our mistakes, we can let somebody else or something else deal with them. It comes back to the machines making us more "productive".
Between ink and spell check or grammar check, there's a significant difference in the amount of intelligence required. Anyone can use ink properly, but if a grown adult cannot spell or create grammatically correct sentences, then the adult requires no more intelligence than a child that, due to maturity, is incapable of proper spelling and grammar to begin with.
I think that's it - we are intelligent if we can write properly.
Some day we will have neural interfaces - will we let machines tell our friends when we're hungry? Will we let AI machines choose the restaurant for us? Choose the food for us? After all, doing those things requires thought, just as writing a legible sentence does.
How much will we let machines do work for us? Where is the line?
Who knows... all I know is that, so long as kids are taught that they can use the machine to correct their mistakes, then they are associating a computer with allowing them to be lazy, rather than associating a computer with any beneficial content that may be present on it.
Same thing with Internet access - if we assume that just having access to the Internet will bridge the gap, then we're basically validating all of the content on the Internet as being acceptable - and we all know just what there is on the Internet.
We have to establish boundaries between the stuff that will allow us to become better human beings - the educational material that will let us recognize and celebrate differences, rather than use them as a means to classify people. We need to have valuable educational content that teaches kids about the topics of their own interest, rather than the usual "this is beyond the scope of this course/textbook" line. Kids must be able to pursue learning as much as possible.
Confusing them by fooling ourselves into believing that there is a "gap" and that the gap must be closed in order to give everyone equal opportunities is a mistake.
How that relates to ink, I don't know.
Can you describe what it is to be a "Fellow" at AT&T, the work you like to focus on in that role, and how a person becomes a fellow?
On the third part about how a person becomes a fellow, what amount of experience or qualifications does one need?
Cheers!
"I don't know what it is with you weath haters, why did you have your heads in the sand?"
And I don't know what it is, but with great consistency the people who use subject titles like "Are You An Idiot?" invariably seem to be the true idiots - gross generalizations, assumptions, ignorance, lack of any meaningful education, deprived of age and wisdom.
Example - calling me a "weath hater", which I'll assume you mean as "wealth hater". Here's a piece of advice for you Freshman... don't go calling people names when you've never met them. You have no clue who you're talking to, and that wholeheartedly earns you the title of "idiot" here.
Further compounding your title is the fact that you're using a public opinion poll and statements from politicians as evidence to claim that the breakup won't happen. You're assuming, as so many genuine idiots do, that statistics mean anything, and that a public opinion poll is actually telling the truth.
You go on to claim that Bush and Gore both stated they are against the MS breakup - gee, there's a couple of reliable and trustworthy guys to rely on to tell the truth. Don't you recall anything else politicians have said, like "I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" from Clinton, or "we agreed to do our best to heal our country after this hard-fought contest" from Bush? Big mistake - using the opinions of politicians as factual evidence of their future actions.
So nice try Freshie, but your idiocy is the one that shines through here.
You can celebrate the virtues of technology and all the research that shows computers help disadvantages people get better education - the problem with that is that it is based on the delusion that information technology is noble and has no side effects or implications for the degradation of our society.
Jon Katz, you have the opinion of an idealistic computer geek. No disrespect intended, because in many regards I'm exactly the same as you, except that your message advises people to do one thing:
Accept current information technology even more than we do, and use it to the exclusion of other forms of social progress, such as better teachers, better curriculum, and other alternatives.
The more you emphasize the computer as an effective learning tool, the more you mandate its acceptance by our society and other societies, and the more people will believe that computers should be available and used by all people.
However, there is one fundamental problem with computers - they deliver much more than just educational content. They also deliver entertainment, and alternative "realities" for people that are so strong that people become literally addicted to computers. Don't tell me there's no such thing as Internet addiction or computer addiction, because I've seen it and been a part of it myself.
Computers are not inherently dangerous - the physiological impact of the entertainment and escapism that people get from computers IS dangerous. My point: computers are addictive.
As market penetration of computers has grown, so has the use of games and the quantity of time people spend playing them. As the Internet has matured, so has the use of chat rooms, websites, and everything else. Some women now believe the only way to meet men is on the Internet. Some people meet others on the Internet and travel around the country and the world just to meet their friends. Some people spend 17 and 24 hours in a day playing computers, see their grades drop, see relationships break apart, and they start falling between the cracks.
It is time to see alternatives to this notion being pushed a lot by Jon Katz that information technology SHOULD be pushed by US Presidents, SHOULD be more accessible to people, SHOULD be used more in education to bridge the "gap" between fortunate and less-than-fortunate.
Present-day information technology is not even coming close to fulfilling the mandate that idealists envision. It is training far more people to become mental invalids than it is helping differently-abled people overcome their own challenges. How many people are dependent on spell-check, grammar check and synonyms/thesaurus for their writing?! How many are dependent on MS Excel to do the most basic arithmetic calculations for them?!
Many people even refuse to read an entire article or message forum post in Slashdot, because they don't have enough mental endurance or interest in reading an article from start to finish!
No, present-day computers are worthless for education - they deliver benefits to some, but teach far more people to be mental sloths. They increase our dependence on devices other than our own, making all people less able, including the ones that are already differently-abled.
What is the solution? We need to give up this geek notion that computers are cool and the mandate of information technology is to change the world, empower people, and deliver information to them.
We need to recognize that computers are not both good and bad - the content of computers determines whether the use of the computer is good or bad.
We need a new focus: not on the availability of Internet and computers in all classrooms, but on the availability of competent teachers, sufficient supporting resources and supportive environments in schools!
We need to drastically improve not only the educational value of the content and function of computers in the classroom, but we need to improve the message of the content as well. Students need to know that the computer has nothing to do with learning - the message has everything to do with the learning. Computers are not powerful information tools unless the CONTENT is a powerful information tool.
We need to tell people that it isn't the computer that is the valuable tool - it is the CONTENT, and content can be just as poor and/or harmful as content in anything else, like television, books, conversations, or whatever.
(from Katz's article) "Few people in the new or old administration -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- seems to get that the most powerful moral issue affecting many kids and the Net isn't that they are online too much, but that so many aren't online at all, or find their Net and Web lives bounded by disparities in family income."
This is absolutely delusional - this message is all wrong and totally misses the significant issue at hand.
The issue is not that there aren't enough people online and that income is the reason why.
The issue is that no matter whether you are rich or poor, the significant majority of content and software available on a computer, whether online or not, is fulfilling only one mandate of information technology: to simplify our lives.
However, that same content is absolutely NOT educating people properly about the benefits and disadvantages of a computer and the Net.
That content is NOT effective and of sufficient quality to justify pushing computers into every school.
And that content is currently so expensive that the mere notion of Katz claiming that access to the Net is a problem is only furthering the divide between who is REALLY rich and poor in our understanding. Specifically, the real divide is between the rich first world that CAN afford even the cheapest modern day computer, and the poor third world that can't even afford a single book on proper hygiene or agricultural techniques.
Jon Katz, you're a computer geek and this article does more to further that which you think you oppose, than it does to correct the real issues at hand, which IMO are:
1. Computer content is giving everyone the wrong message, and people think that the mere presence of computers and the Net in all first-world classrooms will bridge some sort of "gap" between "rich" and "poor" - "rich" and "poor" being identified, respectively, as those above and below the first-world poverty line, which is set at several thousands of dollars of income.
2. Computer content today is almost entirely focused on making things "easier", rather than focused on serving as an educational tool.
3. Computers are so expensive today that the REAL gap between rich and poor is not in the US at all - it is outside of the cushy United States, where the real poor people can't even clean themselves or grow their own food, let alone dream of having $500 to buy a computer and AOL.
Only when the price of computer technology drops to within the same range as the price of an AK-47 on the African continent will it be worth anything.
And only when computer content abandons a "productivity" focus and embraces an "educational" focus will it then stop the harm it is doing to most people who currently use a computer.
Enough ranting. The solution may just come from this company:
http://www.rolltronics.com/
This company understands the true mandate of information technology, and has enough people with sufficient social and environmental awareness to be dangerous enough that they just might end up putting an educational tool in the hands of every student around the world.
The computer and the Internet are damaging unless the CONTENT is valuable. Current educational content will always be damaging until the focus of that content is changed.
There was a petition to bring QuickTime to Linux a while back...
Darwin Streaming Server, a QuickTime streaming server program that is available under Apple's Public Source License (APSL) is available for:
FreeBSD 3.4 (server and proxy)
Red Hat Linux 6.2 (server and proxy)
Solaris 7 (server and proxy)
Windows NT Server/Windows 2000 Server (server)
"You obviously know nothing about mass politics or economics. What public backlash are you talking about? Remember that for the vast majority of the population Windows is the only thing remotely usable and they automatically perceive doing anything bad to Microsoft as a bad thing." And you, in turn, know nothing about the history of big business, anti-trust cases, what Bill Gates thinks, what Gates' competitors will push for, and about a dozen other issues. When you get an education, feel free to come back and play with the big boys. Till then, you can just sit and wonder why the breakup will go through... WE'RE NOT IN KANSAS ANY MORE, TOTO! And you probably want the breakup anyway... the irony.
It's hard to tell whether this is a genuine reply, or a waste of a troll.
Figure it out - Gates wants the breakup, Gates' competitors want the breakup, the general public wants the breakup.
Obviously you've forgotten Bill Gates' ownership stake in various media companies... you can trust "every major poll" all you want; you're delusional if you trust statistics coming from those organizations.
Shoot, you're delusional anyway - you can't even figure out Gates' own reasons for wanting the breakup, let alone figure out that public opinion polls mean about jack squat in the matter.
The public backlash of squashing the breakup would lead to Gore in 2004.
Bush can't abandon something that has received so much popular media attention, and has been so well received by the general public. Microsoft's high-tech opponents would also lend their own PR to the campaign to continue the breakup plans.
Money and lobbying is one thing - going against public opinion is another, and makes politicians think twice. Bush is a politician as much as anyone else; he wants to save his backside for the next election.
Besides - doesn't everyone realize that breaking up large companies like Microsoft actually creates far more value than it destroys? Gates is playing the public for suckers - he WANTS the breakup.
E.g. Standard Oil. AT&T and regional bells.
In both cases, the pieces came to represent market value far in excess of the assembled whole. When it comes to market cap of monopolistic companies, market value works opposite of Gestalt.
The only reason why Gates is fighting the breakup, is because of the sheep-mentality that investors have, thinking that one company is more valuable. They do not realize the truth, so unless Gates wants a market value collapse and shaken confidence in his leadership abilities, he will continue to hide his cards, pretend to fight the breakup, and just coast into his new, greater wealth.
Even AT&T is breaking itself up again, and already the parts are more valuable than when the company was one.
Remember one more thing: Gates is an incredibly cunning businessman, and has acted in precisely this two-faced manner before... he wants the breakup, and he knows how to make it happen while still making him look like the martyr.
On further inspection, it's obvious that the writer of the article is the suspect:
"U.S. scientists aim to blast a comet with a copper projectile to learn about the formation of the solar system as part of a $270 million project funded by NASA (news - web sites), the head of the project said on Tuesday.
The project, called Deep Impact and which will cause an explosion capable of destroying a small town, would be the first space mission to probe inside a comet, whose primitive core could reveal clues about evolution of the solar system."
It seems to me that language reveals the underlying psychology of how people envision a situation. For example, if I keep referring to Linux as "Open Source", it may be that I don't like RMS and consider him a communist. That is not what I think, btw, but it illustrates a point - people use langauge according to how they think and perceive issues. Glass half empty, glass half full.
So the language in the article is decidedly of a violent nature. I'm not a wussy and want to see the world hold hands - it just illustrates what seems to be the underlying psychology of a lot of people within the US, and especially government agencies, who always seem to express violent intentions.
Back to the point - Can we explore at least ONE new world without doing so at gunpoint - crushing things and people as we do it?
I think it's a relevant point to make.
Right... it's the same as a geologist breaking a rock open, but the language and the way it is described is very different... you don't hear of geologists describing what they do with violent terminology like "projectile", and "shoot", do you?
It's nice to see that the United States is now pursuing its foreign policy in space - opting to start "shooting" objects first, and gathering data later.
I know this is for scientific purposes, but doesn't the mere concept of the idea of "shooting" an object with a "projectile" carry the notion of violence with it?
Why start exploring yet another new world the same way humans have done so in the past - through violence?
Many companies producing the popular gaming titles for Windows seem reluctant to support the Open Source, FSF and MacOS platforms with their products. However, Apple is about to join the BSD party with Darwin, offering the potential to add several million new BSD installations over the next few years. With that in mind, adding up the various *BSD communities and Darwin yields a large, growing group of users. Add GNU/Linux, and that total becomes even larger. Growth of these platforms is significant, as is the potential for game sales.
What can these communities do to allow a game developer to write one title and port it easily across platforms, while retaining performance and quality?
Can you comment on what would be required to put something like this together, in terms of software, standards and effort on the part of the developers?
Thank you, and good luck with your TrustedBSD efforts.
Actually, you may be right. I had thought that OpenBSD had SMP support - FreeBSD has it, but there is no port of FreeBSD to PPC.
Time for a hack!
Microsoft would bundle an offer for WebTV with newborn children, if only Bill Gates could figure out how to pitch to the allmighty creator .
And if BG could talk to the four horsemen of myth in a particular religious belief, then Microsoft would make you migrate to WebTV with Microsoft-branded plague, famine, pestilence and death.
That's why the chair comes with WebTV.
"That 533 will sit idle all the time if you load OS9 on it. Wanna wait 6 months for OS X?"
Incorrect - Darwin and Linux for PPC are MP-capable right now, in addition to half a dozen of the most important MacOS apps. Focussing specifically on MacOS 9's MP capabilities, the most important apps for the PowerMac's target market (content creators) are MP capable, and nobody would buy an MP system if they were not going to utilize those apps, and both of the processors. There are plenty of ways to utilize the MP systems right now. Shoot, even the available OSX Public Beta supports MP.
So there is no waste of money or CPU even today; you will get MP performance from the MP systems, and perhaps even OpenBSD will deliver MP performance on the new PMac 533MP, if OpenBSD gets support for the new systems soon.
OSX commercial will include Apache and should have options for the full BSD layer, so in terms of its server capbilities it will be formidable for the hardware Apple wants it to run on. And if that doesn't work, you can grab Darwin, which has been code synched with the OSX commercial release (OSX is feature-frozen now), so you'll be able to serve from Apache on Darwin, and with any other server apps that will run on Darwin.
Good news today... major drool for that new PBook.
"(Do we want a data cloud full of the digital pictures millions of people couldn't bring themselves to delete?)"
It's a quaint thought, but the answer to this cynical question is YES, people do want that. Mass storage such as the type described in the article will provide one more avenue for Net Clogging. SPAM, virus alerts, tag-you're-it, love emails, Microsoft Outlook viruses, sob stories.... they may all be email, but when people can anonymously store large files such as graphics and audio/video, the people in the world that want to clog up the Internet and make it unusable will have one more avenue through which to do so - distributed, secure storage.
These people will upload tons of files that are junk to a lot of people - that is, many people will upload tons of junk; some people will have good intentions and others will have malicious intentions.
Freedom has a price - on the Internet that price is giving equal treatment to all data transmissions, whether they be from people with good intentions, or people who just want to disrupt the Internet as much as possible.
I'm facing a similar situation as the person who posted the questions to /.
I am considering going back to University for a second degree, this time a B.Sc. in Computer Science. I would like to learn to program everything from low-level drivers and kernel work, up to end-user applications. I'm not sure if one person can cover that scope of programming... is that possible?
Does anyone have advice on how a person can learn to write low-level device drivers?
I once was reading about DEC's commercial Unix OS, and the fact that it had (according to the Byte article) highly-optimized drivers. If I wanted to write such drivers, what level of detail will I have to get into?
For example, a hard drive driver. Does a highly-optimized driver require writing assembly code for the DSP in the actual drive? Or assembly code for the IDE/SCSI controller?
Thanks for the tips!
A company called Yipes, which has been around for quite a while, also offers the same 1000 for $1000 deal.
Yipes Website.
The company in question, which is sampling epitaxy wafers to two "major" semiconductor manufacturers (according to the website) is Isonics, a company trading on the NASDAQ (Symbol ISON) and based in Colorado. All of their operations are based in the US, the USSR organization developed the technology, but that technology is now available through a US vendor.
So yes, it's true that the technology exists. The Max Planck Society has verified that the technology does indeed increase thermal conductivity as well. The Max Planck article here.
Beyond the fact that the technology works, Isonics seems to believe that it will scale... why would they be shipping wafers to large semiconductor vendors if they couldn't deliver?
As for the proliferation risk, that is entirely likely. Isonics already offers isotopically pure Oxygen 18, Carbon 12 and 13, and several other pure elements. As I understand it, they're also working to offer isotopically pure Germanium, so they're clearly going for products relevant to semiconductor manufacturers.
MIT is currently working on project "Oxygen", which uses FPGA technology as its foundation. The FPGA project is called "RAW"
/08 99issue/0899dertouzos.html
/pub/raw/documents/RawSpec99.pdf
The idea as I understand it, is that as chip complexity increases, circuit pathways grow longer and longer, creating inefficiencies. So the folks at MIT have designed a repeatable CPU core (RAW project) that is highly parallel in nature and uses FPGA technology. As transistor density increases, more power can be added just as easy as new blocks can be added to Lego, because the design is modular.
Here's some URL's for y'all:
Scientific Article on Project Oxygen:
http://www.sciam.com/1999
MIT's Oxygen website:
http://oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/
MIT's RAW website:
http://www.cag.lcs.mit.edu/raw/
One of the best documents on FPGA technology and it's existing state in the RAW/Oxygen projects is this PDF document:
ftp://ftp.cag.lcs.mit. edu
Enjoy!
The DVD roadmap has this level of storage potential - I think the spec called for 4 layers of data per side of a DVD disk, and double-sided disks, for somewhere in the 1XX Gigabyte storage capacity range. The rollout wasn't for another 3 or 4 years though.
"OK, not just naive, ignorant too.Here's a few examples of how corporations are dictating policies which are in their interest, and against the public interest (this includes _you_, Angelwrath)"
Well you've provided four examples that, for the most part, are entirely US-centric, and presume that these four are examples of forces working against the "public interest", including me.
Out of curiosity, are you claiming that the general public is all subjected to the will of the Tobacco industry? Of US HMO corporations? Of the WTO? Of MacDonalds?
The other thing that's curious is how on earth you have come to conclude that HMO corporations somehow have any effect on my healthcare system.
Didn't you try to claim that it was _me_ that was ignorant, earlier in your post? You may be right - you seem to be an expert on being ignorant yourself.
Canada doesn't have "HMOs" mon ami. I suppose you didn't know that.
"1/ Tobacco. Heck, the gov't even set up a watchdog agency to protect us from harmful, chemical stuff. And cut a huge exemption for one of their large$t contributors."
A US-Centric example, but I do see and hear of the "big Tobacco lobby groups" on CNN and NBC from time to time, so to a certain extent you are correct. On the other hand, I don't smoke, and millions of your fellow American citizens don't smoke, and most of the world doesn't smoke Tobacco, or so I would presume.
In other words, you're wrong, Tobacco doesn't act against the public interest - they act against a lot of people, but those people do not make up the public interest. And there are millions of people that will never, ever smoke, so the effects of "big Tobacco" are far smaller than any fanatic will admit.
Further, consider this - smoking is known to kill people. Everyone knows that. What fault is it of a company if people are so stupid and weak-willed that they continue to smoke even when the health hazards are literally in their face?
The problem with Tobacco isn't the Tobacco industry; the problem is the fools that continue to smoke.
"2/ Health care. HMOs have jumped to become one of the top contibutor$, in the short time they've been around. Average service during this period has dropped dramatically. No correlation there, right?"
I'll pass over this one, because US HMOs are not really relevant, nor are they "greedy multinationals". They may be greedy, but I'd be keen to know what % of US HMOs operate outside of the US, and can therefore are actually multi-national, which is one of the key requirements when talking about greedy multinational corporations (which I'd like to stick with in this thread).
"3/WTO. Oooo, the people in the western countries have implemented horridly anti-capitalist ideas like retirement funds, health care, and living wages. Let's make more money by exploiting the labour in places that don't have such ideas."
I'd be interested in hearing what people honestly suggest as viable alternatives. Please, what do you suggest would solve the problem?
"4/ McDonalds (to pick on just one), Multinational Corp, 1: The public and truth, 0."
Oh, gee, a horribly greedy multinational. This has to be one of the weakest multi-national corporations in the world - same with every other fast food restaurant operating internationally, for that matter. All you do is two things friend - ignore the logo, don't eat in the restaurant - and that company is absolutely powerless over you. There are thousands of families in every country where MacDonalds operates that refuse to eat in the restaurant, and refuse to eat fast food at all - and the numbers of people doing just that are growing all the time. MacDonalds has been plagued in recent years with slowing revenues - that means anti-MacDonalds awareness is growing at a rate that threatens the very future of the company.
Further, do you realize again that you are brining up that example just because you are saturated by US-centric information every day? There are millions and millions of people around the world that never have, and never will eat at MacDonalds, or ANY fast food restaurant for that matter.
The US doesn't yet own the world, friend. Rather than being so dead-set against the multinational corporations, and various other irrelevant companies, why don't you start working on your own extreme cultural ignorance instead?
"200+ years later, the trend hasn't changed, except for getting worse."
This is utter rubbish. How many people had access to information technology 200+ years ago? What happened when all of a sudden the Bible was translated into English and made available to the Christian religious masses?
No, Christians were still long oppressed after the Reformation, so let's deny the role accessible information played in it. Let's ignore the inevitable outcome of a new paradigm in education or information, like the printing press or translated documents or instant global communications.
Let's ignore the fact that huge percentages of first world nations are highly educated today, and education is exploding in two of the largest population centers in the world (China and India).
What do you think the Cell Phone + Internet paradigm is going to do for the world, once the 1 billion predicted people have them in 2003?
Naw, it's going to be just the same thing over again, "except for getting worse". Information is pretty useless - it doesn't liberate people at all, and giving it to a billion people won't do a single thing...
la la la... I don't think we're in Kansas any more, Toto!
"I guess that depends on which world you're talking about. How did you post here without submitting to the dominance of a multi-national corp?"
/. the same as you do, and "dominant, greedy" multinationals had nothing to do with it. Some multi-national companies supplied the equipment necessary to support certain components of software and hardware from my computer to the /. server, but not a single one of them is dominant or greedy - they all have fierce competitors and none of them is able to control prices or influence markets with their behavior.
;) I am not a troll, and I do not presume that you are either - we can debate this and perhaps enjoy an intellectual discourse, or we can do something else in which case I will not be participating. What's it going to be?
I post to
Some people think as soon as they can identify a company that is "multi-national", that it is somehow different from the corner mom & pop grocery store, and it is greedy and evil and should be the subject of ridicule and cynical comments, rather than it being just a very large business able to conduct its business in more than one country.
"Oops. you're a troll, aren't you..."
It's trolling to call people trolls, troll.