The RHCT/RHCSA exam is supposed to stay valid through two iteration of the OS (So I got mine during the RH6 era, I should be god until the release of RH8), why did you have to retake the exam? Or is that just a thing where the cert stayed valid, but because you wanted to take the higher cert they wanted you to have most recent lower cert?
Yes and no. You don't want to hire one of these "Hybrid" people to do pure IT work for your Fortune 500 company with a 400 person IT staff, but within those 400 jobs are positions that could benefit from knowledge of both sides of the fence. Let's say you have a staff of 15 that work on the corporate website. You probably want at least half, Maybe three quarters of those guy to be pure tech. Programers, designers, DBAs, SAs, etc. But there's value in probably three or so people that understand the business side as well as the technical side. Who can look at the new feature and say, "well that's cool and all, but how does it help the business?". Not managers exactly, though at least one of them probably would be the manager, just people that can look at both sides of the problem. And hell it probably doesn't hurt of a few more of those people who are already designers or programmers have at least some clue about how the business side operates.
Closer to home for me, people from West Virginia have been attacking the EPA for stopping mountaintop mining in their state. They say that the EPA is halting job creation and go on and on about how horrible the EPA is. It's so odd to me because this state is rife with environmental problems left over from just this mining and when there was no EPA and no regulations on the state level, chemical companies ran rampant in West Virginia. I wouldn't drink the groundwater there if my life depended on it now. And what was the reason for this? To give a few generations of jobs and stoke the smokestacks of the industrial USA? Sure... but at what future and permanent and irreversible cost?
The essential problem is that people mostly think in the short term. We have the ability to make long term plans, but even the most disciplined of us have a very hard time ignoring short term goals in favor of long term planning. All of us can do it, and some of us are better at it than others, but the temptation to take care of short term problem at the expense of long term success is always there.
The is especially true when you're talking about people who are literally in a subsistence barely surviving mode. It's easy for me to look at the environmental impact of mountaintop mining and say to a miner, "What are you doing? You're destroying the land, poisoning yourself, poisoning your kids. How can you do this?" To him though, he's *feeding* his kids. The chance that his kids might get sick at sometime in the distant future is not nearly as scary to him as the certainty that they won't get enough to eat right now if he doesn't work.
The other problem is one of trust. For a lot of cultural and educational reasons, people in these rural towns trust the local company owners or managers more than the faceless government regulators. If the company says what they're doing is safe (and it's feeding my kids), who is this outside regulator to come in and say otherwise? They typically have seen Erin Brockovich, they don't read environmental studies. One of the first problems with getting anything done about some these environmental disasters is always getting people to believe that the company would *do* something like that.
The real problem.. and the real answer to the question... is that there's probably nothing illegal going on here. A politician accepted campaign contributions, and then introduced legislation that his contributor thought would be beneficial to the politician's constituents. That's all that provably happened. It's legal. The bitching afterward by the contributor that his bill didn't pass might make you think that the contributor *thought* they bought a law, but you can guarantee that at not point was such a thing explicitly said. And thanks to the Supreme Court, what few limits the Congress sought to impose on themselves to prevent this have been ruled Unconstitutional.
Um... so define "regulated". Until five months ago I worked for a Federal Government Contractor, held a security clearance, and did work day to day on classified machines. My workplace was piloting the use of iPhones for e-mail and corporate access when I left. Of course you couldn't put classified information on them, but you couldn't put classified information laptops either, so that's not saying much. There's all kinds of rules for what you can and can't do regarding classified, but for unclassified uses, iPhones are likely as common as Blackberries and laptops there now.
My brother works for a hospital. Out side of the government, probably the most regulated industry in the country. He has a work issued iPad. Again, it's not allowed to contain patient information but neither are any other phones or portable devices that leave the hospital. I currently work for an international security company. We use iPhones for e-mail and corporate messaging.
Indeed, the only "regulated" industry that I can't claim at least some insider knowledge of is finance, so maybe that the one you're thinking of... Otherwise "regulated industry" is caving to user desire to use iDevices and Android in the workplace.
This whole idea is a fantasy, of course. The only way to be safe from the US shutting it down would be to host it in a country willing to stand up against the US to protect it. I don't think there are very many countries on that list.
Not true! There's a substantial list of countries on that list. It's just that most of them have a lot less sympathy to the Wikileaks cause than even the US does. The Iranians, North Koreans, Chinese, or any of a number of other countries have sufficiently poor relations with the US that they'd love to host secret and possibly embarrassing US documents. Assuming that Assange and company are quite clear on the fact that nothing the host country does is to be subject to the least negative scrutiny or leaking.
There's plenty of countries willing to stand up to the US, but few if any of those are any more (indeed often far less) willing to accept the idea that anything and everything is subject to full disclosure.
We actually have a 24 hour development/QA cycle with overlaps in the time coverage. We're based out of Boston, have a large development group in Belfast, and a smaller group in China. Someone is always developing, someone is testing, but we don't need to actually work rediculous hours ourselves. Most of the time... there's always the odd crunch or major critical bug thrown in that requires a bit of extra time, but mostly we work work nine hours and go home knowing that China's picking up, hen they go home knowing the Northern Irish team is working, and we pick up in mid-afternoon so the Belfast guys can be comfy at home.
But DARPA has a track record of inventing useful things like that (and releasing them to the public domain). You're committing a "What have the Romans ever done for us?" fallacy. DARPA has a track record of producing useful stuff, they have not recently broken with that track record. Why you not expect that given funding they wouldn't continue to produce useful stuff?
This isn't a half bad comment, especially for an Anonymous first poster. I see three essential problems with the ideas in the article:
1) As the parent said, you can't eat, wear, or live in software. It's a great business to be in, but I don't want everyone to be in it. I like food, I like fuel, I like a house... all of these things need to be made. They can be made elsewhere, but when we rely on China to make everything we use day to day, we give China the power to starve us, to make us homeless, to leave us without clothes. I'm not an isolationist, and I accept that we live in a global economy, but do we really want to abdicate *all* of our manufacturing to other countries? Having local producers limits energy needs, reduces pollution and makes sure we still have the capacity when something happens and China can no longer provide something for us. Look at what happened to hard drives when Thailand flooded.
2) Not everyone can write software. There, I said it. Not every American has the education, intelligence, drive, interest... whatever to be a producer of software or designer of systems. All of these people who want to "refocus" America on white collar, intellectual property type work places seem to overlook this fact. The country will quickly become a place when you are either an elite (a producer, seller, marketer, manager, or owner of some sort of high tech stuff or other, or old money) or a member of a servant class. The only non-white-collar jobs will be in retail sales, restaurants, etc. Maybe construction, so we all still have places to buy stuff.
3) Not all of these idea will even help all that much with software as a driving force of the economy. Or they they'll help the companies without really helping the US economy. Primarily I'm talking about the H1B stuff here. I'm not suggesting that we stop the H1B program. It's a good thing to try to bring the best and brightest of other nations over; often it's a good thing for both us and the country of origin. Many of these people go home after a while with the experience of having worked in or for some of the largest companies in the world. They carry back useful skills and experience. None the less, this should be a careful and limited program with safeguards in place to make it's not being abused and used to bring in cheap easily abuse-able labor. No one benefits from that (except the greedy bastards abusing the system).
Having said all of this, yes software needs to be a pillar of economic strength for this country. It's important and it's both a driver of our economy and a part of our overall power as a nation. Some of the reforms listed would be very good for the software industry. Finding the things that will help the software industry does not mean we should ignore manufacturing or agriculture, or any of the other pillars of our economy though.
That's part of the problem though, when you're computer illiterate you don't know what you don't know. Understanding computers is, at base, understanding automation. The specifics tools used for automation are immaterial, Excel is expensive, but OO.org Calc can do most of the same things for free. Once you understand the concept of "spreadsheet programs as tools of automation" you can see all the things you can automate using spreadsheets. Some of those things can be done with ledgers, but certainly not all of them. I've seen spreadsheets that can, with very high degrees of accuracy, predict the average amount of damage a well played character can do in an MMO based on all the variables of gear and talent selection in gamet. Is that useful to you? Maybe not, but it could be useful to a lot of students, and it's just one example.
Everyone has task that could be better/faster/easier if they were automated, and nearly everyone already owns tools that could automate many of those tasks. It's just a matter of them realizing the potential is there and understanding how the tools can help them. It doesn't mean everyone becomes a software engineer. Just that everyone gets a grounding in what's possible and some of the basic principles.
You're making a few rather large assumption here. The first is that people who "like" computers will necessarily have the aptitude and resources to realize this fact without being exposed to the devices in the first place. You can say "Everyone has a computer," but that's simply not true. It's also not true that everyone who has a computer has the ability to realize that they would enjoy programming that computer. Especially in this day and age with slick user interfaces and boxed software for nearly every purpose. Since most people are exposed to computers as a tool with a set of functions, it can be rather difficult to make the leap from "this box which does these things" to "this box on which I can create nearly anything".
The second is that "cut and paste sample code" is the best, or even a good, way to learn to program. Many if not most sources of information on the Internet are, at best, poorly designed for education. Often they're intended for the reference of the already educated. At worst they're just utter crap with no value at all. Most people learn better when they are taught than when they cobble together random theories of varying qualities from an unknown number of self proclaimed "experts". You may be an exceptions to that rule (exceptions do exist), but designing an education system around the idea that the exception is the rule doesn't help most people.
Finally you assume that the only reason for primary education is to give students information that they will have immediate and practical use for in the "real world". Like it or not, computers are going precisely nowhere unless or until there is a apocalyptic destruction of our civilization (a possibility I'll grant you, but not one that any of our education has prepared us for). Every student in school right now will be dealing with computers fro every single day of their lives (or fighting off the giant radioactive spiders). It makes sense that much as we give them a primer in biology, physics, higher level math, health, even tools from other domains (I had to take Home Ec, Wood Shop, and Auto Shop for a semester each so I would know the basics of working with tools from the three most common domains of the time), why not computers. They'll interact with computers probably even more than they will stoves.
You're basically saying "rather than teaching students to swim, put them near some water. if they have the aptitude and interest they'll hop in and swim... or drown... whatever".
Ironically in this case, they had probable cause and a warrant. Oddly they chose to ignore the terms of the warrant and invalidate their search. I was reading the facts of this case, and I was appalled; both by the incompetence of the police and their assumptions about privacy and searches. A Federal judge issued a combines FBI/DC police team a warrant to install a GPS device on this guy's car for a ten day period in DC (I'm not clear on whether they had to ten days to install the device, or they could only track him for ten days. It's immaterial as you'll see.) They waited 11 days and got one of the feds to do it outside of DC (he was in Maryland).
So they went through the trouble of establishing probable cause and getting the warrant; then merrily decided that the warrant didn't matter and proceeded to ignore its restrictions.
Yeah, the other guy pretty much beat me too it, but about an hour and half to two hour out from the city in pretty much any direction will hook you up. I'd head west toward Cali, it's particularly empty out there. Driving back be sure to note just how much light LV puts off though. It's amazing. You can literally see the glow of the place from about 45 minutes out.
While this may be true, I don't know that Apple is where the blame needs to be placed. The sheer numbers of students, teachers , and school districts using iPads formally or informally practically begs Apple to take advantage of the situation. If this had been a use case that Apple had expected to be so huge in the first place, I think we would have seen these kinds of tools much earlier. The fact that it's taken this long for Apple to come out with Textbook specific apps makes me think that their sudden popularity in this particular niche caught them as much by surprise as anyone else. They're just being quick to capitalize on the obvious pots of money to be made.
I also think your comparison is a bit unfair. That $400 iPad maybe more expensive than a $30 textbook, but most students above elementary school carry 5-7 textbooks. That brings the costs much closer to inline. Then there are intangibles. You're right that interactivity isn't necessary, but it's nice. There's been increasing concern about the sheer amount of homework that kids are assigned (I don't have a teenager, but after seeing what a few friends kids have to do, it does appear to be a lot more than I ever had to), more interactive book can help focus questions and increase the pace of research. There's been a lot of talk about the weight of books kids carry too, which this could completely eliminate.
In and of themselves I don't know that any of the above is a good reason to switch, but combines they might be. There's also no particular reason that Apple has to be the sole beneficiary here. They're the first to move, but with a little work Barnes and Noble or Amazon could release something similar. Even better, with those two you're not limited to one device. Every major platform has a reader for B&N or Amazon e-books.
Just go out into the country for the experience. It's worth it. One of the very few things I used to enjoy about Army training in the Mohave was the night sky.
Re:Why isn't slashdot blacking out?
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SOPA and PIPA So Far
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Personal Opinion: for sites like Slashdot, the FSF, the EEF, etc, it makes more sense to dedicate a lot of space to discussing the issue on their front pages than to black-out. Most, if not all, people going to these sites are aware of the issue. The blackouts are an awareness raiser, for sites where everyone is already aware, news and information are a more effective form of protest.
Set theory looks good on paper. In practice I'd imagine it's pretty hard to ignore the 10 or 12 guys trying to get into your pants by living out a tech support related porn movie fantasy, in favor of the normal reasonable guys who probably aren't going out of their way to proclaim their normal reasonableness. It's probably made even worse by the realization that most of the ones trying to get into your pants are likely not actually bad guys, they just don't know how to act around polite society. Imagine going into a theater where 15% of your fellow patrons are screaming at the screen, talking on cell phones, or using laser pointers. Could you still enjoy the show since the other 85% of the audience are behaving well?
It's usually somewhere between difficult and impossible to determine before the effort has been made to integrate people of characteristic X into the community of people doing Y. I'll certainly say after reading replies on Slashdot to various stories regarding women, I can see where I might find the climate here and on similar sites hostile if I were a woman. Just look at the replies so far here. They're split about 3 even ways between: reasonable people who think that women avoid OSS because of reasons that are the fault of the community (Deliberate or inadvertent hostility, sexism, etc), reasonable people like you who question that assumption for fairly good reasons, and blatant woman hating or sexism. Granted there's always trolls in a Slashdot discussion, but the level of sheer vindictiveness always seems to go up when females in "geek" activities are the topic.
When the topic is an actual female geek, who has actively done something cool (Like that girl who did a "howto" on building your own iPod charger a couple of years ago), the comments jump from the creepily fawning to completely dismissive like a bipolar Chihuahua on a cup of espresso. I'm not saying that this is the only reason women don't participate much in OSS software. There might also be issues of interest or that sort of thing. The general attitude certainly can't be helpful though.
Engineering input was accepted at the meeting. It was a good meeting. This particular bit of engineering input was pretty clearly not useful. Even most of us in engineering agreed. One bad idea being shot down doesn't "engineering input not accepted" make. My point wasn't to show that all engineers are stupid or lazy (as I said, it's my department), but rather to illustrate that just because sales wants a feature doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Even if it has to sadly take precedence over something that engineering would prefer to add. Sometimes when sales wants something (often in my experience with this particular company), it's because we really need to add it.
Very nice, and with absolutely no understanding of our product. We could charge people for installing and configuring Nagios except we don't do that. We sell products. Appliances. I suppose we could just sort of grow an IT consulting arm in an afternoon and take up your suggestion, but I don't think it will work all that well. What will happen if we don't include the features our customer want in our product; features our competitors already provide; is that people will buy our competitor's products. Then neither sales nor engineering makes anything and we all get to find new jobs. Hopefully at a place that give customers what they want so we don't have to repeat the cycle in six months.
I'm completely unclear on how this is a response to my comment. In my comment sales wants a reasonable thing and we have engineers frighting them on it large because they'd rather focus on stuff that interests them more. They are, in fact including engineering in the discussion, and they're not, in fact asking for anything impossible. I'm in engineering by the way. I know why the engineer in question said what he did. He's a certified genius who is both incapable of realizing that not everyone can setup a Nagios system in a few hours to solve their own problems, and much more willing to spend time on algorithmically interesting analytics code than on "grunt work". So he's pushing back on a perfectly reasonable feature request, mostly because it doesn't interest him.
This shit happen all the time. The whole "Sales guys are all snakes who over promise and under deliver" is no more useful a stereotype than the "Programmers are all lazy creeps who don't want to work" stereotype on the other side. Both sides are made up mostly of reasonable people trying to do their best by the product and make sure we all get paid. Sure there's some snakes in sales. Sure there are some lazy programmers. There are also people in both groups who are imperfect in other ways. Most of us are just trying to do our best and get paid.
If a sales guy has sat in five meetings, and in four of them a customer has said, "man, I wish your product had x like the Acme product," he's going to ask for that to be added in. It's "valuable" if customers want it. Not matter how stupid you find it, no matter how much you'd rather add y (which perhaps no one has asked for), the sales guy thinks he can sell more product with x.
We're having this situation right now. Our sales department is screaming for "Enterprise Management Tools". Basically they want an integrated Nagios/syslog function put into our product. During one recent meeting one of our engineers stood up and basically told them to use Nagios and syslog. Which, from an engineering perspective was a perfectly reasonable idea.
Of course sales felt compelled to point out that: 1) We can't make any money telling them to use someone elses products. 2) Most of our customers have little or no expertise in setting up and deploying complex software systems. 3) The customers are telling us that they want this in our product like our competitors have. "You don't really want that, shut up" isn't exactly the response we want to give them.
Exactly. Are there shithead sales people who oversell and expected engineering to pick up their slack? Of course. Are there shithead engineers that spend more time complaining than developing and are shocked when they don't finish on schedule? Of course. Where I work Sales drives Product Management and PM drives Engineering. This is pretty much a good thing. The sales people are mostly competent and they know what the customers want. If we drove our own development plan in engineering we would no doubt have a very cool product. It wouldn't be usable by any normal mortal, it would be full of cool features no one actually wants, and would lack a bunch of basic and boring features that everyone does want... but it would be cool!
I don't want to be an ass, and I agree in principle that school sites should be at least as platform independent as possible; but honestly how many possible OS configurations should a school test against? If you work on Windows you probably have 90% of parents covered. If you work on Windows and Mac you probably have 99.9% of parents covered. Is working on Ubuntu really worth that extra.1% of parents who could honestly just put Windows in a VM? I understand the desire to use what you want to use, and not let stuff like this dictate how you run your computer, but is it really worth a whole lot of tax payer money to make sure that the school website works for such a small user base? If so at what point do they stop? Do they have to test against every Linux distro? The various BSDs? 32 and 64 bit version of all of this? Install the most minimal cost/complexity Windows VM you can get away with and show the kids how to boot it to do their work.
My parents got me a C=>64c with monitor and a disk drive for $300 in the mid-eighties from some guy who had upgraded (dunno what he got... the 128 and the first Amiga came out around then, maybe he got one of those). My mom was a bit worried about getting my Christmas present used, but it was way more than they could afford to get new so she took a chance. Needless to say it was the the best present EVAR! You could definitely get them for around $400 new (without peripherals of course), and it wouldn't shock me if they were down to $300 by 87-88. The 128 and the first couple generations of the Amiga were out by then. They were like $600 at release, but they were sold for years after their big brothers had "obseleted" them simply because they were so cheap and yet so effective.
Slashdot Mirror
The RHCT/RHCSA exam is supposed to stay valid through two iteration of the OS (So I got mine during the RH6 era, I should be god until the release of RH8), why did you have to retake the exam? Or is that just a thing where the cert stayed valid, but because you wanted to take the higher cert they wanted you to have most recent lower cert?
Yes and no. You don't want to hire one of these "Hybrid" people to do pure IT work for your Fortune 500 company with a 400 person IT staff, but within those 400 jobs are positions that could benefit from knowledge of both sides of the fence. Let's say you have a staff of 15 that work on the corporate website. You probably want at least half, Maybe three quarters of those guy to be pure tech. Programers, designers, DBAs, SAs, etc. But there's value in probably three or so people that understand the business side as well as the technical side. Who can look at the new feature and say, "well that's cool and all, but how does it help the business?". Not managers exactly, though at least one of them probably would be the manager, just people that can look at both sides of the problem. And hell it probably doesn't hurt of a few more of those people who are already designers or programmers have at least some clue about how the business side operates.
Closer to home for me, people from West Virginia have been attacking the EPA for stopping mountaintop mining in their state. They say that the EPA is halting job creation and go on and on about how horrible the EPA is. It's so odd to me because this state is rife with environmental problems left over from just this mining and when there was no EPA and no regulations on the state level, chemical companies ran rampant in West Virginia. I wouldn't drink the groundwater there if my life depended on it now. And what was the reason for this? To give a few generations of jobs and stoke the smokestacks of the industrial USA? Sure ... but at what future and permanent and irreversible cost?
The essential problem is that people mostly think in the short term. We have the ability to make long term plans, but even the most disciplined of us have a very hard time ignoring short term goals in favor of long term planning. All of us can do it, and some of us are better at it than others, but the temptation to take care of short term problem at the expense of long term success is always there.
The is especially true when you're talking about people who are literally in a subsistence barely surviving mode. It's easy for me to look at the environmental impact of mountaintop mining and say to a miner, "What are you doing? You're destroying the land, poisoning yourself, poisoning your kids. How can you do this?" To him though, he's *feeding* his kids. The chance that his kids might get sick at sometime in the distant future is not nearly as scary to him as the certainty that they won't get enough to eat right now if he doesn't work.
The other problem is one of trust. For a lot of cultural and educational reasons, people in these rural towns trust the local company owners or managers more than the faceless government regulators. If the company says what they're doing is safe (and it's feeding my kids), who is this outside regulator to come in and say otherwise? They typically have seen Erin Brockovich, they don't read environmental studies. One of the first problems with getting anything done about some these environmental disasters is always getting people to believe that the company would *do* something like that.
The real problem.. and the real answer to the question... is that there's probably nothing illegal going on here. A politician accepted campaign contributions, and then introduced legislation that his contributor thought would be beneficial to the politician's constituents. That's all that provably happened. It's legal. The bitching afterward by the contributor that his bill didn't pass might make you think that the contributor *thought* they bought a law, but you can guarantee that at not point was such a thing explicitly said. And thanks to the Supreme Court, what few limits the Congress sought to impose on themselves to prevent this have been ruled Unconstitutional.
Um... so define "regulated". Until five months ago I worked for a Federal Government Contractor, held a security clearance, and did work day to day on classified machines. My workplace was piloting the use of iPhones for e-mail and corporate access when I left. Of course you couldn't put classified information on them, but you couldn't put classified information laptops either, so that's not saying much. There's all kinds of rules for what you can and can't do regarding classified, but for unclassified uses, iPhones are likely as common as Blackberries and laptops there now.
My brother works for a hospital. Out side of the government, probably the most regulated industry in the country. He has a work issued iPad. Again, it's not allowed to contain patient information but neither are any other phones or portable devices that leave the hospital. I currently work for an international security company. We use iPhones for e-mail and corporate messaging.
Indeed, the only "regulated" industry that I can't claim at least some insider knowledge of is finance, so maybe that the one you're thinking of... Otherwise "regulated industry" is caving to user desire to use iDevices and Android in the workplace.
This whole idea is a fantasy, of course. The only way to be safe from the US shutting it down would be to host it in a country willing to stand up against the US to protect it. I don't think there are very many countries on that list.
Not true! There's a substantial list of countries on that list. It's just that most of them have a lot less sympathy to the Wikileaks cause than even the US does. The Iranians, North Koreans, Chinese, or any of a number of other countries have sufficiently poor relations with the US that they'd love to host secret and possibly embarrassing US documents. Assuming that Assange and company are quite clear on the fact that nothing the host country does is to be subject to the least negative scrutiny or leaking.
There's plenty of countries willing to stand up to the US, but few if any of those are any more (indeed often far less) willing to accept the idea that anything and everything is subject to full disclosure.
We actually have a 24 hour development/QA cycle with overlaps in the time coverage. We're based out of Boston, have a large development group in Belfast, and a smaller group in China. Someone is always developing, someone is testing, but we don't need to actually work rediculous hours ourselves. Most of the time... there's always the odd crunch or major critical bug thrown in that requires a bit of extra time, but mostly we work work nine hours and go home knowing that China's picking up, hen they go home knowing the Northern Irish team is working, and we pick up in mid-afternoon so the Belfast guys can be comfy at home.
But DARPA has a track record of inventing useful things like that (and releasing them to the public domain). You're committing a "What have the Romans ever done for us?" fallacy. DARPA has a track record of producing useful stuff, they have not recently broken with that track record. Why you not expect that given funding they wouldn't continue to produce useful stuff?
This isn't a half bad comment, especially for an Anonymous first poster. I see three essential problems with the ideas in the article:
1) As the parent said, you can't eat, wear, or live in software. It's a great business to be in, but I don't want everyone to be in it. I like food, I like fuel, I like a house... all of these things need to be made. They can be made elsewhere, but when we rely on China to make everything we use day to day, we give China the power to starve us, to make us homeless, to leave us without clothes. I'm not an isolationist, and I accept that we live in a global economy, but do we really want to abdicate *all* of our manufacturing to other countries? Having local producers limits energy needs, reduces pollution and makes sure we still have the capacity when something happens and China can no longer provide something for us. Look at what happened to hard drives when Thailand flooded.
2) Not everyone can write software. There, I said it. Not every American has the education, intelligence, drive, interest... whatever to be a producer of software or designer of systems. All of these people who want to "refocus" America on white collar, intellectual property type work places seem to overlook this fact. The country will quickly become a place when you are either an elite (a producer, seller, marketer, manager, or owner of some sort of high tech stuff or other, or old money) or a member of a servant class. The only non-white-collar jobs will be in retail sales, restaurants, etc. Maybe construction, so we all still have places to buy stuff.
3) Not all of these idea will even help all that much with software as a driving force of the economy. Or they they'll help the companies without really helping the US economy. Primarily I'm talking about the H1B stuff here. I'm not suggesting that we stop the H1B program. It's a good thing to try to bring the best and brightest of other nations over; often it's a good thing for both us and the country of origin. Many of these people go home after a while with the experience of having worked in or for some of the largest companies in the world. They carry back useful skills and experience. None the less, this should be a careful and limited program with safeguards in place to make it's not being abused and used to bring in cheap easily abuse-able labor. No one benefits from that (except the greedy bastards abusing the system).
Having said all of this, yes software needs to be a pillar of economic strength for this country. It's important and it's both a driver of our economy and a part of our overall power as a nation. Some of the reforms listed would be very good for the software industry. Finding the things that will help the software industry does not mean we should ignore manufacturing or agriculture, or any of the other pillars of our economy though.
That's part of the problem though, when you're computer illiterate you don't know what you don't know. Understanding computers is, at base, understanding automation. The specifics tools used for automation are immaterial, Excel is expensive, but OO.org Calc can do most of the same things for free. Once you understand the concept of "spreadsheet programs as tools of automation" you can see all the things you can automate using spreadsheets. Some of those things can be done with ledgers, but certainly not all of them. I've seen spreadsheets that can, with very high degrees of accuracy, predict the average amount of damage a well played character can do in an MMO based on all the variables of gear and talent selection in gamet. Is that useful to you? Maybe not, but it could be useful to a lot of students, and it's just one example.
Everyone has task that could be better/faster/easier if they were automated, and nearly everyone already owns tools that could automate many of those tasks. It's just a matter of them realizing the potential is there and understanding how the tools can help them. It doesn't mean everyone becomes a software engineer. Just that everyone gets a grounding in what's possible and some of the basic principles.
You're making a few rather large assumption here. The first is that people who "like" computers will necessarily have the aptitude and resources to realize this fact without being exposed to the devices in the first place. You can say "Everyone has a computer," but that's simply not true. It's also not true that everyone who has a computer has the ability to realize that they would enjoy programming that computer. Especially in this day and age with slick user interfaces and boxed software for nearly every purpose. Since most people are exposed to computers as a tool with a set of functions, it can be rather difficult to make the leap from "this box which does these things" to "this box on which I can create nearly anything".
The second is that "cut and paste sample code" is the best, or even a good, way to learn to program. Many if not most sources of information on the Internet are, at best, poorly designed for education. Often they're intended for the reference of the already educated. At worst they're just utter crap with no value at all. Most people learn better when they are taught than when they cobble together random theories of varying qualities from an unknown number of self proclaimed "experts". You may be an exceptions to that rule (exceptions do exist), but designing an education system around the idea that the exception is the rule doesn't help most people.
Finally you assume that the only reason for primary education is to give students information that they will have immediate and practical use for in the "real world". Like it or not, computers are going precisely nowhere unless or until there is a apocalyptic destruction of our civilization (a possibility I'll grant you, but not one that any of our education has prepared us for). Every student in school right now will be dealing with computers fro every single day of their lives (or fighting off the giant radioactive spiders). It makes sense that much as we give them a primer in biology, physics, higher level math, health, even tools from other domains (I had to take Home Ec, Wood Shop, and Auto Shop for a semester each so I would know the basics of working with tools from the three most common domains of the time), why not computers. They'll interact with computers probably even more than they will stoves.
You're basically saying "rather than teaching students to swim, put them near some water. if they have the aptitude and interest they'll hop in and swim... or drown... whatever".
Ironically in this case, they had probable cause and a warrant. Oddly they chose to ignore the terms of the warrant and invalidate their search. I was reading the facts of this case, and I was appalled; both by the incompetence of the police and their assumptions about privacy and searches. A Federal judge issued a combines FBI/DC police team a warrant to install a GPS device on this guy's car for a ten day period in DC (I'm not clear on whether they had to ten days to install the device, or they could only track him for ten days. It's immaterial as you'll see.) They waited 11 days and got one of the feds to do it outside of DC (he was in Maryland).
So they went through the trouble of establishing probable cause and getting the warrant; then merrily decided that the warrant didn't matter and proceeded to ignore its restrictions.
Yeah, the other guy pretty much beat me too it, but about an hour and half to two hour out from the city in pretty much any direction will hook you up. I'd head west toward Cali, it's particularly empty out there. Driving back be sure to note just how much light LV puts off though. It's amazing. You can literally see the glow of the place from about 45 minutes out.
While this may be true, I don't know that Apple is where the blame needs to be placed. The sheer numbers of students, teachers , and school districts using iPads formally or informally practically begs Apple to take advantage of the situation. If this had been a use case that Apple had expected to be so huge in the first place, I think we would have seen these kinds of tools much earlier. The fact that it's taken this long for Apple to come out with Textbook specific apps makes me think that their sudden popularity in this particular niche caught them as much by surprise as anyone else. They're just being quick to capitalize on the obvious pots of money to be made.
I also think your comparison is a bit unfair. That $400 iPad maybe more expensive than a $30 textbook, but most students above elementary school carry 5-7 textbooks. That brings the costs much closer to inline. Then there are intangibles. You're right that interactivity isn't necessary, but it's nice. There's been increasing concern about the sheer amount of homework that kids are assigned (I don't have a teenager, but after seeing what a few friends kids have to do, it does appear to be a lot more than I ever had to), more interactive book can help focus questions and increase the pace of research. There's been a lot of talk about the weight of books kids carry too, which this could completely eliminate.
In and of themselves I don't know that any of the above is a good reason to switch, but combines they might be. There's also no particular reason that Apple has to be the sole beneficiary here. They're the first to move, but with a little work Barnes and Noble or Amazon could release something similar. Even better, with those two you're not limited to one device. Every major platform has a reader for B&N or Amazon e-books.
Just go out into the country for the experience. It's worth it. One of the very few things I used to enjoy about Army training in the Mohave was the night sky.
Personal Opinion: for sites like Slashdot, the FSF, the EEF, etc, it makes more sense to dedicate a lot of space to discussing the issue on their front pages than to black-out. Most, if not all, people going to these sites are aware of the issue. The blackouts are an awareness raiser, for sites where everyone is already aware, news and information are a more effective form of protest.
Set theory looks good on paper. In practice I'd imagine it's pretty hard to ignore the 10 or 12 guys trying to get into your pants by living out a tech support related porn movie fantasy, in favor of the normal reasonable guys who probably aren't going out of their way to proclaim their normal reasonableness. It's probably made even worse by the realization that most of the ones trying to get into your pants are likely not actually bad guys, they just don't know how to act around polite society. Imagine going into a theater where 15% of your fellow patrons are screaming at the screen, talking on cell phones, or using laser pointers. Could you still enjoy the show since the other 85% of the audience are behaving well?
It's usually somewhere between difficult and impossible to determine before the effort has been made to integrate people of characteristic X into the community of people doing Y. I'll certainly say after reading replies on Slashdot to various stories regarding women, I can see where I might find the climate here and on similar sites hostile if I were a woman. Just look at the replies so far here. They're split about 3 even ways between: reasonable people who think that women avoid OSS because of reasons that are the fault of the community (Deliberate or inadvertent hostility, sexism, etc), reasonable people like you who question that assumption for fairly good reasons, and blatant woman hating or sexism. Granted there's always trolls in a Slashdot discussion, but the level of sheer vindictiveness always seems to go up when females in "geek" activities are the topic.
When the topic is an actual female geek, who has actively done something cool (Like that girl who did a "howto" on building your own iPod charger a couple of years ago), the comments jump from the creepily fawning to completely dismissive like a bipolar Chihuahua on a cup of espresso. I'm not saying that this is the only reason women don't participate much in OSS software. There might also be issues of interest or that sort of thing. The general attitude certainly can't be helpful though.
Engineering input was accepted at the meeting. It was a good meeting. This particular bit of engineering input was pretty clearly not useful. Even most of us in engineering agreed. One bad idea being shot down doesn't "engineering input not accepted" make. My point wasn't to show that all engineers are stupid or lazy (as I said, it's my department), but rather to illustrate that just because sales wants a feature doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Even if it has to sadly take precedence over something that engineering would prefer to add. Sometimes when sales wants something (often in my experience with this particular company), it's because we really need to add it.
Very nice, and with absolutely no understanding of our product. We could charge people for installing and configuring Nagios except we don't do that. We sell products. Appliances. I suppose we could just sort of grow an IT consulting arm in an afternoon and take up your suggestion, but I don't think it will work all that well. What will happen if we don't include the features our customer want in our product; features our competitors already provide; is that people will buy our competitor's products. Then neither sales nor engineering makes anything and we all get to find new jobs. Hopefully at a place that give customers what they want so we don't have to repeat the cycle in six months.
I'm completely unclear on how this is a response to my comment. In my comment sales wants a reasonable thing and we have engineers frighting them on it large because they'd rather focus on stuff that interests them more. They are, in fact including engineering in the discussion, and they're not, in fact asking for anything impossible. I'm in engineering by the way. I know why the engineer in question said what he did. He's a certified genius who is both incapable of realizing that not everyone can setup a Nagios system in a few hours to solve their own problems, and much more willing to spend time on algorithmically interesting analytics code than on "grunt work". So he's pushing back on a perfectly reasonable feature request, mostly because it doesn't interest him.
This shit happen all the time. The whole "Sales guys are all snakes who over promise and under deliver" is no more useful a stereotype than the "Programmers are all lazy creeps who don't want to work" stereotype on the other side. Both sides are made up mostly of reasonable people trying to do their best by the product and make sure we all get paid. Sure there's some snakes in sales. Sure there are some lazy programmers. There are also people in both groups who are imperfect in other ways. Most of us are just trying to do our best and get paid.
If a sales guy has sat in five meetings, and in four of them a customer has said, "man, I wish your product had x like the Acme product," he's going to ask for that to be added in. It's "valuable" if customers want it. Not matter how stupid you find it, no matter how much you'd rather add y (which perhaps no one has asked for), the sales guy thinks he can sell more product with x.
We're having this situation right now. Our sales department is screaming for "Enterprise Management Tools". Basically they want an integrated Nagios/syslog function put into our product. During one recent meeting one of our engineers stood up and basically told them to use Nagios and syslog. Which, from an engineering perspective was a perfectly reasonable idea.
Of course sales felt compelled to point out that:
1) We can't make any money telling them to use someone elses products.
2) Most of our customers have little or no expertise in setting up and deploying complex software systems.
3) The customers are telling us that they want this in our product like our competitors have. "You don't really want that, shut up" isn't exactly the response we want to give them.
Exactly. Are there shithead sales people who oversell and expected engineering to pick up their slack? Of course. Are there shithead engineers that spend more time complaining than developing and are shocked when they don't finish on schedule? Of course. Where I work Sales drives Product Management and PM drives Engineering. This is pretty much a good thing. The sales people are mostly competent and they know what the customers want. If we drove our own development plan in engineering we would no doubt have a very cool product. It wouldn't be usable by any normal mortal, it would be full of cool features no one actually wants, and would lack a bunch of basic and boring features that everyone does want... but it would be cool!
I don't want to be an ass, and I agree in principle that school sites should be at least as platform independent as possible; but honestly how many possible OS configurations should a school test against? If you work on Windows you probably have 90% of parents covered. If you work on Windows and Mac you probably have 99.9% of parents covered. Is working on Ubuntu really worth that extra .1% of parents who could honestly just put Windows in a VM? I understand the desire to use what you want to use, and not let stuff like this dictate how you run your computer, but is it really worth a whole lot of tax payer money to make sure that the school website works for such a small user base? If so at what point do they stop? Do they have to test against every Linux distro? The various BSDs? 32 and 64 bit version of all of this? Install the most minimal cost/complexity Windows VM you can get away with and show the kids how to boot it to do their work.
My parents got me a C=>64c with monitor and a disk drive for $300 in the mid-eighties from some guy who had upgraded (dunno what he got... the 128 and the first Amiga came out around then, maybe he got one of those). My mom was a bit worried about getting my Christmas present used, but it was way more than they could afford to get new so she took a chance. Needless to say it was the the best present EVAR! You could definitely get them for around $400 new (without peripherals of course), and it wouldn't shock me if they were down to $300 by 87-88. The 128 and the first couple generations of the Amiga were out by then. They were like $600 at release, but they were sold for years after their big brothers had "obseleted" them simply because they were so cheap and yet so effective.