Computers are needed in schools, but they aren't the reason that public education is often poor and why the public education system is frequently tottering on bankruptcy.
The big reason that public schools have such problems is that school has ceased to be about education. It's become more and more of a welfare delivery system. Each new welfare program installed in schools under the guise of helping Johnny read needs staff people, administrators, office space and tons of other overhead that should rightfully go towards books, teachers, and facilities. And don't get me started on the massive subsidies provided to school sports, which were once a good use of gym equipment after school that have become almost entities unto themselves.
The reason most school systems started being about welfare delivery is that they realized that if Dick and Jane haven't been eating, they don't learn. What they fail to realize is that bringing everyone up to the same socioecnomic level as the high-achieving middle class white students means solving a LOT of social problems, which takes a lot of resources, and the pool of resources the public is willing to assign to education is limited.
Schools need to stop trying to solve all the socioeconmic problems. It's not to say the socioeconomic problems aren't worth solving, but the education field is the wrong place to solve them. Educating the people first may actually solve more problems in the long run because you're producing people who are capable of integrating more fully into the economy and society.
Math has changed tremendously in the past 100 years (although very basic math remains mostly unchanged).
OK, math has changed. I'm sure the field of mathematics as an academic pursuit has changed, and it probably has had a major impact on science, engineering and fields for whom statistics plays a major role.
But how much of the math that even well-educated people actually know and use in everyday life has changed in the past 100 years? Most educated professionals who aren't in a math-intensive field seldom use much beyond very basic algebra. Have significant new digits in Pi changed much? Are there bold new techniques for solving for X?
Even in the calculus classes I took in college school, much of the "soft" education about the subject involved guys like Newton, Leibniz and other people who were long-dead. We never learned about significant advances in calculus in the past 100 years (although I don't doubt there were at least a few), let alone the past 10 or 20 years.
I'm sure math has changed, but I'm willing to bet that most of the math taught in high school hasn't changed meaningfully in the past 25 years and only trivially in the past 50. Academic math in colleges has probably changed dramatically, but that's largely meaningless for most high school students.
It's usually not a question of the bandwidth, it's a question of latency. Most people with DSL connectivity should be able to use VoIP, provided that the latency between them and their calling partner is less than 150ms.
Until we get a voice compression system that can compress my voice into a 5Kbit stream cleanly ant at telephone line quality, it will not happen over the internet.
I'd say its also going to take people learning to live with phone calls that suffer from a lot of digital artifacts (high latency, jitter, dropouts, etc). I think many people who own cell phones already are there in terms of noise acceptance. It's getting people who grew up in urban areas in the 60s and 70s on 56k toll-quality to accept it. It's too bad the older generation who grew up on circa 1920s handsets and even older switching and cabling aren't the decision makers on IP telephony purchasing, they'd tell you, "Hey, it sounds great compared to the 1910 Bell wall set I have at home, shut up about your 56k toll quality already..."
Paypal has to be able to make money off of their microtransactions and they probably cost money themselves -- they have an infrastructure that needs feeding, and more than likely pay bank costs to implement some of these charges.
I think there's probably some minimum level at which small payments can't work due to the transaction processing costs. It's not just a dozen encrypted packets ensuring the payments, its a whole infrastructure, auditing and so on to make it work.
It just seems unlikely that a third party can process sub-dollar charges and make any money on it. What does make sense is some government entity (federal reserve? post office?) getting involved and creating a centralized clearninghouse for financial transactions. It would still cost money, only be available in US dollars, but it would likely make transactions down to the $.05 practical for payers and payees alike.
The idea is for the PS2 to help educate about clean water -- they probably don't even know the water is unsafe.
They probably don't realize its unsafe because the corrupt kleptocrat-for-life that runs their country has been dumping tech company hazardous waste in the river while lining his Swiss bank account on the profits.
Meanwhile those PS/2s that got "donated" for this worthy education project that worked and weren't diverted to the families of the kleptocrat's supporters were sold to the duty free store at the airport so that the government could generate even more hard currency.
Wake up and smell the coffee. You need to give these people something their government can't steal from them and that they won't immediately turn around and sell for cash, like clean water, innoculation from Polio and other things that materially improve their life. Justifying the technojackoff fantasy of running Linux on the PS/2 by thinking it helps people living in the stone age would be funny if it wasn't pathetic.
Is there an explanation for the pay inequity? Supply vs. demand? I've known several women I'd call "exhibitionists" who didn't mind being photographed naked for personal/private purposes. I've known several women who would have any kind of sex (oral, anal, dildo, etc) with pretty much anyone at the drop of a hat.
For most men, getting a woman to have sex off-camera is a bit of a challenge. But fucking a stranger on camera for money? I think it takes a special person to do that. I can imagine that the number of women who would generally be considered physically attractive *and* who will screw for money must be a really small number. Not only is the sex-acting a talent, but the psychological and emotional barriers that have to be crossed are signficant.
I've seen systems similar to this where they use a lot of laptop parts, a common power supply and pretty much anything they can do to make more than one system run off of a shared part. I'd imagine this type of integration could cut your per system electrical consumption by 10-20%.
An even bigger win would be a mutlisystem chassis that would have an integrated fiber channel switch. It'd cut the cabling and power way down -- run a single fibe channel cable to a Xiotech or EMC cabinet.
Heat is still a killer. I'd like to see a data center installed in a room that spanned more than one floor. I'd put a raised floor about 6 feet off the ground and use perforated floor to draw cool air from the subfloor. The ceiling would be open to big exhaust fans on the ceiling of the second floor. I think what makes heat so tough on data centers is that after you raise the floor there's not a lot of head room left for the equipment. Having an extra 10-20 feet above the equipment for heat to rise into would go a long way.
I can see the value of this, but in my experience is that most technology people are at best highly competitive and at worst raging egomaniacs when it comes to the work they've done.
Peer review has to be done carefully or can become a pissing contest. Review by senior people keeps the peace, but is only really valuable if senior people are senior because they're smart.
Oftentimes geeks like technomyopia take over and assume that technology is the only field that makes rapid changes. Law, medicine and education make rapid changes not only in technique of practice but of information content. How do those professions and professionals handle training and continuing education?
I know that continuing legal education is actually a requirement of attorneys in Minnesota (45 credit hours every three years). I would imagine that it's seen as the lawyer's professional responsibility to maintain his or her certifications. Some rich firms may reimburse, but small firms may just see it as another professional cost the attorney has to keep up with to be an attorney.
I think it's probably wise for a business to encourage continuing education to the extent of paying for it. Training feels like an investment to an employee and eliminates the potential for "but I didn't know how.." excuses from employees. Some training should be almost manditory and free to the employee. But I do think that employees also have to show some commitment to their field: by either paying something for further training, doing some training during work hours at half salary, or not mitigating work deadlines to accomodate training -- accomodate the training but make the employees demonstrate it has value.
My new CIO says he had a policy at his last company to require managers spend their training budgets or get dinged at review time. He said that training is important, but his experience was employees will often whine for training if it's not an option but if money is budgeted for training they come up with excuses not to do it.
What counts makes you a "unix vendor"? Total copies shipped? Total copies in use? Total number of users? What kind of users -- interactive or other client/server clients?
Even though no one in my office has a copy of FreeBSD, all 600+ of them are "FreeBSD users" by merit of their use of DHCP and DNS services run on FreeBSD.
You could argue that the biggie Unix vendors like Sun/HP/IBM can claim hundreds of millions of users worldwide based on pervasive client-server based systems in use by governments or other organizations that are hard to ignore.
Someone told me about dark fiber with the tragic appendage, "..and it may never be used."
The reasons it might not get used were part economic (we can't afford the people and gizmos to light it and maintain it) but part technical tied to not using it right now. Apparently the technology used with long fiber runs like this is highly tied to the fiber in use. Tomorrow's fiber gear uses technology that's not readily compatible with today's fiber optic plants.
Never is probably a long time, and it would seem kind of silly that new fiber gear is being designed that would totally obsolete existing fiber plants, but I think the gist was that by the time the dark fiber was lightable by someone who had the capital to do so it would require such a large upgrade that it would essentially be cheaper to do it over than to fix what was there to work with whatever was state of the art in gear.
Of course the real reasons will be monopoly and enforced scarcity, but these are much more interesting and romantic.
I'm as much terrified of what I see as insane and dangerous laws about freedom of speech, bearing arms, etc. being forced upon the UK (/EU) as I am of having to obey the DMCA.
What Britons usually miss about American freedoms is that Americans generally see them as the inalienable rights of citizens, enshrined in our constitution. Britons have a hard time with this because they're subjects, not citizens and they don't have a constitution.
If you don't believe this is true, remember that we fought a war in the last part of the 18th century over these very issues.
In the eyes of Americans we cannot impose the inalienable rights that have been vested in you by your creartor. You already have them, they've just been taken away from you by the tyranny of your monarchy and parliament.
I'm now up at least two copies of CDRW software. Not because I bought it, but because its come bundled with every CDRW drive I've ever bought. I actually use EZCD 4.x from drive #2, but there are two other OEMish packages capable of burning CDs sitting on my shelf unopened.
The last drive I bought was a Phillips 8x4x32 @ Best Buy for ~$75. Can you buy them cheaper without software?
Is lack of Mac software an issue? Did they often sell you the drive and then expect you to go out and fetch the S/W yourself prior to its inclusion in OS9?
There's three categories to your list of Sun "accomplishments":
(1) Sun doing something because it's the "right thing to do"; (2) Sun doing something because it costs them nothing and is perceived as (1); and (3) Sun doing something that advances their business and that can be spun as (1).
I'd bet that Sun does most of what Sun does because of #3, some because of #2 and very little as #1. Sun is also motivated to look "good" relative to Microsoft, either to rank-and-file IT who use their product, to PHBs that buy the product or to the "community".
If Sun, IBM or anybody else had a monopoly position like Microsoft's, Sun would probably act no differently than Microsoft does when the day was over. They'd be pursuing the exact same save-my-monopoly routine that Microsoft was doing.
Sun it motivated by its shareholders and board, not by anything else. If you believe that they are motivated by charity or their own "good deeds" you're a victim of their "MS is bad" PR campaign.
Can you jam GPS? Could you bring along a pocket-sized low power transmitter that would prevent them from getting any info or false info (I never went above 20!)?
Even if armchair analysis can provide meaningful advances in knowlegde (and I'd agree than it can), that doesn't mean that most people, including judges and bureaucrats, will take their findings seriously.
The findings that most people outside the scientific community take seriously need to have some meritocratic credentials attached to them, particularly if they challenge status quo knowledge. Uncredentialed findings, particularly those which alter a world view, are treated as little more than the fantasies of zealots. Often even when they come from people with credentials, it often takes many people with credentials to back them up.
I realize that peer review is supposed to accomplish this, but to me that often just looks like meritocratic approval -- the blessings of the priests. How many signficant amateur findings have been ignored by established science until science came around to either solving the problem on their own or changing their paradigm to accept the findings?
I've read the same thing. Many of the available silos have been essentially abandoned since they were built in the late 50s or early 60s. The water damage and vandalism is a big problem. I'm sure there's a probably a buttload of environmental problems -- asbestos, fuel leaks from generators, god knows what else.
There are some success stories of some of the less damaged ones getting converted, but I think a lot of them are pretty trashed from neglect.
I'm wondering if it might not be cheaper to build your own bunker from scratch than to buy a government one in dubious condition. You'd get what you want, as you want it with fewer gotchas. Most civilian bunkers need to resist much less severe threats than a silo anyway, since presumably the activities of a civilian bunker are only meaningful if there is a civilian population to service..
Re:Break out? Can they hang on is the question
on
OSX/Win2K Deathmatch
·
· Score: 1
And that's the point that I'm making. Apple already is a niche player, and a relatively successful one. The parent poster somewhere up this thread was making the point that because Apple's now a "UNIX vendor" there's opportunities for them *beyond* their niche.
I'm saying that's doubtful, there's too many players in the UNIX space that do what Apple might expand into. Those other players do it very, very well and Apple can't hope to move into their space.
And whatever value their UNIX-ness gives them means nothing to the wintel world in the desktop space, and they don't rackmount so they're not getting into the datacenter, either.
Which leaves a hungry microsoft looking for a new market a very threatening proposition. Lose the niche, lose the business.
There are no free forums. Forums cost money to buy, build, and maintain. You can either subtract the cost of the forum from the research funding (ie, do less research) or you can pay the forum cost afterwards and use all the money for research.
In an ideal world, the NSF or whatever governmental agency does the funding would do a web site and just stipulate that to whatever extent possible the results of the study be made to them electronically for posting on their web site.
Break out? Can they hang on is the question
on
OSX/Win2K Deathmatch
·
· Score: 2
Break out? Apple's only hope is that they can keep their existing niche market. If I want a proprietary hardware vendor who can sell me an UNIX OS for something other than design/publishing, I've got Sun, HP and IBM who can all sell me low/mid/high-end data processing solutions with decades of experience in doing so in addition to thousands of VARs and other third parties with equivilent depth of experience and products for the OEMs products.
Apple can really talk about the "history" of UNIX and BSD and can probably drum up a couple of people that did something interesting in the brief lifetime of NeXT, but that's it.
They also have ZERO chance of replacing the WinTel hegemony on corporate desktops. Too much time, money and manpower has been invested in that paradigm for it to be changed by the fact that Apple's got BSD under the hood and can now be trusted to mutlitask with some measure of stability.
Apple really needs to hope that a stagnating tech economy doesn't get some hungry Microsofties the idea that they can grow into the design and publishing businesses with the competitive advantage of integration with the rest of the business world and commodity hardware pricing. The day that Microsoft decides it wants do that, Apple will be a nice memory and nothing more.
This has nothing to do with the quality of OS X, Win2k, Sun, Linux, BSD or anything else. It's pure business position.
Parents want educational 1st, gaming dead last
on
PS2 As PC
·
· Score: 1
I tend to believe most parents would have an easier time forking over $300 for a PS2/XBox over a PC, especially if that PS2 came with a module to allow basic internet/WWW interactivity (including e-mail) and basic functions like word-processing.
Most parents will buy anything if they think it will help Johnny get ahead in school. Given the choice between a PC, with a proven track record of typing reports, educational software and use in the labor marketplace vs. a "toy" that promises to be "as good as" a PC for word processing, but is primarily a game machine, what do you think they're going to choose?
One thing that primarily open source shops (and I'm talking about someone doing more than using BIND and sendmail out of the box and serving static pages with apache) would seem to need is someone with a lot of programming ability. And I don't mean light scripting in perl or shell, someone well-versed enough in C to be able to make reasonably complex new apps or modifications to existing apps.
I work with both OSS and Windows applications, and it seems that the Windows applications are unreliable but have better feature sets. The OSS applications are more reliable, but often seem missing the features I need or require some kind of a middleware application I don't have the skills or time to tie together into a coherent whole.
Slashdot Mirror
Computers are needed in schools, but they aren't the reason that public education is often poor and why the public education system is frequently tottering on bankruptcy.
The big reason that public schools have such problems is that school has ceased to be about education. It's become more and more of a welfare delivery system. Each new welfare program installed in schools under the guise of helping Johnny read needs staff people, administrators, office space and tons of other overhead that should rightfully go towards books, teachers, and facilities. And don't get me started on the massive subsidies provided to school sports, which were once a good use of gym equipment after school that have become almost entities unto themselves.
The reason most school systems started being about welfare delivery is that they realized that if Dick and Jane haven't been eating, they don't learn. What they fail to realize is that bringing everyone up to the same socioecnomic level as the high-achieving middle class white students means solving a LOT of social problems, which takes a lot of resources, and the pool of resources the public is willing to assign to education is limited.
Schools need to stop trying to solve all the socioeconmic problems. It's not to say the socioeconomic problems aren't worth solving, but the education field is the wrong place to solve them. Educating the people first may actually solve more problems in the long run because you're producing people who are capable of integrating more fully into the economy and society.
Math has changed tremendously in the past 100 years (although very basic math remains mostly unchanged).
OK, math has changed. I'm sure the field of mathematics as an academic pursuit has changed, and it probably has had a major impact on science, engineering and fields for whom statistics plays a major role.
But how much of the math that even well-educated people actually know and use in everyday life has changed in the past 100 years? Most educated professionals who aren't in a math-intensive field seldom use much beyond very basic algebra. Have significant new digits in Pi changed much? Are there bold new techniques for solving for X?
Even in the calculus classes I took in college school, much of the "soft" education about the subject involved guys like Newton, Leibniz and other people who were long-dead. We never learned about significant advances in calculus in the past 100 years (although I don't doubt there were at least a few), let alone the past 10 or 20 years.
I'm sure math has changed, but I'm willing to bet that most of the math taught in high school hasn't changed meaningfully in the past 25 years and only trivially in the past 50. Academic math in colleges has probably changed dramatically, but that's largely meaningless for most high school students.
It's usually not a question of the bandwidth, it's a question of latency. Most people with DSL connectivity should be able to use VoIP, provided that the latency between them and their calling partner is less than 150ms.
Until we get a voice compression system that can compress my voice into a 5Kbit stream cleanly ant at telephone line quality, it will not happen over the internet.
I'd say its also going to take people learning to live with phone calls that suffer from a lot of digital artifacts (high latency, jitter, dropouts, etc). I think many people who own cell phones already are there in terms of noise acceptance. It's getting people who grew up in urban areas in the 60s and 70s on 56k toll-quality to accept it. It's too bad the older generation who grew up on circa 1920s handsets and even older switching and cabling aren't the decision makers on IP telephony purchasing, they'd tell you, "Hey, it sounds great compared to the 1910 Bell wall set I have at home, shut up about your 56k toll quality already..."
Paypal has to be able to make money off of their microtransactions and they probably cost money themselves -- they have an infrastructure that needs feeding, and more than likely pay bank costs to implement some of these charges.
I think there's probably some minimum level at which small payments can't work due to the transaction processing costs. It's not just a dozen encrypted packets ensuring the payments, its a whole infrastructure, auditing and so on to make it work.
It just seems unlikely that a third party can process sub-dollar charges and make any money on it. What does make sense is some government entity (federal reserve? post office?) getting involved and creating a centralized clearninghouse for financial transactions. It would still cost money, only be available in US dollars, but it would likely make transactions down to the $.05 practical for payers and payees alike.
The idea is for the PS2 to help educate about clean water -- they probably don't even know the water is unsafe.
They probably don't realize its unsafe because the corrupt kleptocrat-for-life that runs their country has been dumping tech company hazardous waste in the river while lining his Swiss bank account on the profits.
Meanwhile those PS/2s that got "donated" for this worthy education project that worked and weren't diverted to the families of the kleptocrat's supporters were sold to the duty free store at the airport so that the government could generate even more hard currency.
Wake up and smell the coffee. You need to give these people something their government can't steal from them and that they won't immediately turn around and sell for cash, like clean water, innoculation from Polio and other things that materially improve their life. Justifying the technojackoff fantasy of running Linux on the PS/2 by thinking it helps people living in the stone age would be funny if it wasn't pathetic.
Is there an explanation for the pay inequity? Supply vs. demand? I've known several women I'd call "exhibitionists" who didn't mind being photographed naked for personal/private purposes. I've known several women who would have any kind of sex (oral, anal, dildo, etc) with pretty much anyone at the drop of a hat.
For most men, getting a woman to have sex off-camera is a bit of a challenge. But fucking a stranger on camera for money? I think it takes a special person to do that. I can imagine that the number of women who would generally be considered physically attractive *and* who will screw for money must be a really small number. Not only is the sex-acting a talent, but the psychological and emotional barriers that have to be crossed are signficant.
I've seen systems similar to this where they use a lot of laptop parts, a common power supply and pretty much anything they can do to make more than one system run off of a shared part. I'd imagine this type of integration could cut your per system electrical consumption by 10-20%.
An even bigger win would be a mutlisystem chassis that would have an integrated fiber channel switch. It'd cut the cabling and power way down -- run a single fibe channel cable to a Xiotech or EMC cabinet.
Heat is still a killer. I'd like to see a data center installed in a room that spanned more than one floor. I'd put a raised floor about 6 feet off the ground and use perforated floor to draw cool air from the subfloor. The ceiling would be open to big exhaust fans on the ceiling of the second floor. I think what makes heat so tough on data centers is that after you raise the floor there's not a lot of head room left for the equipment. Having an extra 10-20 feet above the equipment for heat to rise into would go a long way.
I can see the value of this, but in my experience is that most technology people are at best highly competitive and at worst raging egomaniacs when it comes to the work they've done.
Peer review has to be done carefully or can become a pissing contest. Review by senior people keeps the peace, but is only really valuable if senior people are senior because they're smart.
Oftentimes geeks like technomyopia take over and assume that technology is the only field that makes rapid changes. Law, medicine and education make rapid changes not only in technique of practice but of information content. How do those professions and professionals handle training and continuing education?
I know that continuing legal education is actually a requirement of attorneys in Minnesota (45 credit hours every three years). I would imagine that it's seen as the lawyer's professional responsibility to maintain his or her certifications. Some rich firms may reimburse, but small firms may just see it as another professional cost the attorney has to keep up with to be an attorney.
I think it's probably wise for a business to encourage continuing education to the extent of paying for it. Training feels like an investment to an employee and eliminates the potential for "but I didn't know how.." excuses from employees. Some training should be almost manditory and free to the employee. But I do think that employees also have to show some commitment to their field: by either paying something for further training, doing some training during work hours at half salary, or not mitigating work deadlines to accomodate training -- accomodate the training but make the employees demonstrate it has value.
My new CIO says he had a policy at his last company to require managers spend their training budgets or get dinged at review time. He said that training is important, but his experience was employees will often whine for training if it's not an option but if money is budgeted for training they come up with excuses not to do it.
Haha. It's at 17 of 105 right now.
This will only make fewer people use it.
The three other people who still use Macs are pissed, too.
What counts makes you a "unix vendor"? Total copies shipped? Total copies in use? Total number of users? What kind of users -- interactive or other client/server clients?
Even though no one in my office has a copy of FreeBSD, all 600+ of them are "FreeBSD users" by merit of their use of DHCP and DNS services run on FreeBSD.
You could argue that the biggie Unix vendors like Sun/HP/IBM can claim hundreds of millions of users worldwide based on pervasive client-server based systems in use by governments or other organizations that are hard to ignore.
Someone told me about dark fiber with the tragic appendage, "..and it may never be used."
The reasons it might not get used were part economic (we can't afford the people and gizmos to light it and maintain it) but part technical tied to not using it right now. Apparently the technology used with long fiber runs like this is highly tied to the fiber in use. Tomorrow's fiber gear uses technology that's not readily compatible with today's fiber optic plants.
Never is probably a long time, and it would seem kind of silly that new fiber gear is being designed that would totally obsolete existing fiber plants, but I think the gist was that by the time the dark fiber was lightable by someone who had the capital to do so it would require such a large upgrade that it would essentially be cheaper to do it over than to fix what was there to work with whatever was state of the art in gear.
Of course the real reasons will be monopoly and enforced scarcity, but these are much more interesting and romantic.
I'm as much terrified of what I see as insane and dangerous laws about freedom of speech, bearing arms, etc. being forced upon the UK (/EU) as I am of having to obey the DMCA.
What Britons usually miss about American freedoms is that Americans generally see them as the inalienable rights of citizens, enshrined in our constitution. Britons have a hard time with this because they're subjects, not citizens and they don't have a constitution.
If you don't believe this is true, remember that we fought a war in the last part of the 18th century over these very issues.
In the eyes of Americans we cannot impose the inalienable rights that have been vested in you by your creartor. You already have them, they've just been taken away from you by the tyranny of your monarchy and parliament.
I'm now up at least two copies of CDRW software. Not because I bought it, but because its come bundled with every CDRW drive I've ever bought. I actually use EZCD 4.x from drive #2, but there are two other OEMish packages capable of burning CDs sitting on my shelf unopened.
The last drive I bought was a Phillips 8x4x32 @ Best Buy for ~$75. Can you buy them cheaper without software?
Is lack of Mac software an issue? Did they often sell you the drive and then expect you to go out and fetch the S/W yourself prior to its inclusion in OS9?
There's three categories to your list of Sun "accomplishments":
(1) Sun doing something because it's the "right thing to do"; (2) Sun doing something because it costs them nothing and is perceived as (1); and (3) Sun doing something that advances their business and that can be spun as (1).
I'd bet that Sun does most of what Sun does because of #3, some because of #2 and very little as #1. Sun is also motivated to look "good" relative to Microsoft, either to rank-and-file IT who use their product, to PHBs that buy the product or to the "community".
If Sun, IBM or anybody else had a monopoly position like Microsoft's, Sun would probably act no differently than Microsoft does when the day was over. They'd be pursuing the exact same save-my-monopoly routine that Microsoft was doing.
Sun it motivated by its shareholders and board, not by anything else. If you believe that they are motivated by charity or their own "good deeds" you're a victim of their "MS is bad" PR campaign.
Can you jam GPS? Could you bring along a pocket-sized low power transmitter that would prevent them from getting any info or false info (I never went above 20!)?
Even if armchair analysis can provide meaningful advances in knowlegde (and I'd agree than it can), that doesn't mean that most people, including judges and bureaucrats, will take their findings seriously.
The findings that most people outside the scientific community take seriously need to have some meritocratic credentials attached to them, particularly if they challenge status quo knowledge. Uncredentialed findings, particularly those which alter a world view, are treated as little more than the fantasies of zealots. Often even when they come from people with credentials, it often takes many people with credentials to back them up.
I realize that peer review is supposed to accomplish this, but to me that often just looks like meritocratic approval -- the blessings of the priests. How many signficant amateur findings have been ignored by established science until science came around to either solving the problem on their own or changing their paradigm to accept the findings?
What you're really asking is if Gartner Group or whatever consulting group in question is willing to sell their name with a set of "results".
I'm sure they are, as long as there's some plausable truth in the results.
I've read the same thing. Many of the available silos have been essentially abandoned since they were built in the late 50s or early 60s. The water damage and vandalism is a big problem. I'm sure there's a probably a buttload of environmental problems -- asbestos, fuel leaks from generators, god knows what else.
There are some success stories of some of the less damaged ones getting converted, but I think a lot of them are pretty trashed from neglect.
I'm wondering if it might not be cheaper to build your own bunker from scratch than to buy a government one in dubious condition. You'd get what you want, as you want it with fewer gotchas. Most civilian bunkers need to resist much less severe threats than a silo anyway, since presumably the activities of a civilian bunker are only meaningful if there is a civilian population to service..
And that's the point that I'm making. Apple already is a niche player, and a relatively successful one. The parent poster somewhere up this thread was making the point that because Apple's now a "UNIX vendor" there's opportunities for them *beyond* their niche.
I'm saying that's doubtful, there's too many players in the UNIX space that do what Apple might expand into. Those other players do it very, very well and Apple can't hope to move into their space.
And whatever value their UNIX-ness gives them means nothing to the wintel world in the desktop space, and they don't rackmount so they're not getting into the datacenter, either.
Which leaves a hungry microsoft looking for a new market a very threatening proposition. Lose the niche, lose the business.
There are no free forums. Forums cost money to buy, build, and maintain. You can either subtract the cost of the forum from the research funding (ie, do less research) or you can pay the forum cost afterwards and use all the money for research.
In an ideal world, the NSF or whatever governmental agency does the funding would do a web site and just stipulate that to whatever extent possible the results of the study be made to them electronically for posting on their web site.
Break out? Apple's only hope is that they can keep their existing niche market. If I want a proprietary hardware vendor who can sell me an UNIX OS for something other than design/publishing, I've got Sun, HP and IBM who can all sell me low/mid/high-end data processing solutions with decades of experience in doing so in addition to thousands of VARs and other third parties with equivilent depth of experience and products for the OEMs products.
Apple can really talk about the "history" of UNIX and BSD and can probably drum up a couple of people that did something interesting in the brief lifetime of NeXT, but that's it.
They also have ZERO chance of replacing the WinTel hegemony on corporate desktops. Too much time, money and manpower has been invested in that paradigm for it to be changed by the fact that Apple's got BSD under the hood and can now be trusted to mutlitask with some measure of stability.
Apple really needs to hope that a stagnating tech economy doesn't get some hungry Microsofties the idea that they can grow into the design and publishing businesses with the competitive advantage of integration with the rest of the business world and commodity hardware pricing. The day that Microsoft decides it wants do that, Apple will be a nice memory and nothing more.
This has nothing to do with the quality of OS X, Win2k, Sun, Linux, BSD or anything else. It's pure business position.
I tend to believe most parents would have an easier time forking over $300 for a PS2/XBox over a PC, especially if that PS2 came with a module to allow basic internet/WWW interactivity (including e-mail) and basic functions like word-processing.
Most parents will buy anything if they think it will help Johnny get ahead in school. Given the choice between a PC, with a proven track record of typing reports, educational software and use in the labor marketplace vs. a "toy" that promises to be "as good as" a PC for word processing, but is primarily a game machine, what do you think they're going to choose?
One thing that primarily open source shops (and I'm talking about someone doing more than using BIND and sendmail out of the box and serving static pages with apache) would seem to need is someone with a lot of programming ability. And I don't mean light scripting in perl or shell, someone well-versed enough in C to be able to make reasonably complex new apps or modifications to existing apps.
I work with both OSS and Windows applications, and it seems that the Windows applications are unreliable but have better feature sets. The OSS applications are more reliable, but often seem missing the features I need or require some kind of a middleware application I don't have the skills or time to tie together into a coherent whole.