Having worked for a school district for years, I can tell you we've gone with MS Office because it's most likely what our students will be using when the make it to the real world.
In addition to that, it's the same price when you compare the Corel office suite with it's MS counterpart.
I think these new ads are going to be really annoying. I think that my browsing expierence (with IE) will not be as pleasent as before, especially if I were to stumble across an inappropriate "banner" in a public place. This also isn't so good for school districts which will now have to be more agressive with ad filtering.
On the other hand, this guy is trying to make some money by doing a little innovation in a field which has pretty much stuck with the tried and true since it's inception. Not that this is innovation that we like want or need, but a guy has to eat.
But how many people do you know in real life who would be willing to take someone to court over advertisement. It'd be like me taking a Credit Card company to court every time I got a junk snail-mail.
I work for School District #6 (www.district6.org) in Southern Oregon, where I recently had the opportunity to set up a thin-client lab for word-processing and internet browsing. Since I'm not a big fan of RedHat, I decided to put Debian on the server, and strip Debian way way down for the clients. The lab is not totally thin, as about 100M is taken up on each client (X client, fonts, basic utilities, etc.) since I didn't have enough time to research truly thin client solutions.
All the computers are donated IBM P-100s that we got from some other local agency. They've all worked very well, as the only problems we've had are hardware related (harddrives failing, etc.)
If you have any questions, feel free to go to the tech page on district6.org and click on the E-Mail link for Aaron Blew.
Yes, it sounds crazy but is true. The best way to weed out good teachers from the bad ones is money. Offer them a low pay, and usually the ones who do show up for the interview are the ones who are really interested in teaching show up, while if you offer lots and lots of money, you will get quite a few more applicants who very well may be in it for money alone.
The proper thing to do here is to increase the BUDGETS that the teachers have to work with. This, you will find, is their main griping point. How good of a job do you think will be done if you have a higher paid staff working with a low budget vs. a moderately paid staff doing their work on a more suitable budget?
All I can say is, teachers who are in the job to teach do a very good job while those who are in it for money are very often disappointed. If I were paid $100,000/year to do the job I do, but had no budget, I would rather take the $42,000/year and have a budget that suits the needs of my department.
Actually, I'm actually considering moving there. Now don't get me wrong, I really do like living here in the states. But it's shit like this that really makes me want to move elsewhere. Everything that comes back to the DMCA and copyright laws and other money hoarding devices seem to end badly.
Copyright laws are not without merrit and I know it's not a money hoarding device...for most. I really do respect artists, musicians, etc., but it has gone too far. What is the copyright length now? 75 years after they have died?! WTF? That's like me making a special mark on a piece of paper (lets call it a letter) and then enforcing copyright stuff on it.
"No you may not use that 'a' I wrote on that paper! It's mine by way of copyright! What?! Bull hokey! I take you to court sir!"
(Ok, a weeee bit exaggerated, but it could be done)
*sigh*
Anyway, my best to all those involved in these cases and I hope that someone can step forward and show them that open source != illegal.
Translation...
As soon as we quit taking it up the ass by money hungry weasels in Los Angeles...We'll start it up again. Until then, hang in there cause we know how much it sucks not having The Rock Station on the web. Our freakin' hands are tied.
Companies like this need to keep hanging on, because when the economy does pick up again, people will be re-hired, and demand for these devices will go up. The big question now is as to when the market goes back up...
I often question why I date carbons. Especially C-14. I mean, if she were ever to miss 10 molecules, I'd be in a terrible mess, trying to explain why my date just blew half the diner up.
This is one of the most foolish patents I've seen, up there with the RAMBUS ones. It saddens me that the patent office would pass such a broad patent as this, especially when we in the Linux community who use X-Windows and window managers like Sawfish, Enlightenment and others have been doing what is said in the patent for quite a while. Here's the worst of the patent here:
selecting a theme from among said plurality of themes;
At our school in southern Oregon, we use Squid and squidGuard. We had been using Novell's "Border Manager". We discovered it to be crap (as many before us have, I'm sure), and thus the move was made.
Anyway, my point is if schools were to use free software in place of the Microsoft/Novell equivilants, imagine how much more money could be put to more workstations for students, more powerful servers, etc. Heck! If we went totally Linux, we could probally even give the poor teachers a raise!
All that this article is saying is that 3Dfx is abandoning their in-house production of the PCB (Printed Circut Boards). They won't stop tailoring to the retail market like ATI or NVidia, but they will just start selling the chips to companies like Gullimont and Asus.
I'm just curious, were you at Bungie planning to port Halo to linux before the Microsoft acquision? If so, were they nit-picky about it?
Thanks,
-moath
I'm presently in charge of a project called "PMS" or "Package Management System". It's designed to work with all distributions, especially those without proper package management (ie Slackware). It will work in a model similar to that of APT, but automatically convert it to.tgz format or something along those lines. More information can be had here.
Well, what if one of these lines of code is say "printf ("Hello World, its %c today!", date)", and somebody had that under the GPL, how exactally would one change it? Convert all the variables from date to monkey or some such thing? I don't exactally what lines of code people are having these seemingly dire problems with, but it seems as if one could possibly release the program that prints "Hello World" and GPL it, and thus get a foothold to collect millions from various publishers! I just hope it hasn't gone that far...
This looks really cool and this is the sort of thing that I would like to do when I graduate from college, but how? What classes should I take? I'm already planning on taking Computer Science and/or Computer Engineering when I get to college in the next two years or so. Should I be taking any classes in particular?
WOWZA! Now I don't have to buy a bigger monitor! Just think, now we don't need bigger monitors! Now I can view my 320x200 pr0n from across the room when my monitor is in 1024x768 and not have to squint, much less wear glasses.
The Yahoo article dosen't have a whole lot of detail on this, but I think that my splitting it off into a Internet type company, it includes the Microsoft web server, and other web type things (mabye even SQL). This is the sort of business model that Netscape followed/follows (followed being before the AOL merger, I'm not exactally sure on this point).
I think, that if done correctly, this could be a very good move from the perspective of the opensource/alternative operating system community. Who knows, since Bill can't lead all 3 companys at once, they may consider opensource/porting! I don't really know if a judge can enforce something along these lines though...
Ouch man, I see your point about the special treatment stuff. Personally I'd talk to Emmett (being as he is the slashdot guy that I know the best) and tell him my situation.
I just had an interesting thought. What if this is what Micrsoft wants? Think about it, a bunch of opensource fanatics all riled up, ranting, raving and trolling can, if twisted properly (something that Microsoft is good at), give the opensource community some bad press and/or something to make the public eye look a little bit away from them. Hell, just posting the damn code wasn't exactally the smartest thing one could have done!
Personally, I think that Microsoft needs have a babysitter for a while. Sure they may have innovated 5-10 years ago, but they haven't done a whole lot lately.
"Third, should slashdot decide the odds are legally against them on this and back down, I won't fault you for it"
Hrmm. I'm sorry, but I don't really know if they hold your opinion high enough that if you DID fault them, they would care. Please snap out of the god complex.
Slashdot Mirror
Having worked for a school district for years, I can tell you we've gone with MS Office because it's most likely what our students will be using when the make it to the real world.
In addition to that, it's the same price when you compare the Corel office suite with it's MS counterpart.
Do you see X-Windows (in whatever form) as a viable platform for GUI technologies in the future or is it approaching the point of diminishing returns?
I think these new ads are going to be really annoying. I think that my browsing expierence (with IE) will not be as pleasent as before, especially if I were to stumble across an inappropriate "banner" in a public place. This also isn't so good for school districts which will now have to be more agressive with ad filtering.
On the other hand, this guy is trying to make some money by doing a little innovation in a field which has pretty much stuck with the tried and true since it's inception. Not that this is innovation that we like want or need, but a guy has to eat.
Ahh, the joys of capitalism.
-Aaron
But how many people do you know in real life who would be willing to take someone to court over advertisement. It'd be like me taking a Credit Card company to court every time I got a junk snail-mail.
Kinda silly.
-Aaron
I work for School District #6 (www.district6.org) in Southern Oregon, where I recently had the opportunity to set up a thin-client lab for word-processing and internet browsing. Since I'm not a big fan of RedHat, I decided to put Debian on the server, and strip Debian way way down for the clients. The lab is not totally thin, as about 100M is taken up on each client (X client, fonts, basic utilities, etc.) since I didn't have enough time to research truly thin client solutions.
All the computers are donated IBM P-100s that we got from some other local agency. They've all worked very well, as the only problems we've had are hardware related (harddrives failing, etc.)
If you have any questions, feel free to go to the tech page on district6.org and click on the E-Mail link for Aaron Blew.
Good luck,
-Aaron
Yes, it sounds crazy but is true. The best way to weed out good teachers from the bad ones is money. Offer them a low pay, and usually the ones who do show up for the interview are the ones who are really interested in teaching show up, while if you offer lots and lots of money, you will get quite a few more applicants who very well may be in it for money alone.
The proper thing to do here is to increase the BUDGETS that the teachers have to work with. This, you will find, is their main griping point. How good of a job do you think will be done if you have a higher paid staff working with a low budget vs. a moderately paid staff doing their work on a more suitable budget?
All I can say is, teachers who are in the job to teach do a very good job while those who are in it for money are very often disappointed. If I were paid $100,000/year to do the job I do, but had no budget, I would rather take the $42,000/year and have a budget that suits the needs of my department.
-Aaron
CANADA!!!!
Actually, I'm actually considering moving there. Now don't get me wrong, I really do like living here in the states. But it's shit like this that really makes me want to move elsewhere. Everything that comes back to the DMCA and copyright laws and other money hoarding devices seem to end badly.
Copyright laws are not without merrit and I know it's not a money hoarding device...for most. I really do respect artists, musicians, etc., but it has gone too far. What is the copyright length now? 75 years after they have died?! WTF? That's like me making a special mark on a piece of paper (lets call it a letter) and then enforcing copyright stuff on it.
"No you may not use that 'a' I wrote on that paper! It's mine by way of copyright! What?! Bull hokey! I take you to court sir!"
(Ok, a weeee bit exaggerated, but it could be done)
*sigh*
Anyway, my best to all those involved in these cases and I hope that someone can step forward and show them that open source != illegal.
</rant>
when they put up this "translation":
Translation...
As soon as we quit taking it up the ass by money hungry weasels in Los Angeles...We'll start it up again. Until then, hang in there cause we know how much it sucks not having The Rock Station on the web. Our freakin' hands are tied.
Companies like this need to keep hanging on, because when the economy does pick up again, people will be re-hired, and demand for these devices will go up. The big question now is as to when the market goes back up...
-Aaron
I often question why I date carbons. Especially C-14. I mean, if she were ever to miss 10 molecules, I'd be in a terrible mess, trying to explain why my date just blew half the diner up.
Ahh, the pains of dating compounds...
-Aaron
Feelable Porn
I'm not saying that they're copying X-Window themes. I'm just saying that they're patenting something that's been in practice for quite a while.
-Aaron
selecting a theme from among said plurality of themes;
That's just retarted.
-Aaron
At our school in southern Oregon, we use Squid and squidGuard. We had been using Novell's "Border Manager". We discovered it to be crap (as many before us have, I'm sure), and thus the move was made.
Anyway, my point is if schools were to use free software in place of the Microsoft/Novell equivilants, imagine how much more money could be put to more workstations for students, more powerful servers, etc. Heck! If we went totally Linux, we could probally even give the poor teachers a raise!
All that this article is saying is that 3Dfx is abandoning their in-house production of the PCB (Printed Circut Boards). They won't stop tailoring to the retail market like ATI or NVidia, but they will just start selling the chips to companies like Gullimont and Asus.
Hax0r of slashdot BAD! Hax0r of RIAA GOOOOOD! At least they didn't take my lifeblood of a news-site down.
I'm just curious, were you at Bungie planning to port Halo to linux before the Microsoft acquision? If so, were they nit-picky about it? Thanks, -moath
I'm presently in charge of a project called "PMS" or "Package Management System". It's designed to work with all distributions, especially those without proper package management (ie Slackware). It will work in a model similar to that of APT, but automatically convert it to .tgz format or something along those lines. More information can be had here.
Thanks,
WOWZA! Now I don't have to buy a bigger monitor! Just think, now we don't need bigger monitors! Now I can view my 320x200 pr0n from across the room when my monitor is in 1024x768 and not have to squint, much less wear glasses.
Ahh, I love progress...
The Yahoo article dosen't have a whole lot of detail on this, but I think that my splitting it off into a Internet type company, it includes the Microsoft web server, and other web type things (mabye even SQL). This is the sort of business model that Netscape followed/follows (followed being before the AOL merger, I'm not exactally sure on this point).
I think, that if done correctly, this could be a very good move from the perspective of the opensource/alternative operating system community. Who knows, since Bill can't lead all 3 companys at once, they may consider opensource/porting! I don't really know if a judge can enforce something along these lines though...
Ouch man, I see your point about the special treatment stuff. Personally I'd talk to Emmett (being as he is the slashdot guy that I know the best) and tell him my situation.
I just had an interesting thought. What if this is what Micrsoft wants? Think about it, a bunch of opensource fanatics all riled up, ranting, raving and trolling can, if twisted properly (something that Microsoft is good at), give the opensource community some bad press and/or something to make the public eye look a little bit away from them. Hell, just posting the damn code wasn't exactally the smartest thing one could have done!
Personally, I think that Microsoft needs have a babysitter for a while. Sure they may have innovated 5-10 years ago, but they haven't done a whole lot lately.
I personally don't count bugs as "innovation".
"Third, should slashdot decide the odds are legally against them on this and back down, I won't fault you for it"
Hrmm. I'm sorry, but I don't really know if they hold your opinion high enough that if you DID fault them, they would care.
Please snap out of the god complex.
Besides that, good luck guys!