Lacking a killer ap that only works in IPv6 land, the finance people won't back any infrastructure upgrade.
The only thing that might do it is customer demand. The only way I ccan see customers demanding this is if the ISPs set it up so that all their customers get a free IPv6 STATIC range with thier service. An ISP doing this might be enough to attract geeks (if they provided some pretty good IPv6 -> IPv4 stuff too). And if they attract geeks, and the geeks recommend them to non-geeks, it could at least provide them with a little competitive advantage.
Just to clear this up, the general rule is actually "When you leave a letter out, put in an apostrophe". This explains everything, including "it's", "won't", and the like.
The posessive is a leftover from the days when English had more noun declensions. For example, we still have "I", "me", and "my" as examples of the Nominative (Subject), Accusative (Object), and Genitive (Possessive) cases. Currently, a person's name would be represented as eg. "John", "John", "John's". But at one time, the Genitive case had an "i" in it, so it would've been "John", "John", "Johnis". You still occasionally see this in old place names. For example, the Spotswood hotel near here has embedded into its concrete "Spottiswoode".
People who prefer to avoid language history usually remember the apostrophe indication posessive as a secondary rule to the one about a letter being left out.
Agree with you about the old Nescape being non-standards compliant. But there are degrees of standard compatibility, and just because someone is only 99% compatible, doesn't meant that you only need to be 66% compatible (numbers invented to illustrate a point).
HTML isn't supposed to render exactly the same everywhere, but it is supposed to be readable everywhere. If it doesn't render readably on standards compliant browsers, that's the fault of the web page, not the browser.
Just for the record, this is usually called "States Rights" or "Competitive Federalism", the idea being that if you don't like the way one state is going, you move elsewhere (see also that Free State project about moving to New Hampshire). I usually call it "Localtarian", because "Competitive Federalism" is usually to much of a mouthful (better suggestions welcomed). It's one of the points of Libertarianism, and the sole reason that I'm a member of the Libertarian (Liberal Democratic) Party in Australia.
<i>Though really I don't get the appeal of actual eternal life though. People would go all batty after the first few hundred years. I suppose many people just haven't thought it through far enough.</i>
Maybe you should get a life:).
Personally, I'm looking forward to eternal life. Not the kind Jonathan Swift depicts (ie. getting older and older for thousands of years, and becoming mentally deranged, etc), but eternal enjoyment of eternal life.
I don't know what God has planned for us, but I know I'd be happy for a few thousand years just learning stuff. I'm currently interested in everything except unimportant current events (ie. sport and celebrities), and that's more a decision based on using my time to achieve what I want; I could develop a (theoretical) interest in those too. Presumably, also, living in a "country" where the government *never* messes up (ie. new heavens/new earth, w/ Jesus ruling), things will be a lot more efficient. Current government has to be designed to hold this-world humans in check; the next world won't require that.
While I wait for that to happen, though, God wants me here:).
Suggestion #1: Get Slashdot to post an article on this after you buy them out, and you will get much better quality responses.
<i> - Bring the site in line with current web standards as is suggested here.</i>
Please do:).
<i>- Keep the current line of editors but base their continued employment on their performance and a quarterly vote by readers. If an overwhelming amount of readers want a particular editor to leave then their opinion will be taken into consideration. On the other hand we could go for a completely new team of editors - what do you guys think?</i>
Keep the ones we have, but base their performance on their actual editing. They loose points for poor spelling/grammar, and dupes. They can regain a very few points for posting an article which gets over 1000 comments. After a few months, the better editors will give you an idea of what is possible, and you can tell the others to lift their game or get out.
<i>- Dupe prevention scripts. This has been requested time and time again and now it will be implemented.</i>
How about dupe detection scripts, with extra points being lost by editors who don't use them. If they really want to post a dupe, make them link to the previous article in the summary.
<i>- Remove the karma system. All this has done is make karma whoring a competition. It is ineffective and a waste of time. - Remove the moderation system. I don't really feel it adds anything: for example I see too many posts moderated out of sight just because the poster's opinion is not in line with Slashdot group think.</i>
The two above are pretty much tied together. If the moderation system goes, I'll probably head elsewhere too (technocrat?). To me, part of the value of Slashdot is that the lurkers occasionally come out of the woodwork when their own company/project is discussed. I suspect other lurkers like the mod system too. There are plenty of unmoderated forums out there.
<i>- Make slashdot more international: I know it has traditionally been a US-centric site but it would be good to see more of a balance of articles from around the globe.</i>
If you do this, it'd be great if you could put them in categories. I personally would skim everything, but it would mean that the people who like Slashdot the way it is could continue using it that way.
<i>- Roland Piquepaille - articles linked from this guy's blog have to go. So far as I can see he adds no content to articles and we may as well have them from the original source.</i>
Is someone submitting the original sources?
- More user features: Enhanced profile (similar to Fark perhaps?), longer sigs, image attachment to posts (up to a certain size and only after a user has made a certain amount of posts, say 50?)
1. Postflood 2. Post images (goatse) 3. Profit!!!
With the image attachment, if you keep the karma/mod system, possibly you could allow it to people who have had excellent karma for months, but I think this is your most widely hated suggestion.
Where are you going? US has SSN, and Australia, while somewhat freer, is only about 5 years behind the USA in many ways. Where would you go? Switzerland? New Zealand? New Hampshire (Free State project)? Let me know when you figure it out.
To me, the difference in point 2 between cults and non-cults is that cults say "You must be part of our organisation to be saved", whereas non-cults say "You must believe our core beliefs to be saved". That means that as a member of a smaller conservative presbyterian denomination, I still believe that the saved are not limited to my denomination, nor even to the presbyterian/reformed circles; evangelicals, charismatics, and anglicans all have numbers of saved people (in varying degrees, from majority to minority), and even some of those in the Catholic and Orthodox churches are saved (although fewer here than in the evangelicals). Now I've upset just about everyone.
Likewise, there are people at my church every Sunday who are not saved. Worldwide, there are almost certainly members of our organisation who are not saved. It has nothing to do with membership in our organisation (good as that is:) ), but to do with their beliefs.
Package manager: does stuff with packages on your system
Repository manager: gets packages to your machine
Dependency resolver: works with the above to figure out which packages to install
rpm and dpkg (debian) are both Package Managers. apt, yum, up2date, and the like are repository managers + dependency resolvers in the one (which depend on the package managers). This irks me because by doing both, they are breaking the Unix tool rule of doing one thing, and doing it well.
Disclaimer: I'm the developer of Arpmats (arpmats.sourceforge.net) which wants to use package managers and repo managers, but wants the dependency resolver to be optional.
Well, actually, the two bear more than a passing resemblance. The bank's business model was to invest the savings of their customers, skim some of the returns themselves, and return a fraction to the customer in return for use of their money.
When Western society became consumerised, and people spent all their income now with no thought for the future (possibly due to pensions and social security), the banks no longer had people's savings to invest.
Banks had to change their business model. Rather than being a business that profited by investing others money, they became a business that profited by easing the transfer of money. It used to be that getting money out of the bank involved going to the bank. Now you can get it out of any ATM/EFTPOS/whatever. The banks naturally needed a way to make money in this new business model, so they began charging fees for transactions.
I managed to find a "bank" (credit union that has a deal with a major bank) that has chargeable and non-chargeable transactions. Even for the chargeable ones, the bank will give you 30 free transactions a quarter. If I get my money out of the bank once a week (immediately before I pay my rent), then I reduce the number of transactions. So far, in about 3 years with this "bank", I haven't been charged *any* fees (just some tax).
Of course, this is in Australia. But the deal I have is better than any of the big banks will offer.:)
Why not just use a standard protocol which already allows portable bookmarks. The IETF has specified ACAP, and there is a Bookmarks schema for it, but Mozilla doesn't support it yet.
> what good does it do that you have the right > to protest, if you have no job, no income, > bombs explode every day, and you can get shot > when making the use of the right to protest?
1. no job
Start a business. Don't wait for corporate handouts.
2. no income
See above.
3. bombs explode every day
I agree this is a problem. Turn in any terrorists you discover.
4. you can get shot when making the use of the right to protest?
That's what police are for. And if that's not happening, then you *do* need more police.
What I'd really like is a pluggable backend system for preferences, et. al., so I can plug it into ACAP. ACAP is like LDAP, but different:).
The difference here is that bookmarks stored in ACAP would be stored in the standard ACAP format. This would mean that I could use these bookmarks in any ACAP-compliant browser. Ideally, your ISP would have the ACAP server. Then, you can access your bookmarks from your own or someone else's browser. Now all of this you could do with a shared network drive. But you could also have a shared section of bookmarks that are shared between everyone on your team, and are "mounted" as a separate folder in your bookmarks.
Sure, you can in theory do all this with mounted drives, but we could replace DNS with mounted drives too, but it doesn't change the fact that you should use the right tool for the right job. We want TMTOWTDI (there's more than one way to do it), as perl suggests, and those many ways include LDAP and ACAP.
I don't buy anything anymore. I'm never buying anything again. Capitalist America hung me out to dry and they'll never see me cooperate again.
You could always try joining in. Start your own corporation. If you're interested, I'd suggest buying one more thing (second-hand, if possible): Rich Dad, Poor Dad (and especially note the advice about continuing financial education). Yeah, I know, you'd rather program [or insert job here] than work in business, but that's where the money is.
I live for the day when the Capitalists go out for long walks off their short window ledges when their nigger
Do you mean niggardly?
investments go south from the lack of credited consumers. The entire economy has been transformed into strip malls, junk bonds and websites. People have been transformed into appallingly credited hyperconsumers who are incapable of saving and meeting all future obligations. A grown person cannot expect to spend money like a 14-yr-old girl for decades and expect any good to come from it.
... I presume you've been reading the John Taylor Gatto book "The Underground History of American Education". Well, to merge two ideas I've suggested so far, start a business that's a school whose structure is based on the lessons learned from Gatto's book: Start by looking at the old one-room school, and Montessori schools, and the home-schooling materials. Train students to be self-motivated learners. With only one or two teachers for a school full of students, you'll be able to make lots of money:).
Point 1: This is a current technical limitation which, while admittedly a problem, will no doubt go away as soon as large-scale IPv6 use begins (due to pressure on Cisco).
Point 2: No doubt the same thing would've been said about IPv4. While I agree we'll never use them all, we don't expect to either. If every customer gets assigned a/64 address space, this means 2^64 customers, instead of 2^128. Besides, who cares if it's too big, unless it causes problems (see points 3 & 4).
Point 3: The plan is to greatly reduce the size of routing tables by allocating people large and contiguous blocks, if I understand correctly. So rather than a/56 (which would be the equivalent of a Class C for an ISP), they can get a/48 (which is the equivalent of a class B). I'm sure the larger ISPs can get more than a/48. And any small to medium ISP ought not to need more than a/48.
Point 4: 3.4% longer? Well, by the time IPv6 comes in, new technology will most likely have made people's downloads 3.4% faster.
That's my theory anyway. Everyone please expose my ignorance, and argue; at least the discussion is still going:).
Mark Twain said "I have never to let my schooling interfere with my education".
So, how about a school which begins by teaching basic literacy (nothing new so far), but allows children to progress at their own rate. The purpose of the literacy would be to empower children to pursue their own education. Additionally, if children were pursuing their own education, they would not need so many teachers. Look at the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (Little House on the Prairie, etc). They had one teacher teaching many levels, and the students were essentially responsible for teaching themselves, rather than having to move at the pace the teacher was speaking at. And this can be done on larger scales too, reducing the teacher to student ratio.
If you think that children would just use the lower staff to student ratio to act up, you may well be right. But shift responsibility for the behaviour from the teacher back where it belongs: the parent. If the child is acting up, send them to their parents (seriously acting up, that is). Also, adjust the enforced schooling age. Here (Australia) it's currently 15. Up until 1900, the words tenager and adolescent didn't even exist. At the age of 12 or 13, you were suddenly an adult (albeit a young one). Part of the problem with today's society is convincing people that they're children until the age of 18/21; by that age, childish behaviour is fairly established, and is sometimes continued significantly longer. Set a minimum school age, and allow anyone who finishes high school to quit when they finish, regardless of age. This will get most discontented students out of the classroom.
Those of you who know your Laura Ingalls Wilder will remember the problem of Big Bill Ritchie, who with his gang had killed a teacher, and was deservedly horsewhipped when he attempted to attack the new teacher. This is the main problem I haven't solved yet, but probably it would be possible to have security guards for teachers too, where this was felt to be necessary.
Also, naturally we'd aim provide an education, not a cradle-to-adult life support system (that's what families are for).
I'm sure I've left some of my ideas out, so everyone feel free to flame away, and I'll do my best to respond sometime:).
This should hopefully provide you with more idea of what is possible.
Of course, you're assuming that the goal here is to make lots of people highly educated. If so, you've missed the point of the education system. The education system is designed to churn out good employees. See: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/t oc1.ht m for details.:)
# Engines are mechanical devices and wear down and break, just from everyday use. This doesn't happen to software. It doesn't wear out and break because you use it every day.
Agreed. But the way some people use their computers, it does. I work in a computer repair shop, and the guys who repair computers sometimes get the same person coming in numerous times with crud on their computer which makes it crash. So if you use it daily in a certain fashion, it will.
# The majority of street car engines are essentially the same. If you understand the principles, you'll understand the principles in any car. Software is not the same. Just because you understand the architecture of a particular database program doesn't mean you have a clue about the architecture of other database programs. Obviously it doesn't mean you have a clue about the architecture of random page layout programs, photo editing programs, C++ compilers, and so on....and that's why it's even more important to have cars not welded shut -- a wider range of people can do something under the hood than with source code.
# Along the same lines, which do you think is more complex? A car engine or the source code to gcc? Theres absolutely no doubt that it's the latter by an order of magnitude.
Agreed. But why does this make the analogy invalid? It's almost like saying that 19" screens are essentially different than 15" screens; with the screens, there is increased size; with the car/gcc, there is increased complexity, but it doesn't invalidate the principle.
# Just because you can open the hood to your car doesn't mean you know what to do with all those big boxes of chips and wires and a computer controlled fuel injector and so on. If you're riding down the highway and all of a sudden your digital speedometer goes our--or even simpler, the "check engine" light comes on--explain to me how lifting the hood is going to help you. Maybe in the 1970s when cars were simpler. Ditto for most software.
One of the keys to open source, one that even the advocates miss, is that it goes hand in hand with SIMPLICITY. If you have a well-written, clear, and short program, then you can tinker with it. You can't tinker with 200,000 lines of code, unless you have someone to walk through it with you and answer your questions. In reality, odds are that a blind change, no matter how experienced you are, is not going to be a good match for an architecture you don't fully understand.
Well, I've done this with a 60,000 line program. The version of cfengine I'm using is 61,396 lines long. It has a built-in SMTP mail sender. There was a bug in this sender in that it didn't recognise multi-line SMTP responses. Most mail servers don't do these, so it's not a problem, but the mail software I'm using does. I tracked down the appropriate function by reading the code, and sent in a fix (although I recommended that the cfengine chief architect check it because I hadn't coded C in over 6 years).
My point is, with a car, sure, maybe you often can't do anything, but if you understand the general principle of how an engine works (kinda like I understand C), then you can at least sometimes spot the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Lacking a killer ap that only works in IPv6 land, the finance people won't back any infrastructure upgrade.
The only thing that might do it is customer demand. The only way I ccan see customers demanding this is if the ISPs set it up so that all their customers get a free IPv6 STATIC range with thier service. An ISP doing this might be enough to attract geeks (if they provided some pretty good IPv6 -> IPv4 stuff too). And if they attract geeks, and the geeks recommend them to non-geeks, it could at least provide them with a little competitive advantage.
Just to clear this up, the general rule is actually "When you leave a letter out, put in an apostrophe". This explains everything, including "it's", "won't", and the like.
The posessive is a leftover from the days when English had more noun declensions. For example, we still have "I", "me", and "my" as examples of the Nominative (Subject), Accusative (Object), and Genitive (Possessive) cases. Currently, a person's name would be represented as eg. "John", "John", "John's". But at one time, the Genitive case had an "i" in it, so it would've been "John", "John", "Johnis". You still occasionally see this in old place names. For example, the Spotswood hotel near here has embedded into its concrete "Spottiswoode".
People who prefer to avoid language history usually remember the apostrophe indication posessive as a secondary rule to the one about a letter being left out.
Agree with you about the old Nescape being non-standards compliant. But there are degrees of standard compatibility, and just because someone is only 99% compatible, doesn't meant that you only need to be 66% compatible (numbers invented to illustrate a point).
HTML isn't supposed to render exactly the same everywhere, but it is supposed to be readable everywhere. If it doesn't render readably on standards compliant browsers, that's the fault of the web page, not the browser.
Just for the record, this is usually called "States Rights" or "Competitive Federalism", the idea being that if you don't like the way one state is going, you move elsewhere (see also that Free State project about moving to New Hampshire). I usually call it "Localtarian", because "Competitive Federalism" is usually to much of a mouthful (better suggestions welcomed). It's one of the points of Libertarianism, and the sole reason that I'm a member of the Libertarian (Liberal Democratic) Party in Australia.
Where are you going? US has SSN, and Australia, while somewhat freer, is only about 5 years behind the USA in many ways. Where would you go? Switzerland? New Zealand? New Hampshire (Free State project)? Let me know when you figure it out.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m (remove stupid space in URL)
To me, the difference in point 2 between cults and non-cults is that cults say "You must be part of our organisation to be saved", whereas non-cults say "You must believe our core beliefs to be saved". That means that as a member of a smaller conservative presbyterian denomination, I still believe that the saved are not limited to my denomination, nor even to the presbyterian/reformed circles; evangelicals, charismatics, and anglicans all have numbers of saved people (in varying degrees, from majority to minority), and even some of those in the Catholic and Orthodox churches are saved (although fewer here than in the evangelicals). Now I've upset just about everyone.
:) ), but to do with their beliefs.
Likewise, there are people at my church every Sunday who are not saved. Worldwide, there are almost certainly members of our organisation who are not saved. It has nothing to do with membership in our organisation (good as that is
rpm and apt are different kinds of tools.
Imagine three classes of tools:
Package manager: does stuff with packages on your system
Repository manager: gets packages to your machine
Dependency resolver: works with the above to figure out which packages to install
rpm and dpkg (debian) are both Package Managers. apt, yum, up2date, and the like are repository managers + dependency resolvers in the one (which depend on the package managers). This irks me because by doing both, they are breaking the Unix tool rule of doing one thing, and doing it well.
Disclaimer: I'm the developer of Arpmats (arpmats.sourceforge.net) which wants to use package managers and repo managers, but wants the dependency resolver to be optional.
Question: does anyone know whether Switzerland is part of all this? Or New Zealand?
Well, actually, the two bear more than a passing resemblance. The bank's business model was to invest the savings of their customers, skim some of the returns themselves, and return a fraction to the customer in return for use of their money.
:)
When Western society became consumerised, and people spent all their income now with no thought for the future (possibly due to pensions and social security), the banks no longer had people's savings to invest.
Banks had to change their business model. Rather than being a business that profited by investing others money, they became a business that profited by easing the transfer of money. It used to be that getting money out of the bank involved going to the bank. Now you can get it out of any ATM/EFTPOS/whatever. The banks naturally needed a way to make money in this new business model, so they began charging fees for transactions.
I managed to find a "bank" (credit union that has a deal with a major bank) that has chargeable and non-chargeable transactions. Even for the chargeable ones, the bank will give you 30 free transactions a quarter. If I get my money out of the bank once a week (immediately before I pay my rent), then I reduce the number of transactions. So far, in about 3 years with this "bank", I haven't been charged *any* fees (just some tax).
Of course, this is in Australia. But the deal I have is better than any of the big banks will offer.
Why not just use a standard protocol which already allows portable bookmarks. The IETF has specified ACAP, and there is a Bookmarks schema for it, but Mozilla doesn't support it yet.
http://www.defendmail.sunet.com.au/Projects/ACAP/
> what good does it do that you have the right
> to protest, if you have no job, no income,
> bombs explode every day, and you can get shot
> when making the use of the right to protest?
1. no job
Start a business. Don't wait for corporate handouts.
2. no income
See above.
3. bombs explode every day
I agree this is a problem. Turn in any terrorists you discover.
4. you can get shot when making the use of the right to protest?
That's what police are for. And if that's not happening, then you *do* need more police.
What I'd really like is a pluggable backend system for preferences, et. al., so I can plug it into ACAP. ACAP is like LDAP, but different :).
The difference here is that bookmarks stored in ACAP would be stored in the standard ACAP format. This would mean that I could use these bookmarks in any ACAP-compliant browser. Ideally, your ISP would have the ACAP server. Then, you can access your bookmarks from your own or someone else's browser. Now all of this you could do with a shared network drive. But you could also have a shared section of bookmarks that are shared between everyone on your team, and are "mounted" as a separate folder in your bookmarks.
Sure, you can in theory do all this with mounted drives, but we could replace DNS with mounted drives too, but it doesn't change the fact that you should use the right tool for the right job. We want TMTOWTDI (there's more than one way to do it), as perl suggests, and those many ways include LDAP and ACAP.
> ...I am seriously considering expatrioting myself...
Ok, but where to? Australia isn't much better. Switzerland? New Zealand?
You could always try joining in. Start your own corporation. If you're interested, I'd suggest buying one more thing (second-hand, if possible): Rich Dad, Poor Dad (and especially note the advice about continuing financial education). Yeah, I know, you'd rather program [or insert job here] than work in business, but that's where the money is.
I live for the day when the Capitalists go out for long walks off their short window ledges when their niggerDo you mean niggardly?
investments go south from the lack of credited consumers. The entire economy has been transformed into strip malls, junk bonds and websites. People have been transformed into appallingly credited hyperconsumers who are incapable of saving and meeting all future obligations. A grown person cannot expect to spend money like a 14-yr-old girl for decades and expect any good to come from it.... I presume you've been reading the John Taylor Gatto book "The Underground History of American Education". Well, to merge two ideas I've suggested so far, start a business that's a school whose structure is based on the lessons learned from Gatto's book: Start by looking at the old one-room school, and Montessori schools, and the home-schooling materials. Train students to be self-motivated learners. With only one or two teachers for a school full of students, you'll be able to make lots of money :).
In response to:
/64 address space, this means 2^64 customers, instead of 2^128. Besides, who cares if it's too big, unless it causes problems (see points 3 & 4).
/56 (which would be the equivalent of a Class C for an ISP), they can get a /48 (which is the equivalent of a class B). I'm sure the larger ISPs can get more than a /48. And any small to medium ISP ought not to need more than a /48.
:).
Point 1: This is a current technical limitation which, while admittedly a problem, will no doubt go away as soon as large-scale IPv6 use begins (due to pressure on Cisco).
Point 2: No doubt the same thing would've been said about IPv4. While I agree we'll never use them all, we don't expect to either. If every customer gets assigned a
Point 3: The plan is to greatly reduce the size of routing tables by allocating people large and contiguous blocks, if I understand correctly. So rather than a
Point 4: 3.4% longer? Well, by the time IPv6 comes in, new technology will most likely have made people's downloads 3.4% faster.
That's my theory anyway. Everyone please expose my ignorance, and argue; at least the discussion is still going
Try these ideas everyone:
:).
Mark Twain said "I have never to let my schooling interfere with my education".
So, how about a school which begins by teaching basic literacy (nothing new so far), but allows children to progress at their own rate. The purpose of the literacy would be to empower children to pursue their own education. Additionally, if children were pursuing their own education, they would not need so many teachers. Look at the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (Little House on the Prairie, etc). They had one teacher teaching many levels, and the students were essentially responsible for teaching themselves, rather than having to move at the pace the teacher was speaking at. And this can be done on larger scales too, reducing the teacher to student ratio.
If you think that children would just use the lower staff to student ratio to act up, you may well be right. But shift responsibility for the behaviour from the teacher back where it belongs: the parent. If the child is acting up, send them to their parents (seriously acting up, that is). Also, adjust the enforced schooling age. Here (Australia) it's currently 15. Up until 1900, the words tenager and adolescent didn't even exist. At the age of 12 or 13, you were suddenly an adult (albeit a young one). Part of the problem with today's society is convincing people that they're children until the age of 18/21; by that age, childish behaviour is fairly established, and is sometimes continued significantly longer. Set a minimum school age, and allow anyone who finishes high school to quit when they finish, regardless of age. This will get most discontented students out of the classroom.
Those of you who know your Laura Ingalls Wilder will remember the problem of Big Bill Ritchie, who with his gang had killed a teacher, and was deservedly horsewhipped when he attempted to attack the new teacher. This is the main problem I haven't solved yet, but probably it would be possible to have security guards for teachers too, where this was felt to be necessary.
Also, naturally we'd aim provide an education, not a cradle-to-adult life support system (that's what families are for).
I'm sure I've left some of my ideas out, so everyone feel free to flame away, and I'll do my best to respond sometime
This should hopefully provide you with more idea of what is possible.
One word (and I'm an ISP admin): IEAK
Try Winblox (wblox) from Liu de Yu (cf. recent Bugtraq posts). If you grok regex, it's easy.
Of course, you're assuming that the goal here is to make lots of people highly educated. If so, you've missed the point of the education system. The education system is designed to churn out good employees. See:t oc1.ht m for details. :)
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/
If Firebird has been renamed to Firefox, I'm hoping they don't rename Thunderbird to Thunderbox.
(Moderation only from those who understand the Australian idiom please).
# Engines are mechanical devices and wear down and break, just from everyday use. This doesn't happen to software. It doesn't wear out and break because you use it every day.
...and that's why it's even more important to have cars not welded shut -- a wider range of people can do something under the hood than with source code.
Agreed. But the way some people use their computers, it does. I work in a computer repair shop, and the guys who repair computers sometimes get the same person coming in numerous times with crud on their computer which makes it crash. So if you use it daily in a certain fashion, it will.
# The majority of street car engines are essentially the same. If you understand the principles, you'll understand the principles in any car. Software is not the same. Just because you understand the architecture of a particular database program doesn't mean you have a clue about the architecture of other database programs. Obviously it doesn't mean you have a clue about the architecture of random page layout programs, photo editing programs, C++ compilers, and so on.
# Along the same lines, which do you think is more complex? A car engine or the source code to gcc? Theres absolutely no doubt that it's the latter by an order of magnitude.
Agreed. But why does this make the analogy invalid? It's almost like saying that 19" screens are essentially different than 15" screens; with the screens, there is increased size; with the car/gcc, there is increased complexity, but it doesn't invalidate the principle.
# Just because you can open the hood to your car doesn't mean you know what to do with all those big boxes of chips and wires and a computer controlled fuel injector and so on. If you're riding down the highway and all of a sudden your digital speedometer goes our--or even simpler, the "check engine" light comes on--explain to me how lifting the hood is going to help you. Maybe in the 1970s when cars were simpler. Ditto for most software.
One of the keys to open source, one that even the advocates miss, is that it goes hand in hand with SIMPLICITY. If you have a well-written, clear, and short program, then you can tinker with it. You can't tinker with 200,000 lines of code, unless you have someone to walk through it with you and answer your questions. In reality, odds are that a blind change, no matter how experienced you are, is not going to be a good match for an architecture you don't fully understand.
Well, I've done this with a 60,000 line program. The version of cfengine I'm using is 61,396 lines long. It has a built-in SMTP mail sender. There was a bug in this sender in that it didn't recognise multi-line SMTP responses. Most mail servers don't do these, so it's not a problem, but the mail software I'm using does. I tracked down the appropriate function by reading the code, and sent in a fix (although I recommended that the cfengine chief architect check it because I hadn't coded C in over 6 years).
My point is, with a car, sure, maybe you often can't do anything, but if you understand the general principle of how an engine works (kinda like I understand C), then you can at least sometimes spot the problem.
This seems like a good place to post a link to why we don't teach civics any more.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/
Click on the "Table of Contents" section, and you'll find you can read the whole book online.