It's interesting that the people who criticize centralized economic planning always point to the failures of that model in Eastern Europe, ignoring its early successes, or the more obvious recent successes in China. It goes to show that there's more than one way to organize a political economy, and that the Chinese model has some strategic advantages.
As far as this strategy goes, the thing I find to dislike about it is that it's emphatically nationalist: the goal is to benefit China, at the expense of competing economic powers. But, the criticisms I read here are also at least implicitly nationalist.
Once they got there, sure. We haven't really been to Mars to an extent that we know everything about it, and how we can use knowledge from it to better our lives.
We're discussing colonization, not scientific exploration.
The first Europeans to see the Caribbean Islands saw it as an Earthly paradise -- a better place to live than the place they had come from. That is clearly not the case with Mars.
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist are generally used to describe support for social change to create a more egalitarian society. The terms Left and Right were coined during the French Revolution, referring to the seating arrangement in parliament; those who sat on the left generally supported the radical changes of the revolution, including the creation of a republic and secularization.
I believe that's mostly correct, but leaves out a critical detail: the French Revolution was overtly and explicitly a conflict between classes. You had partisans of monarchy, aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat and peasantry -- and they used those terms. The most passionate advocates of egalitarianism, republicanism, and radical change -- the farthest Left -- were the poorer classes, who were the majority of society; the most determined opponents of these things -- the Right -- were the aristocracy and clergy, who were a minority. The main weight of the Left was the bourgeoisie.
We usually talk about the French Revolution in terms of the assumption of sovereignty by the National Assembly -- the collapse of the old monarchy and the creation of the new republic. So, there's a lot of discussion of the new, emergent republican state, and its use to eliminate the old social structures and enforce the new social structures. The question of support for the state is the question of support for the new, republican state.
So at this point, this is the model of Left and Right:
The Left agenda: #1 Redistribute power to the poor and oppressed. #2 Oppose old social norms and advocate new social norms. #3 Support consolidation of power in the state.
The Right agenda: #1 Consolidate power in the traditional elite. #2 Support old social norms and denigrate new social norms. #3 Oppose consolidation of power in the state.
In these circumstances, I believe that it is clear that #1 is the defining principle in the agenda of Left and Right, #2 is understood as an extension of #1, and #3 follows from #1 and #2 and from the fact that the Left, broadly speaking, controlled a new, fledgling state.
It's pretty easy to see similar circumstances in other social revolutions, particularly Russia in 1917.
However, you should notice that the relation between the three principles is contingent, and assuming that all three line up the same way at all times is a mistake, and leads to confusion. In particular, failing to see the class conflict as the primary issue leads to all sorts of confusion. Obviously, the proletarian radicals who supported the new republican state wanted it to be strong enough to permanently end the power of the aristocracy, but they would not have wanted the old monarchist state to be so strong.
Fast forward to Emperor Napoleon -- well, the problem is right there in the name. Is the French Empire for or against egalitarian ideals? Is it supported by or opposed by the poor and oppressed? It's all much muddier.
The history of Communist Parties, and of the nations they control, is more complicated, but I think there are significant parallels. The biggest difference is that through the changed circumstances of those revolutions, the party in power was nominally the same, but changed dramatically in character. The Bolsheviks of 1917 were very much supporters of the poor and oppressed, represented new social ideals, and sought to establish a new state with the strength to enforce the will of the poor and oppressed; the Communist Party that sent tanks to crush Prague Spring, or the Communist Party that put down the Tiananmen Square uprising, were very different in character.
Left and Right lend themselves to use as terms of comparison of relative degree, but it seems to me that it's a rather difficult comparison to make in the muddy middle. I don't think it's at all clear which of the contemporary US and PRC is more Left or Right, and in contemporary circumstances, I don't think it's a useful comparison.
Past experience has taught us that the new frontier is bountiful.
Past experience showed us that European explorers saw abundant arable land, timber, and game, and defenseless potential slaves with lots of accumulated mineral wealth. The resources they could gather with a landing party were worth more than the cost of the ships they sailed in. Establishing a colony required only dropping off colonists with some hand tools.
Mars is a lifeless rock, with little water, air, or gravity. There are no resources for colonists to use; they'd have to bring everything with them. If there are exploitable mineral resources, the cost of transporting them from Mars would be greater than the value of the minerals.
I usually argue against the elaborate arguments for space exploration, but for once, that side of the argument seems well represented. So I'll flip sides for a change.
A crewed expedition to Mars would, strictly speaking, be an extremely expensive undertaking with little or no scientific merit. I doubt colonizing Mars is even possible. But, if spending large amounts of money on some flashy Big Science project makes it easier to spend money on smaller and more useful science projects, than maybe it would be justified. There are plenty of grotesque government expenditures for political theater, or worse -- the obscenity that is US "defense" spending comes to mind. Spending less money on that, and more on something useless but harmless, would actually be an improvement.
I agree. I think sometimes we worry too much about upsetting kids.
I was pretty upset as a child to learn what "mutually assured destruction" was -- it left me haunted by the idea that underneath the calm, rational facade of the social order, there was brutality, greed, and madness, and this brutality, greed, and madness was concentrated in those with the most power.
That was a valuable insight, and the foundation of my political beliefs ever since.
I've heard good things about PowerDNS, and I think Wikimedia uses it.
I went with BIND just because it's standard, so the instructions for anything that involves nameservice includes instructions for BIND: configuring IPv6, configuring DNSSEC, configuring TLS/SSL, etc. There's never much load on my Linux box, so I don't worry about optimizing performance.
First, political questions are ethical questions. "Gaming" the political system is unethical.
Second, if this meets with even the slightest degree of success, it will backfire. By voting for Palin, you've granted her greater legitimacy and political power, whether she wins the nomination or not.
Vote for what you believe in, even if what you believe in has no chance of winning this election. Or, unless you're too damned clever for honesty and integrity.
I was lucky enough to get a textbook that mentioned Debs and the Socialist Party several times -- enough so that I noticed that between the Civil War and World War II, every time there was a good cause, socialists seemed to be involved. That was enough to lead me to read biographies of Debs, and histories of the Socialist Party and the IWW.
These days, I do see that it's common for progressive middle school teachers to use A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, as at least a supplementary textbook, and given the scope of the book, it gives good coverage to the socialist movement in the US.
Usually, this means voting for the best electable candidate.
No.
In the first place, I refuse to actively endorse a political candidate who proposes courses of action, or perpetuates ongoing courses of action, that I believe are morally reprehensible. In effect, this rules out my voting for any major candidate for the US presidency.
In the second place, it is a mistake to assume that the legal outcome of an election, in a "winner takes all" system, is the same as the political outcome of an election. It makes a difference if a candidate wins by a narrow margin or a wide margin. It makes a difference if there was a minority faction who publicly challenged the candidates on one or more issues.
In the third place, and most important, democratic politics do not begin or end with elections, but it does require organization to have any influence on politics. If you make the effort to build an organization to represent a minority viewpoint in an election, at the end of the election, you've got an organization that represents that viewpoint. If you subordinate your viewpoint to support the "best electable candidate," at the end of the election, you've got absolutely nothing.
One of the most grotesque spectacles in recent US political history was the way in which the tremendous wave of anti-war sentiment, manifested in massive demonstrations against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was deliberately and methodically diffused and eliminated, by the strenuous efforts of pro-Democratic Party liberals to redirect the anti-war movement to support for John Kerry, who campaigned on his military record, and who gave speeches promising to escalate the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and who rattled sabers against Iran and Syria.
I still don't know if the pro-Kerry agitators were simply ruthlessly cynical, or if they thought Kerry was lying in his campaign speeches and would suddenly transform from bellicose to pacific upon being elected.
When I was taking courses on system administration, network administration, and programming, I'd rarely see more than one or two laptops in use. On the one hand, relative income may have been a factor, but on the other, most of the students were current or former IT workers. If most IT students don't need laptops in class, I suspect most students in general don't.
The main question in the original blog post seems to be why instructors don't make their policies on laptop use more explicit. There's some discussion of making exemptions for students with learning disabilities, and a couple of comments that college-level students are adults, and should be free to make their own decisions on whether to ignore lectures and browse the web if they want. It's striking that there's no real defense of using laptops in class for students in general.
If students are routinely ignoring lectures completely, and yet passing their classes, it does raise the question of whether students passively listening to a lecture is a pointless ritual.
When I was taking classes on system and network administration, with students who mostly were or had recently been working in IT, I rarely saw more than one or two laptops on desktops in the room. Part of it must be relative wealth -- this was a community college, not an elite university. But if the IT people don't really need laptops in the classroom, I have to suspect that very few students do need them.
I didn't have any trouble with my router, once I filled in the tunnel information -- everything IPv6 capable auto-configured instantly. But I keep seeing complaints about routers -- maybe I just got lucky.
Seriously. One of the improvements in IPv6 is the built-in automatic configuration. Once the ISPs finally get around to actually deploying IPv6, no one but network administrators will need to look at network addresses.
That's pretty much what I understood the point to be. It's not that typing quickly and accurately is a critical job skill, per se, so much as that typing quickly and accurately is a natural consequence of spending hours at a keyboard.
I'm more on the systems administration side of things, and long before I started working in IT, I noticed that sysadmins were the fastest typists around. I spent a lot of time as a temp data entry clerk, and generally, data entry clerks don't type as fast as sysadmins.
I'm a former Trotskyist, and I believe I largely agree with you.
Leninism is fundamentally about middle class radicalism. The problem with the idea of the vanguard of the proletariat is one that it's embarassing that Marxists (starting with Marx) keep missing: in the relatively fluid class dynamics of bourgeois society, becoming a working class leader means becoming middle class. A working class leader is an intermediate between workers and owners -- which is the definition of middle class. This is why every Leninist party that meets with any success starts acting like the left wing of the bourgeoisie: because that's what it is. Self-delusion on this point makes things worse, not better.
I've come to think that this is an extension of an error by Marx, in that he saw industrial production as almost socialist, as if it were a matter of workers in each factory tossing out the managers and setting up committees to run the places. I think he should have extended the conclusion he reached about the Paris Commune: as workers need a state after their own image, they need an economy after their own image, and we've scarcely begun creating that.
2. DON'T make the administrative interface a GUI. System administrators need a command-line tool for constructing repeatable processes. Procedures are best documented by providing commands that we can copy and paste from the procedure document to the command line. We cannot achieve the same repeatability when the instructions are: "Checkmark the 3rd and 5th options, but not the 2nd option, then click OK." Sysadmins do not want a GUI that requires 25 clicks for each new user. We want to craft the commands to be executed in a text editor or generate them via Perl, Python, or PowerShell.
Since I've had to work with Windows servers in my new job, I thought I'd better read up on them, so I've been reading Windows Server 2008: The Definitive Guide. The sections on the underlying principles and theory of the OS are fine. But that's one third of the text, at most. Most of the text is useless blow-by-blow accounts of sequences of clicks in GUI applets. It's completely unreadable -- the descriptions are meaningless unless you're working through the instructions with an instance of Windows Server 2008 in front of you. And who's going to set up several instances, just to make sense of the description of the applet for configuring load balancing?
I can't blame the book, particularly, as it's a problem of GUIs.My workplace has lots of documents with step-by-step instructions for configuring services, which have one sentence of text, followed by a screenshot, followed by another sentence of text, and another screenshot, and so on.
On the flip side, one of the great things about text configuration files is that while they're full of obscure configuration options, they're also full of the documentation explaining the obscure configuration options. Config files are rich with documentation. GUI configuration applets frequently aren't. I'll take a documented option in a config file over an undocumented option in a GUI config applet any day.
I agree. I first read of that essay on Slashdot, and I've reposted the link several times.
One thing I've found telling about the way mathematics is taught in schools, is that while mathematics is intrinsically interesting, I almost never see students expressing any interest in it. On a college campus, for instance, I'll often see students following instructors from lectures, asking them questions and continuing the class discussion. This happens most often with instructors in humanities courses, but I've seen with courses in social sciences, hard sciences, and engineering. But almost never do I see this with instructors of mathematics courses. The one exception I can think of was the occasion of a guest lecture at UC Berkeley by Benoit Mandelbrot, at the height of popular interest in fractal geometry.
I was particularly struck one time, a year or so ago, when I was taking some community college courses. One of them was a philosophy survey course, and the instructor was quite engaging (moreso than the instructors in the subject I heard at UC Berkeley, some of whom were big names). One day I was part of the crowd of students talking to him, when we got in the elevator with a woman I recognized as part of the mathematics faculty. I felt a bit sorry for her, as we were having an energetic discussion of the nature of mathematics with a philosophy instructor, not with the mathematics instructor.
My experience of taking courses in calculus was that we had problem sets of escalating difficulty, with little or no explanation of what the underlying ideas actually were. I've found it particularly disconcerting that standard calculus textbooks go to enormous lengths to avoid discussing infinitesimals, and being coy about differentials, despite these concepts being perfectly valid, despite having been fundamental to Newton and Leibniz's invention of calculus, and being implicit in much of the terminology and notation.
I had a very hard time keeping up with the work in calculus courses, and had to abandon my plan to pursue a computer science degree because of it. Yet, when I've talked to the students who were outperforming me, or even to mathematics majors, I've found most of them had only a superficial understanding of mathematics, and little or no actual interest in the subject. I find this both perplexing and sad.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting that the people who criticize centralized economic planning always point to the failures of that model in Eastern Europe, ignoring its early successes, or the more obvious recent successes in China. It goes to show that there's more than one way to organize a political economy, and that the Chinese model has some strategic advantages.
As far as this strategy goes, the thing I find to dislike about it is that it's emphatically nationalist: the goal is to benefit China, at the expense of competing economic powers. But, the criticisms I read here are also at least implicitly nationalist.
Once they got there, sure. We haven't really been to Mars to an extent that we know everything about it, and how we can use knowledge from it to better our lives.
We're discussing colonization, not scientific exploration.
The first Europeans to see the Caribbean Islands saw it as an Earthly paradise -- a better place to live than the place they had come from. That is clearly not the case with Mars.
The usage of Left and Right gets confused. How and why takes a bit of history.
From Wikipedia:
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist are generally used to describe support for social change to create a more egalitarian society. The terms Left and Right were coined during the French Revolution, referring to the seating arrangement in parliament; those who sat on the left generally supported the radical changes of the revolution, including the creation of a republic and secularization.
I believe that's mostly correct, but leaves out a critical detail: the French Revolution was overtly and explicitly a conflict between classes. You had partisans of monarchy, aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat and peasantry -- and they used those terms. The most passionate advocates of egalitarianism, republicanism, and radical change -- the farthest Left -- were the poorer classes, who were the majority of society; the most determined opponents of these things -- the Right -- were the aristocracy and clergy, who were a minority. The main weight of the Left was the bourgeoisie.
We usually talk about the French Revolution in terms of the assumption of sovereignty by the National Assembly -- the collapse of the old monarchy and the creation of the new republic. So, there's a lot of discussion of the new, emergent republican state, and its use to eliminate the old social structures and enforce the new social structures. The question of support for the state is the question of support for the new, republican state.
So at this point, this is the model of Left and Right:
The Left agenda:
#1 Redistribute power to the poor and oppressed.
#2 Oppose old social norms and advocate new social norms.
#3 Support consolidation of power in the state.
The Right agenda:
#1 Consolidate power in the traditional elite.
#2 Support old social norms and denigrate new social norms.
#3 Oppose consolidation of power in the state.
In these circumstances, I believe that it is clear that #1 is the defining principle in the agenda of Left and Right, #2 is understood as an extension of #1, and #3 follows from #1 and #2 and from the fact that the Left, broadly speaking, controlled a new, fledgling state.
It's pretty easy to see similar circumstances in other social revolutions, particularly Russia in 1917.
However, you should notice that the relation between the three principles is contingent, and assuming that all three line up the same way at all times is a mistake, and leads to confusion. In particular, failing to see the class conflict as the primary issue leads to all sorts of confusion. Obviously, the proletarian radicals who supported the new republican state wanted it to be strong enough to permanently end the power of the aristocracy, but they would not have wanted the old monarchist state to be so strong.
Fast forward to Emperor Napoleon -- well, the problem is right there in the name. Is the French Empire for or against egalitarian ideals? Is it supported by or opposed by the poor and oppressed? It's all much muddier.
The history of Communist Parties, and of the nations they control, is more complicated, but I think there are significant parallels. The biggest difference is that through the changed circumstances of those revolutions, the party in power was nominally the same, but changed dramatically in character. The Bolsheviks of 1917 were very much supporters of the poor and oppressed, represented new social ideals, and sought to establish a new state with the strength to enforce the will of the poor and oppressed; the Communist Party that sent tanks to crush Prague Spring, or the Communist Party that put down the Tiananmen Square uprising, were very different in character.
Left and Right lend themselves to use as terms of comparison of relative degree, but it seems to me that it's a rather difficult comparison to make in the muddy middle. I don't think it's at all clear which of the contemporary US and PRC is more Left or Right, and in contemporary circumstances, I don't think it's a useful comparison.
Past experience has taught us that the new frontier is bountiful.
Past experience showed us that European explorers saw abundant arable land, timber, and game, and defenseless potential slaves with lots of accumulated mineral wealth. The resources they could gather with a landing party were worth more than the cost of the ships they sailed in. Establishing a colony required only dropping off colonists with some hand tools.
Mars is a lifeless rock, with little water, air, or gravity. There are no resources for colonists to use; they'd have to bring everything with them. If there are exploitable mineral resources, the cost of transporting them from Mars would be greater than the value of the minerals.
I usually argue against the elaborate arguments for space exploration, but for once, that side of the argument seems well represented. So I'll flip sides for a change.
A crewed expedition to Mars would, strictly speaking, be an extremely expensive undertaking with little or no scientific merit. I doubt colonizing Mars is even possible. But, if spending large amounts of money on some flashy Big Science project makes it easier to spend money on smaller and more useful science projects, than maybe it would be justified. There are plenty of grotesque government expenditures for political theater, or worse -- the obscenity that is US "defense" spending comes to mind. Spending less money on that, and more on something useless but harmless, would actually be an improvement.
I have a hard time imagining someone running for re-election on the basis of having upgraded the time system software.
Fascist coward.
I agree. I think sometimes we worry too much about upsetting kids.
I was pretty upset as a child to learn what "mutually assured destruction" was -- it left me haunted by the idea that underneath the calm, rational facade of the social order, there was brutality, greed, and madness, and this brutality, greed, and madness was concentrated in those with the most power.
That was a valuable insight, and the foundation of my political beliefs ever since.
I've heard good things about PowerDNS, and I think Wikimedia uses it.
I went with BIND just because it's standard, so the instructions for anything that involves nameservice includes instructions for BIND: configuring IPv6, configuring DNSSEC, configuring TLS/SSL, etc. There's never much load on my Linux box, so I don't worry about optimizing performance.
You can override the assigned nameservers at your router or in your OS.
With a little effort, you can set up BIND on your own system.
First, political questions are ethical questions. "Gaming" the political system is unethical.
Second, if this meets with even the slightest degree of success, it will backfire. By voting for Palin, you've granted her greater legitimacy and political power, whether she wins the nomination or not.
Vote for what you believe in, even if what you believe in has no chance of winning this election. Or, unless you're too damned clever for honesty and integrity.
I was lucky enough to get a textbook that mentioned Debs and the Socialist Party several times -- enough so that I noticed that between the Civil War and World War II, every time there was a good cause, socialists seemed to be involved. That was enough to lead me to read biographies of Debs, and histories of the Socialist Party and the IWW.
These days, I do see that it's common for progressive middle school teachers to use A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, as at least a supplementary textbook, and given the scope of the book, it gives good coverage to the socialist movement in the US.
Usually, this means voting for the best electable candidate.
No.
In the first place, I refuse to actively endorse a political candidate who proposes courses of action, or perpetuates ongoing courses of action, that I believe are morally reprehensible. In effect, this rules out my voting for any major candidate for the US presidency.
In the second place, it is a mistake to assume that the legal outcome of an election, in a "winner takes all" system, is the same as the political outcome of an election. It makes a difference if a candidate wins by a narrow margin or a wide margin. It makes a difference if there was a minority faction who publicly challenged the candidates on one or more issues.
In the third place, and most important, democratic politics do not begin or end with elections, but it does require organization to have any influence on politics. If you make the effort to build an organization to represent a minority viewpoint in an election, at the end of the election, you've got an organization that represents that viewpoint. If you subordinate your viewpoint to support the "best electable candidate," at the end of the election, you've got absolutely nothing.
One of the most grotesque spectacles in recent US political history was the way in which the tremendous wave of anti-war sentiment, manifested in massive demonstrations against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was deliberately and methodically diffused and eliminated, by the strenuous efforts of pro-Democratic Party liberals to redirect the anti-war movement to support for John Kerry, who campaigned on his military record, and who gave speeches promising to escalate the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and who rattled sabers against Iran and Syria.
I still don't know if the pro-Kerry agitators were simply ruthlessly cynical, or if they thought Kerry was lying in his campaign speeches and would suddenly transform from bellicose to pacific upon being elected.
When I was taking courses on system administration, network administration, and programming, I'd rarely see more than one or two laptops in use. On the one hand, relative income may have been a factor, but on the other, most of the students were current or former IT workers. If most IT students don't need laptops in class, I suspect most students in general don't.
The main question in the original blog post seems to be why instructors don't make their policies on laptop use more explicit. There's some discussion of making exemptions for students with learning disabilities, and a couple of comments that college-level students are adults, and should be free to make their own decisions on whether to ignore lectures and browse the web if they want. It's striking that there's no real defense of using laptops in class for students in general.
If students are routinely ignoring lectures completely, and yet passing their classes, it does raise the question of whether students passively listening to a lecture is a pointless ritual.
When I was taking classes on system and network administration, with students who mostly were or had recently been working in IT, I rarely saw more than one or two laptops on desktops in the room. Part of it must be relative wealth -- this was a community college, not an elite university. But if the IT people don't really need laptops in the classroom, I have to suspect that very few students do need them.
I didn't have any trouble with my router, once I filled in the tunnel information -- everything IPv6 capable auto-configured instantly. But I keep seeing complaints about routers -- maybe I just got lucky.
Which router, and which firmware version?
My D-Link DIR-615 C1 works great with the 3.12NA firmware. 3.11NA had bugs with IPv4 DHCP, and 3.13NA had some bugs with IPv6.
Seriously. One of the improvements in IPv6 is the built-in automatic configuration. Once the ISPs finally get around to actually deploying IPv6, no one but network administrators will need to look at network addresses.
That's pretty much what I understood the point to be. It's not that typing quickly and accurately is a critical job skill, per se, so much as that typing quickly and accurately is a natural consequence of spending hours at a keyboard.
I'm more on the systems administration side of things, and long before I started working in IT, I noticed that sysadmins were the fastest typists around. I spent a lot of time as a temp data entry clerk, and generally, data entry clerks don't type as fast as sysadmins.
I'm a former Trotskyist, and I believe I largely agree with you.
Leninism is fundamentally about middle class radicalism. The problem with the idea of the vanguard of the proletariat is one that it's embarassing that Marxists (starting with Marx) keep missing: in the relatively fluid class dynamics of bourgeois society, becoming a working class leader means becoming middle class. A working class leader is an intermediate between workers and owners -- which is the definition of middle class. This is why every Leninist party that meets with any success starts acting like the left wing of the bourgeoisie: because that's what it is. Self-delusion on this point makes things worse, not better.
I've come to think that this is an extension of an error by Marx, in that he saw industrial production as almost socialist, as if it were a matter of workers in each factory tossing out the managers and setting up committees to run the places. I think he should have extended the conclusion he reached about the Paris Commune: as workers need a state after their own image, they need an economy after their own image, and we've scarcely begun creating that.
Enron did perform one valuable service: distracting Californians from how PG&E was criminally exploiting them.
If you use dog shit for an envelope, nobody wants to read the letter.
Butterflies are widely regarded as more pleasant than dog shit.
2. DON'T make the administrative interface a GUI. System administrators need a command-line tool for constructing repeatable processes. Procedures are best documented by providing commands that we can copy and paste from the procedure document to the command line. We cannot achieve the same repeatability when the instructions are: "Checkmark the 3rd and 5th options, but not the 2nd option, then click OK." Sysadmins do not want a GUI that requires 25 clicks for each new user. We want to craft the commands to be executed in a text editor or generate them via Perl, Python, or PowerShell.
Since I've had to work with Windows servers in my new job, I thought I'd better read up on them, so I've been reading Windows Server 2008: The Definitive Guide. The sections on the underlying principles and theory of the OS are fine. But that's one third of the text, at most. Most of the text is useless blow-by-blow accounts of sequences of clicks in GUI applets. It's completely unreadable -- the descriptions are meaningless unless you're working through the instructions with an instance of Windows Server 2008 in front of you. And who's going to set up several instances, just to make sense of the description of the applet for configuring load balancing?
I can't blame the book, particularly, as it's a problem of GUIs.My workplace has lots of documents with step-by-step instructions for configuring services, which have one sentence of text, followed by a screenshot, followed by another sentence of text, and another screenshot, and so on.
On the flip side, one of the great things about text configuration files is that while they're full of obscure configuration options, they're also full of the documentation explaining the obscure configuration options. Config files are rich with documentation. GUI configuration applets frequently aren't. I'll take a documented option in a config file over an undocumented option in a GUI config applet any day.
I agree. I first read of that essay on Slashdot, and I've reposted the link several times.
One thing I've found telling about the way mathematics is taught in schools, is that while mathematics is intrinsically interesting, I almost never see students expressing any interest in it. On a college campus, for instance, I'll often see students following instructors from lectures, asking them questions and continuing the class discussion. This happens most often with instructors in humanities courses, but I've seen with courses in social sciences, hard sciences, and engineering. But almost never do I see this with instructors of mathematics courses. The one exception I can think of was the occasion of a guest lecture at UC Berkeley by Benoit Mandelbrot, at the height of popular interest in fractal geometry.
I was particularly struck one time, a year or so ago, when I was taking some community college courses. One of them was a philosophy survey course, and the instructor was quite engaging (moreso than the instructors in the subject I heard at UC Berkeley, some of whom were big names). One day I was part of the crowd of students talking to him, when we got in the elevator with a woman I recognized as part of the mathematics faculty. I felt a bit sorry for her, as we were having an energetic discussion of the nature of mathematics with a philosophy instructor, not with the mathematics instructor.
My experience of taking courses in calculus was that we had problem sets of escalating difficulty, with little or no explanation of what the underlying ideas actually were. I've found it particularly disconcerting that standard calculus textbooks go to enormous lengths to avoid discussing infinitesimals, and being coy about differentials, despite these concepts being perfectly valid, despite having been fundamental to Newton and Leibniz's invention of calculus, and being implicit in much of the terminology and notation.
I had a very hard time keeping up with the work in calculus courses, and had to abandon my plan to pursue a computer science degree because of it. Yet, when I've talked to the students who were outperforming me, or even to mathematics majors, I've found most of them had only a superficial understanding of mathematics, and little or no actual interest in the subject. I find this both perplexing and sad.