I think you ought to test/validate your assumptions and consider evaluating what Perl 6 has to offer. Many of the core Perl 6 developers had little experience or interest in Perl 5. The pace of development and number of committers seems to be accelerating.
Performance has gotten about 4 times faster in the last year.
The developer ecosystem is maturing. CPAN6 is here.
Perl 6 provides Inline::Perl5. Which allows backward compatible access to and mixing of Perl 5 and Perl 6. It also allows you to specify a versioned dialect of Perl 6. So in ~10 years when Perl 6.i is released. Your code targeting Perl 6.d functionality which has been deprecated in 6.e and removed in 6.f will still work.
The design and implementation of Perl 6 is clean and heavily influenced by Paul Graham's essay on The Hundred-Year Language. Most of Perl 6 is written in both Perl 6 and a subset of Perl 6 called Not Quite Perl (NQP). Which means Perl developers don't need to learn another language to become core developers.
Larry said that acceleration beats velocity. Perl 6 certainly seems to be accelerating. If you watch the video... there's a lot of exciting things baked into Perl 6. However the focus is on getting things right, clean, and fast (in that order). If/when performance gets within ~10-20% of Perl 5, Python, etc... I think the expressiveness and strangely consistent and clean language design will prompt many to re-evaluate their concept of Perl.
I've heard this complaint before. Have you ever considered that the OLPC XO laptop at $200 can hold significantly more than $200 worth of books?
The XO has a built in webcam and microphone. I remember learning how cell phones in remote fishing villages in Peru allowed fisherman to check market prices before selling to the middle men. Imagine doing that while putting the Internet at their fingertips?
The XO is an enabling technology. It won't solve the problems of poor children around the world. But it will enable them to solve their own problems. And I dare say that have a much better idea of the problems and solutions than we do.
There is no good research data with findings that support a correlation between homework and academic benefit. I believe the unspecified study that shows there "may" be some benefit if the last years of high school was flawed. At least if it is the one mentioned by Alfie Kohn in his book "The Homework Myth" http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/hm.htm. I'm sure someone out there has a reason to discount Mr. Kohn and his book. But personally, I found it a good read. A lot of emphasis on what makes for good research, and the limits of research.
It sounds like you have some good self-guidelines on assigning work. And the fact that you let the students work on it in class is a good think to IMHO. I wonder why you insist on labelling it homework?
What I don't understand is where schools, principals, teachers and what have you come off thinking they have the right to our childrens' time after school hours. There is no good research data that supports findings that correlate homework with academic benefit. In the absence of any proven academic benefits, please don't grasp at other unsubstantiated ones.
1) Practice Fine as long as it is optional. Then you'll know the child will implicitly be agreeing that it isn't just busywork when they complete it.
2) Responsibility Please refrain yourself from teaching our children responsibility outside school hours. "There are only 24 hours in the day" applies to kids as well as adults. 7 hours of school plus 2-4 hours of homework a night quickly becomes a 50+ hour per week job. And that takes away from the myriad of activities that our kids partake in or would be participating in if they weren't so busy with homework. I am certain that our children learn more about time management and responsibility from choosing and participating in the extracirricular activities that they are interested in, than they do from turning in homework assignments.
3) Communication Communication is 2 way. How often do you think a parent signs homework without even looking or talking about it. More often than not I'd wager. Parent teacher conferences are a much better forum for communication. If you want to keep parents in the loop, try keeping a regular monthly schedule at a designated public venue and an open invitation for parents to drop in. Make the parents sign and return an open invitation notice if you will. But please don't assign homework for the purpose of keeping us parents in the loop.
4) Avoiding Procrastination Please teach procrastination avoidance during school hours. You can just as easily allow small segments of in class time to complete large tasks. People study best in different ways. If what they're learning is engaging and interesting, they'll study it in their own way in their own time. My daughter by her own choice completes the majority of her weekly homework assignments on Monday night. And then works nightly on the few things she has decided need reinforcement. She has made the choice that she'd rather do as much as she can on Mondays so that Tuesday through Sunday will be relatively free.
I've read that teachers who swear off homework have credited it with helping them to become better teachers. They find that they have to work harder on their lesson plans, priorities and time management in order to get the message across.
I don't think your reasons for homework are supportable.
You have a rather top down perspective on the issue. Rather than thinking of people as vessels to be filled through a process of "internalization", I think we each have to construct our own understanding of the world around us.
From my perspective, teachers who think their job is to teach the materials have missed the point. Teachers teach their pupils. That doesn't mean connecting all the dots for them, but helping them connect the dots for themselves. Giving them not the answers but the questions. And then helping them navigate by thinking their way to the answer. Different people come at understanding things from different angles. Which I suppose is why there's that saying about only really understanding something after you've taught it.
It is a cop out to simply lay the blame on the students for failing to internalize the materials due to lack of motivation or ability on their part. Either the teacher or the materials themselves have come up short if the students can't be convinced of value of learning them.
Homework itself isn't a bad thing. But requiring it is... especially as an end in and of itself. 7 hours of school each day with 2-4 hours of homework a night quickly becomes a 50+ hour per week job. Learning should be full of questions, excitement, ah ha moments and about exploring ideas. It shouldn't be a mind numblying crushing load of tedious rigermarole. If you want to provide optional take home assignments without added incentives then all is well and good. The kids who realize they need extra work or just want to reinforce the lesson will have the option of doing so.
With the exception of the last few years of high school, there is no research data which supports any positive relationship between homework and learning. Please don't argue pedagogical benefits unless you can back them up with good research. I would be very interested in these pedagogical benefits you mention, if they are supportable.
Falling back on homework for the purpose of teaching time managements skills and study habits is unsupportable. Not all kids go to college. And you aren't helping prepare kids for college if you don't let them develop their own study methods and time management skills. Because like learning itself, different people study best in different ways. People have enough interests in their life that there will never be enough time in the day. No one needs busywork to learn time management skills.
I think the current system fails most if not all of our kids, because it tries to force conformity with things any otherwise free thinking individual would have a hard time stomaching. I believe that that pressure towards conformity to doing what is expected and dealing with tedium, is in large part responsible for the apathy most of us have to school, jobs, and government.
By and large, I agree with the previous poster. But on one point, I cannot:
"I view bad teachers as another challenge to be overcome; a truly good student will persevere no matter the quality of the teacher."
This is simply not true. Some kids will persevere, many will not.
There have been psychological studies that have used children previously identified through intelligence testing and catagorized them by their exceptional strengths: creative, analytical, etc. In the study I read, the groups of students were placed into classrooms with a teacher that taught the cirriculum with a particular emphasis on one perspective: creative, analytical, etc.
The kids whose exceptional strength matched the one emphasized by the teacher did best.
It is unfortunate that the education system in the USA emphasizes the analytical and memorization talents. A lot of kids' talents are never recognized or encouraged. Many subsequently come to feel that they are failures because they don't excel in sports or academics.
The comments on this thread are like a pendulum swinging back and forth between an over-reliance on either hardwork or innate talent. It takes both.
Using the ever popular sports analogy: Lance Armstrong was a Tour de France cyclist before he was diagnosed with and recovered from testicular cancer. But he never won one until after. He credited this to plumbing the depths of his physical, emotional, and mental limits during chemotherapy and recovery. By coming to a better understanding of his limits, he was subsequently able to push himself closer to them during his training. And that has made all the difference between and excellent cyclist and a singularly exceptional one.
It takes both talent and dedication. I agree with the original poster, that the USA and apparently Canada tend to ignore dedication and hardwork in favor of innate talent. I find it disturbing that people think it is a good thing for a "gifted" student to be able to get through their education without having to develop a work ethic, time management, organization, and prioritization skills. So what if they get A's, get into the good college, and find a stable job with a good income. Think of what they could have become if they'd learned to apply themselves.
I'd like to draw attention to some bad assumptions about IQ testing:
Giving an Generalized IQ score (Full Scale Intelligence Quotient) without specifying which test was given isn't very useful.
For example, you can only get scores above 160 on the old Stanford Binet form L-M. So comparing your relative's >170 score to your own is most likely an apples to oranges comparison.
Different tests test different things. Full Scale scores are derived from composite scores, and composite scores are derived from subtests. The selection of subtests and their grouping into composites are much more significant than an overall general intelligence score.
A high generalized IQ score isn't a garrauntee of success in intellectual endeavors. Returning to sports analogies: Michael Jordan and Lance Armstrong are both amazing atheletes. But they aren't amazing due to high scores in generalized atheletic talent, but rather because they each have a particular cocktail of talents suited to their respective sports.
IQ testing is a closed loop
IQ testing orginated when the French psychologist Alfred Binet developed tests to determine academic aptitude at a boys school. IQ testing today still largely reflects an idea of generalized intelligence rooted in academic aptitude.
academic institutions promote and track kids based on IQ scores. One school psychologist I know, preferred not to do testing where possible on lower functioning children to avoid their being tracked for failure.
The kids tracked for success tend to be more successful. So kids and parents who to prioritize their education on the components tested by IQ tests tend to do better.
In Summary: Different cultures and countries around the world have different ideas of how to define and test for intelligence. The basket of talents reflected in intelligence tests varies accordingly. The kids who well match the particular cocktail of talents valued by their culture find themselves tracked for success, and are subsequently more likely to be successful.
Sidenotes:
IQ scores are supposed to be a normal distribution (bell curve). But research has shown that far more people are identified with "exceptional" intelligence that would be expected.
An IQ of 130 falls into the 95th percentile. Which roughly corresponds to 1 in every 20 individuals, if IQ tests really were a normal distribution.
Research has shown that if there is more than a marginal gap in ability or achievement students do not benefit from being mixed.
First, they don't view the more advanced students as role models, but rather someone in a different league.
Second the advanced students often end up doing a greater share of the work, sometimes their classmates work too. And they often wind up pigeonholed as tutors. A job which doesn't challenge them, and for which they have little pedagogical experience.
Mixed ability classrooms can be considered harmful to all parties when the difference in ability is significant.
Programming Web Services with Perl
is a first edition. If you check out the Amazon reviews, you will note that as of the time of this post, it has 5 stars from 5 reviews.
Your observations of those books may very well be valid. I myself haven't read them. But the amazon reviews for them are 2 1/2 stars and 4 stars respectively.
Honestly, if someone is reading this review and they don't know what XML-RPC and SOAP are... they probably don't need to be reading the book;)
I did say the book assumes no knowledge of XML-RPC and SOAP. But, obviously the review does... Though you are correct, I should have expanded the acronyms. I share your dislike for when you're never told what an acronym stands for... However be content that the book does explain what they are.
XML-RPC: eXtensible Markup Language - Remote Procedure Call
Why ask a marketing guy anything? I can read press releases as well as the next guy. Are you honestly able to say anything that isn't strictly party line?
A Marketer went into the barbers for a haircut. "Certainly, sir," said the barber, "But you will have to take your Personal Stereo off." "No, No," said the marketer, and fled to another barber, who said the same thing. Finally the marketer found a barber who would cut his hair without taking the headphone off. As the barber chopped and scissored, the marketer fell asleep. The barber gently removed the headphones; the marketer slumped and breathed more shallowly and then, died. The barber heard a gentle noise coming from the headset. He picked it up and listened: "Breathe in, Breathe out, Breathe in, Breathe out."
Quoting Linus Torvalds: "0.01 sources weren't actually runnable: they were just a token gesture to arl who had probably started to despair about ever getting anything. "
if you're feeling ignorant of linux history, read this. It has content I haven't seen elsewhere.
What was that an article or a novella? Many valid and interesting points, but too too long.
If there are fewer turn based games (TBG's), then let me suggest a relatively recent release that was overlooked. Sure it's one of those wargames which the writer described as being a hopelessly small niche market. I'm not a war nut, I am becoming a "The Operational Art of Warfare - Century of War" (TOAW-CW) nut.
It is the wargamers' wargame. Practically every major offensive of the past century is represented in the scenario library. And if you like to play a game with a friend on your own schedule. TBG's can't be beat. Every other night I play a turn vs. one of the guys from work. Testing each other's prowess in various scenarios. This game could be played for years without exhausting the scenarios or growing bored. And as it ships with its own editor, you're free to create your own scenarios.
The first thing I did was turn the 3D view off, and settle into the informative 2D game view. The variety of units, formations, supply, combat and organizational tactics and strategies that can be mastered are a pleasure to delve into. And here is a game AI which is better on offense than defense...
Cobalt has been a great company. I'm disappointed to see to swallowed by Sun. I wish them well, but in the mean time, I'm liquidating my holdings of COBT.
Why Sell? What value does the Sun deal bring to Cobalt? Cobalt has been doing pretty well establishing their market and channel partners. What does this deal do to benefit the company? Sure the stockholders get to line their pockets in the short-term, but it is bad for the company. Until today, Cobalt has been free to focus on doing the network server appliance right.
Now Cobalt is being swallowed by the beamoth Sun, who will doubtless meddle in their affairs. As if bloated corporate meddling won't be bad enough, I imagine use of Linux may be on the way out at Cobalt. Hasn't Sun after all made it a corporate directive that they aren't going to be a Linux company? Sun might "support" Linux, but they sure as hell don't sell it.
Such corporate politics and meddling won't be good for Cobalt. Not that Cobalt will be ruffled by the direction of such a hypothetical directive. They've always firmly stated that they are not in the business of selling Linux, but that Linux helps them sell network server applianced.
Anything above iron in the periodic table of elements didn't originate from our sun, but rather from supernovas...according to my coffee table physics books.
I'll take my knives in extraterrestrial lead, silver, and gold please!
The following batch file syntax will remove ILOVEU from a WinNT machine, and show you all the damaged files. Perhaps someone can post a version for Win9X? Anyone have any improvements or suggestions?
Garrett
==== cut here and past into a.cmd file ==== @echo off if exist %SYSTEMROOT%\win32dll.vbs echo You were infected with love! if not exist %SYSTEMROOT%\win32dll.vbs echo You aren't infected... if not exist %SYSTEMROOT%\win32dll.vbs GOTO END
if exist %SYSTEMROOT%\win32dll.vbs del %SYSTEMROOT%\win32dll.vbs if exist %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\mskernel32.vbs del %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\mskernel32.vbs if exist %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\love-letter-for-you.txt.vbs del
%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\love-letter-for-you.txt.vb s if exist %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\love-letter-for-you.htm del %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\love-letter-for-you.htm
%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\Rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 %TEMP%\ihateu.inf del %TEMP%\ihateu.inf
echo Love has been eradicated from this computer... echo.
echo Let's find files that may have been infected echo This will search all local and networked drives echo So be prepared to wait. echo. echo Recommendation: Delete all files listed echo. echo Results will be written to IHATE.TXT echo. echo.>IHATE.TXT
for %%x in (a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z) do if exist %%x:\nul ( echo Searching %%x: %%x: cd\ dir/s/b *.vbs > IHATE.TMP type IHATE.TMP type IHATE.TMP >> IHATE.TXT ) del IHATE.TMP
I like Mandrake. But, one of the reasons I have had a hard time recommending Mandrake as a first time Linux distribution to friends, family, and co-workers... is concerns about quality.
With RedHat, Caldera, and SUSE I have the impression that a distribution undergoes rigorous quality assurance testing before being released. Mandrake seems to put more emphasis on user interface issues, eye candy, and being there first as an early adopter of new features, functionality, and code.
In the past, I've assisted with testing and debugging packages in the Cooker development distribution. The process by which Cooker was transformed into a release distribution happened behind the scenes and off the mailing lists.
I'm curious as to why the process of creating a release version of a distribution doesn't happen in the same open development fishbowl in which development takes place? I've been somewhat surprised by failures of simple things like:
Bad or Missing package dependencies
Failure to completely uninstall packages
The large footprint of the smallest installable set of packages for a Mandrake Distribution
Things which I would expect to have been covered in regression tests by a quality assurance group.
Could you talk a little bit about the process of quality assurance and testing a new distribution at Mandrake? How many people on staff does Mandrake have working full-time in this capacity? Where do Mandrake's strengths and weaknesses lie in providing a high quality distribution (in the context of the common problems all distributions face)?
Mandrake hasn't been are repackaged version of RedHat since at least 6.0. Sure there is cross-pollination, but that's different. And since RedHat is the defacto standard to the pointy haired people, they work hard to make it 99.999% RedHat compatible.
Also, in 7.0 they have 3 prepackaged installs (paraphrased): desktop, development, and server.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you ought to test/validate your assumptions and consider evaluating what Perl 6 has to offer. Many of the core Perl 6 developers had little experience or interest in Perl 5. The pace of development and number of committers seems to be accelerating.
Performance has gotten about 4 times faster in the last year.
The developer ecosystem is maturing. CPAN6 is here.
Perl 6 provides Inline::Perl5. Which allows backward compatible access to and mixing of Perl 5 and Perl 6. It also allows you to specify a versioned dialect of Perl 6. So in ~10 years when Perl 6.i is released. Your code targeting Perl 6.d functionality which has been deprecated in 6.e and removed in 6.f will still work.
The design and implementation of Perl 6 is clean and heavily influenced by Paul Graham's essay on The Hundred-Year Language. Most of Perl 6 is written in both Perl 6 and a subset of Perl 6 called Not Quite Perl (NQP). Which means Perl developers don't need to learn another language to become core developers.
Larry said that acceleration beats velocity. Perl 6 certainly seems to be accelerating. If you watch the video... there's a lot of exciting things baked into Perl 6. However the focus is on getting things right, clean, and fast (in that order). If/when performance gets within ~10-20% of Perl 5, Python, etc... I think the expressiveness and strangely consistent and clean language design will prompt many to re-evaluate their concept of Perl.
I've heard this complaint before. Have you ever considered that the OLPC XO laptop at $200 can hold significantly more than $200 worth of books?
The XO has a built in webcam and microphone. I remember learning how cell phones in remote fishing villages in Peru allowed fisherman to check market prices before selling to the middle men. Imagine doing that while putting the Internet at their fingertips?
The XO is an enabling technology. It won't solve the problems of poor children around the world. But it will enable them to solve their own problems. And I dare say that have a much better idea of the problems and solutions than we do.
What University of Missouri study? I'd like to read it. Got a url?
There is no good research data with findings that support a correlation between homework and academic benefit. I believe the unspecified study that shows there "may" be some benefit if the last years of high school was flawed. At least if it is the one mentioned by Alfie Kohn in his book "The Homework Myth" http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/hm.htm. I'm sure someone out there has a reason to discount Mr. Kohn and his book. But personally, I found it a good read. A lot of emphasis on what makes for good research, and the limits of research.
It sounds like you have some good self-guidelines on assigning work. And the fact that you let the students work on it in class is a good think to IMHO. I wonder why you insist on labelling it homework?
What I don't understand is where schools, principals, teachers and what have you come off thinking they have the right to our childrens' time after school hours. There is no good research data that supports findings that correlate homework with academic benefit. In the absence of any proven academic benefits, please don't grasp at other unsubstantiated ones.
1) Practice
Fine as long as it is optional. Then you'll know the child will implicitly be agreeing that it isn't just busywork when they complete it.
2) Responsibility
Please refrain yourself from teaching our children responsibility outside school hours. "There are only 24 hours in the day" applies to kids as well as adults. 7 hours of school plus 2-4 hours of homework a night quickly becomes a 50+ hour per week job. And that takes away from the myriad of activities that our kids partake in or would be participating in if they weren't so busy with homework. I am certain that our children learn more about time management and responsibility from choosing and participating in the extracirricular activities that they are interested in, than they do from turning in homework assignments.
3) Communication
Communication is 2 way. How often do you think a parent signs homework without even looking or talking about it. More often than not I'd wager. Parent teacher conferences are a much better forum for communication. If you want to keep parents in the loop, try keeping a regular monthly schedule at a designated public venue and an open invitation for parents to drop in. Make the parents sign and return an open invitation notice if you will. But please don't assign homework for the purpose of keeping us parents in the loop.
4) Avoiding Procrastination
Please teach procrastination avoidance during school hours. You can just as easily allow small segments of in class time to complete large tasks. People study best in different ways. If what they're learning is engaging and interesting, they'll study it in their own way in their own time. My daughter by her own choice completes the majority of her weekly homework assignments on Monday night. And then works nightly on the few things she has decided need reinforcement. She has made the choice that she'd rather do as much as she can on Mondays so that Tuesday through Sunday will be relatively free.
I've read that teachers who swear off homework have credited it with helping them to become better teachers. They find that they have to work harder on their lesson plans, priorities and time management in order to get the message across.
I don't think your reasons for homework are supportable.
You have a rather top down perspective on the issue. Rather than thinking of people as vessels to be filled through a process of "internalization", I think we each have to construct our own understanding of the world around us.
From my perspective, teachers who think their job is to teach the materials have missed the point. Teachers teach their pupils. That doesn't mean connecting all the dots for them, but helping them connect the dots for themselves. Giving them not the answers but the questions. And then helping them navigate by thinking their way to the answer. Different people come at understanding things from different angles. Which I suppose is why there's that saying about only really understanding something after you've taught it.
It is a cop out to simply lay the blame on the students for failing to internalize the materials due to lack of motivation or ability on their part. Either the teacher or the materials themselves have come up short if the students can't be convinced of value of learning them.
Homework itself isn't a bad thing. But requiring it is... especially as an end in and of itself. 7 hours of school each day with 2-4 hours of homework a night quickly becomes a 50+ hour per week job. Learning should be full of questions, excitement, ah ha moments and about exploring ideas. It shouldn't be a mind numblying crushing load of tedious rigermarole. If you want to provide optional take home assignments without added incentives then all is well and good. The kids who realize they need extra work or just want to reinforce the lesson will have the option of doing so.
With the exception of the last few years of high school, there is no research data which supports any positive relationship between homework and learning. Please don't argue pedagogical benefits unless you can back them up with good research. I would be very interested in these pedagogical benefits you mention, if they are supportable.
Falling back on homework for the purpose of teaching time managements skills and study habits is unsupportable. Not all kids go to college. And you aren't helping prepare kids for college if you don't let them develop their own study methods and time management skills. Because like learning itself, different people study best in different ways. People have enough interests in their life that there will never be enough time in the day. No one needs busywork to learn time management skills.
I think the current system fails most if not all of our kids, because it tries to force conformity with things any otherwise free thinking individual would have a hard time stomaching. I believe that that pressure towards conformity to doing what is expected and dealing with tedium, is in large part responsible for the apathy most of us have to school, jobs, and government.
By and large, I agree with the previous poster. But on one point, I cannot:
"I view bad teachers as another challenge to be overcome; a truly good student will persevere no matter the quality of the teacher."
This is simply not true. Some kids will persevere, many will not.
There have been psychological studies that have used children previously identified through intelligence testing and catagorized them by their exceptional strengths: creative, analytical, etc. In the study I read, the groups of students were placed into classrooms with a teacher that taught the cirriculum with a particular emphasis on one perspective: creative, analytical, etc.
The kids whose exceptional strength matched the one emphasized by the teacher did best.
It is unfortunate that the education system in the USA emphasizes the analytical and memorization talents. A lot of kids' talents are never recognized or encouraged. Many subsequently come to feel that they are failures because they don't excel in sports or academics.
The comments on this thread are like a pendulum swinging back and forth between an over-reliance on either hardwork or innate talent. It takes both.
Using the ever popular sports analogy: Lance Armstrong was a Tour de France cyclist before he was diagnosed with and recovered from testicular cancer. But he never won one until after. He credited this to plumbing the depths of his physical, emotional, and mental limits during chemotherapy and recovery. By coming to a better understanding of his limits, he was subsequently able to push himself closer to them during his training. And that has made all the difference between and excellent cyclist and a singularly exceptional one.
It takes both talent and dedication. I agree with the original poster, that the USA and apparently Canada tend to ignore dedication and hardwork in favor of innate talent. I find it disturbing that people think it is a good thing for a "gifted" student to be able to get through their education without having to develop a work ethic, time management, organization, and prioritization skills. So what if they get A's, get into the good college, and find a stable job with a good income. Think of what they could have become if they'd learned to apply themselves.
I'd like to draw attention to some bad assumptions about IQ testing:
Giving an Generalized IQ score (Full Scale Intelligence Quotient) without specifying which test was given isn't very useful.
IQ testing is a closed loop
In Summary: Different cultures and countries around the world have different ideas of how to define and test for intelligence. The basket of talents reflected in intelligence tests varies accordingly. The kids who well match the particular cocktail of talents valued by their culture find themselves tracked for success, and are subsequently more likely to be successful.
Sidenotes:
Research has shown that if there is more than a marginal gap in ability or achievement students do not benefit from being mixed.
First, they don't view the more advanced students as role models, but rather someone in a different league.
Second the advanced students often end up doing a greater share of the work, sometimes their classmates work too. And they often wind up pigeonholed as tutors. A job which doesn't challenge them, and for which they have little pedagogical experience.
Mixed ability classrooms can be considered harmful to all parties when the difference in ability is significant.
I actually submitted the review 3/26/03... It just took that long for the review to be reviewed I guess :)
Programming Web Services with Perl is a first edition. If you check out the Amazon reviews, you will note that as of the time of this post, it has 5 stars from 5 reviews.
You are referring to:
Your observations of those books may very well be valid. I myself haven't read them. But the amazon reviews for them are 2 1/2 stars and 4 stars respectively.
Honestly, if someone is reading this review and they don't know what XML-RPC and SOAP are... they probably don't need to be reading the book ;)
I did say the book assumes no knowledge of XML-RPC and SOAP. But, obviously the review does... Though you are correct, I should have expanded the acronyms. I share your dislike for when you're never told what an acronym stands for... However be content that the book does explain what they are.
Simon Cozens, the Perl6 Pumpking, wrote that joke.
Why ask a marketing guy anything? I can read press releases as well as the next guy. Are you honestly able to say anything that isn't strictly party line?
A Marketer went into the barbers for a haircut. "Certainly, sir," said the barber, "But you will have to take your Personal Stereo off." "No, No," said the marketer, and fled to another barber, who said the same thing. Finally the marketer found a barber who would cut his hair without taking the headphone off. As the barber chopped and scissored, the marketer fell asleep. The barber gently removed the headphones; the marketer slumped and breathed more shallowly and then, died. The barber heard a gentle noise coming from the headset. He picked it up and listened: "Breathe in, Breathe out, Breathe in, Breathe out."
Quoting Linus Torvalds: "0.01 sources weren't actually runnable: they were just a token gesture to arl who had probably started to despair about ever getting anything. "
if you're feeling ignorant of linux history, read this. It has content I haven't seen elsewhere.
What was that an article or a novella? Many valid and interesting points, but too too long.
If there are fewer turn based games (TBG's), then let me suggest a relatively recent release that was overlooked. Sure it's one of those wargames which the writer described as being a hopelessly small niche market. I'm not a war nut, I am becoming a "The Operational Art of Warfare - Century of War" (TOAW-CW) nut.
It is the wargamers' wargame. Practically every major offensive of the past century is represented in the scenario library. And if you like to play a game with a friend on your own schedule. TBG's can't be beat. Every other night I play a turn vs. one of the guys from work. Testing each other's prowess in various scenarios. This game could be played for years without exhausting the scenarios or growing bored. And as it ships with its own editor, you're free to create your own scenarios.
The first thing I did was turn the 3D view off, and settle into the informative 2D game view. The variety of units, formations, supply, combat and organizational tactics and strategies that can be mastered are a pleasure to delve into. And here is a game AI which is better on offense than defense...
You can find it for $19.95 at Gamestop
Cobalt has been a great company. I'm disappointed to see to swallowed by Sun. I wish them well, but in the mean time, I'm liquidating my holdings of COBT.
Why Sell? What value does the Sun deal bring to Cobalt? Cobalt has been doing pretty well establishing their market and channel partners. What does this deal do to benefit the company? Sure the stockholders get to line their pockets in the short-term, but it is bad for the company. Until today, Cobalt has been free to focus on doing the network server appliance right.
Now Cobalt is being swallowed by the beamoth Sun, who will doubtless meddle in their affairs. As if bloated corporate meddling won't be bad enough, I imagine use of Linux may be on the way out at Cobalt. Hasn't Sun after all made it a corporate directive that they aren't going to be a Linux company? Sun might "support" Linux, but they sure as hell don't sell it.
Such corporate politics and meddling won't be good for Cobalt. Not that Cobalt will be ruffled by the direction of such a hypothetical directive. They've always firmly stated that they are not in the business of selling Linux, but that Linux helps them sell network server applianced.
There is a Perl module written by Damian Conway called Coy which performs error handling in haiku. It has an extensible grammer...
Anything above iron in the periodic table of elements didn't originate from our sun, but rather from supernovas
I'll take my knives in extraterrestrial lead, silver, and gold please!
The following batch file syntax will remove ILOVEU from a WinNT machine, and show you all the damaged files. Perhaps someone can post a version for Win9X? Anyone have any improvements or suggestions?
.cmd file ====
b s
u n","MSKernel32",, >> %TEMP%\ihateu.inf u nServices","Win32DLL",, >> %TEMP%\ihateu.inf
/s /b *.vbs > IHATE.TMP
Garrett
==== cut here and past into a
@echo off
if exist %SYSTEMROOT%\win32dll.vbs echo You were infected with love!
if not exist %SYSTEMROOT%\win32dll.vbs echo You aren't infected...
if not exist %SYSTEMROOT%\win32dll.vbs GOTO END
if exist %SYSTEMROOT%\win32dll.vbs del %SYSTEMROOT%\win32dll.vbs
if exist %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\mskernel32.vbs del %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\mskernel32.vbs
if exist %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\love-letter-for-you.txt.vbs del
%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\love-letter-for-you.txt.v
if exist %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\love-letter-for-you.htm del %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\love-letter-for-you.htm
echo [version] > %TEMP%\ihateu.inf
echo signature="$Windows NT$" >> %TEMP%\ihateu.inf
echo. >> %TEMP%\ihateu.inf
echo [DefaultInstall] >> %TEMP%\ihateu.inf
echo DelReg=KeyToRemove >> %TEMP%\ihateu.inf
echo. >> %TEMP%\ihateu.inf
echo [KeyToRemove] >> %TEMP%\ihateu.inf
echo HKLM,"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\R
echo HKLM,"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\R
%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\Rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 %TEMP%\ihateu.inf
del %TEMP%\ihateu.inf
echo Love has been eradicated from this computer...
echo.
echo Let's find files that may have been infected
echo This will search all local and networked drives
echo So be prepared to wait.
echo.
echo Recommendation: Delete all files listed
echo.
echo Results will be written to IHATE.TXT
echo.
echo.>IHATE.TXT
for %%x in (a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z) do if exist %%x:\nul (
echo Searching %%x:
%%x:
cd\
dir
type IHATE.TMP
type IHATE.TMP >> IHATE.TXT
)
del IHATE.TMP
:END
echo Finished.
Don't forget that the only time P-III's are comparable or faster than Athlons are when they are using 800 MHz RIMMS.
Average Price:
$150 - 128MB PC133 CAS2 DIMM (Athlon)
$700 - 128MB 800MHz RIMM (P-III)
I like Mandrake. But, one of the reasons I have had a hard time recommending Mandrake as a first time Linux distribution to friends, family, and co-workers... is concerns about quality.
With RedHat, Caldera, and SUSE I have the impression that a distribution undergoes rigorous quality assurance testing before being released. Mandrake seems to put more emphasis on user interface issues, eye candy, and being there first as an early adopter of new features, functionality, and code.
In the past, I've assisted with testing and debugging packages in the Cooker development distribution. The process by which Cooker was transformed into a release distribution happened behind the scenes and off the mailing lists.
I'm curious as to why the process of creating a release version of a distribution doesn't happen in the same open development fishbowl in which development takes place? I've been somewhat surprised by failures of simple things like:
- Bad or Missing package dependencies
- Failure to completely uninstall packages
- The large footprint of the smallest installable set of packages for a Mandrake Distribution
Things which I would expect to have been covered in regression tests by a quality assurance group.Could you talk a little bit about the process of quality assurance and testing a new distribution at Mandrake? How many people on staff does Mandrake have working full-time in this capacity? Where do Mandrake's strengths and weaknesses lie in providing a high quality distribution (in the context of the common problems all distributions face)?
Mandrake hasn't been are repackaged version of RedHat since at least 6.0. Sure there is cross-pollination, but that's different. And since RedHat is the defacto standard to the pointy haired people, they work hard to make it 99.999% RedHat compatible.
Also, in 7.0 they have 3 prepackaged installs (paraphrased): desktop, development, and server.
Perl has moved to Linux style versions. Where even numbers are stable and odd are development:
Expect to see v5.6.0.1-n soon ;)
Until I can log into E*Trade, I can't move over to Mozilla. And M14-crypto doesn't do E*Trade (for me).
The only other thing keeping me from making the switch is the lack of support for mail filters. I get too much email to have it all swamp my Inbox