I've never understood (agreed with?) the usage of Good and Bad without context. I mean, what does it mean for people to be inherently bad? Bad with respect to which entities or what goals?
You suggest greed and hunger for power to be bad characteristics of humanity. So the question is bad with respect to who or what? If you are talking about God or the planet, then I can accept it, but I don't believe these are bad traits for humans. Where would we be without them?
If we weren't greedy, then we'd probably all still be living in caves if we even would have survived that long. After all, we didn't move into air conditioned houses because we needed them but because we wanted more than we needed.
If we didn't have a hunger for power, I'm sure we wouldn't have lasted long. In the wild and without tools, humans are not particularly formidable creatures. Where would we be if no one hungered for the power to bring down dinner with a spear, to grow food out of the ground, to harness fire and electricity, to organize people into communities?
What I'm saying here is I've never seen a blade that couldn't cut in any direction and I've never seen anything inherently good or bad.
Yeah, that's the one he was thinking of. It's a pretty cool display too though. I used to live in Huntsville (Madison to be exact) about 3 miles from the rocket park. Even at the rocket park, the Saturn 5 lies on its side and isn't visible from the road. There is one rocket on display there that you can see for miles, but it's not the Saturn 5.
I don't know that the rocket is worth $5 million dollars to save, but it sure was cool to see. When you take into account the PR value of having such a beast, then maybe it is worth it. Well, on to the pictures.
Pictures of the Rocket Park:
http://aesp.nasa.okstate.edu/fieldguide/pages/addr ess/t-z/usspace.html
http://www.themindspill.com/air_space/space/ASRC/a src4.html
Picture of the Saturn5:
http://aesp.nasa.okstate.edu/fieldguide/pages/boos ter/sv-asrc.html
Dangers of a Poorly Designed Sandbox: My first tech job was working on a cd/dvd manufacturers software system. We had test and production databases, but codewise they were mostly the same. While I was debugging an error and later testing my fix (using dev), I started and then cancelled all the orders for one of our major customers several times. After spending several hours doing this, the department head/VP came over to talk to me, the lowly intern. Apparently, the testing code was sending out automatic emails to essentially every single station in the manufacturing process to let them know the jobs had been cancelled or restarted. All of these were old jobs (dev db was snapped from prod a few months ago), but there had to have been thousands of messages and it undoubtedly caused a lot of confusion. The VP realized it was an honest mistake and left mumbling something like, "Well it's good you're testing."
Why we Don't Use SQL commands to update single records: This one wasn't me, but rather a very experienced friend of mine. One day a request came in to reset an individuals password within our web application. My friend, who wrote about half the code in this particular $20 million business, executed the following code in query analyzer: update user_account set password = 'newpasswd'. Oops, no where clause.... All of the passwords were wiped and due to the nature of our backup system, it took several hours to restore and what we got was a few days old. In the meantime, we had to make temporary passwords for all of our hundred or so employees while fielding a constant stream of calls from fortune 500 customers.
Fun With Backups: I jointly administer a machine with a software company. They handle anything related to their application and I get the rest. Well one day, the mysql database had grown to the point where it no longer fit on its partition. The company moved the data to a new partition and created a softlink from the old location and then sent us a note about the change (which was promptly forgotten). The individual who designed our backups didn't know a lot about mysql and was basically just copying the database files after stopping the server. Well, nobody updated the backup script after the data files were moved. Sure enough, a week later, someone did something through the (brand new) application that fubared a lot of data. When I went to restore from our tapes, I untared everything and verified the data was there (ls). Then I moved all of the current/fubar data out of the mysql data directory and went to copy the backup in. Only when I got to the backup directory, all of the backup data was gone! It then took me embarassingly long to figure out that what I had untarred was actually a soft link to the production data and not backed up production data. Hence when I moved the current/fubar stuff, the data in my backup directory "disappeared."
That would seem like the easy way to do it but...
Would they really need a search warrant in order to do that (maybe)? And if you are going to set up a sting like this, don't you want to make sure it is going to work? A lot of people block images, and I don't think you can safely make the assumption that a cracker would not be doing this.
Yeah, and then there is the widespread enslavement and killing of the Jews, the queers, and the dissenters...
Of course, this was Bush the senior...
"No, I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." I suppose you gotta start somewhere.
You have to pretend that men and women are equal... Patently untrue. People love talking about the differences between genders.
One day I was thinking about the sale of computer services and I started wondering about which sex was better at computer services in terms of sales and support. A couple observations started to bounce around my head. First, the vast majority of "after sale" service reps I have known were female and generally fairly attractive. The sales reps I know tend to be male more often than not. This seemed odd to me since I would have expected a more even distribution across these two activities. This made me wonder if people (men?) were less inclined to trust a woman in a technical sales role. With there being so many attractive women working after sale relationships, I similarly wondered if this was a job that males were particularly bad at.
To make a long story short, I brought this topic up in the above context during a lunch one day. The two managers at the table immediately and very seriously told me to drop it and that I couldn't even suggest the possibility of such things. The funny thing is, one of those managers makes jokes about women all of the time and at one Christmas party he found himself totally trashed and groping various ladies in the customer service department.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, despite there being many sheltered forums in which it is acceptable to discuss differences between the sexes (Ex. in jest or drunken stupor), it is not generally acceptable.
I agree with you and think this is one of those problems that is gradually going to move to the fore front of personal computing as we become more and more dependant on the data stored on our drives.
Some examples:
How may people do we know with massive collections of digital only photo albums?
How many of us have stopped purchasing music in cd form, instead using services like iTunes and storing all of our music on our hard drives? How long before the same sorts of things start happening with video?
And of course there's all that other data too.
It's not going to happen overnight or all at once, but gradually more and more people are going to have hard drive failures (like I did). Once that happens they will never accept a solution without some level of redundancy. With serial ATA out, the four device limitation is gone and I wouldn't be surprised if we see raided (or oterhwise redundant) home systems in the core market in the next 5 years.
The exact sentence is actually, "Developers of all skill levels will enjoy powerful features in Visual C++.NET 2003." I haven't touched the VC++ stuff under.Net, but doing what little VC++ work I did was hellish compared to anything involving.Net. For example, I remember there being like half a zillion peculiarly named string classes: CComBSTR, BSTR, bstr_t. Having to screw around with safe arrays was equally annoying. The.net framework is much much more intuitive than VC++ ever was. It's a lot more like Java plus a few improvements.
No, but the ability to do great work with such primitive tools as make and gdb demonstrates that you are a skilled and experienced programmer.
How?
And if you have never acquired that skill, it strongly suggests that you really don't have that much experience because even in Windows programming, it comes up with regularity.
In two years of windows development working in VC++, VB, VBScript, C#, ASP, ASP.net, COM+,.net, I have never had to use make directly. Of course, that's not to say that windows doesn't have some pretty gruesome tools as well for things like dll hell, creating type libraries, idls and such.
It's been cmd going back to NT. "command" will still get you a shell, you just won't like it very much. Also, not trying to flame or anything, but in terms of names, cmd's not all that much worse than csh, ksh, bash, etc....
There's still a pretty good amount of functionality in the windows command line, especially if you have the reskit. Besides, the first thing I do on any windows workstation I get is to install cygwin and add the binaries to the path. Then you've got the best of both worlds.
Where programmers have ONLY used Microsoft's Visual Studio and have ONLY produced end-user, non-programmer apps, their skills I feel are limited. UNIX programmers can certainly produce apps for non-programmers (Open Office, Gimp, KDE etc...), but I think that "Windows Cultured" programmers cannot as easily develop "programmer's tools".
I agree that people who have only produced end user apps will have difficulty producing many kinds of developer tools. However, I have trouble believing that all or even most "Windows Cultured" programmers' experiences are limited to developing end user applications. I know mine aren't.
You seriously want to argue that the hordes of VC++ and VB programmers are experienced and skilled programmers?
My first inclination was yes, but after thinking about it, I figured it wouldn't do any good to argue. Suffice to say, I know many good developers who spend most of their time working with VB/VC++. I used to work for one such chap who had a doctorate from MIT and founded his own company.
I do the same when working in unix and am typically fairly unworried while working in windows. I think this has to do with familiarity more than anything.
It's rather rare to find such bigotry among Windows programmers, who are, on the whole, olution-oriented and non-ideological.
Au contraire, Mr. Sposky, most Windows people I deal with are ignorant of anything that doesn't come from Redmond, and not willing to learn.
People can be solution-oriented and non-ideological without being willing to learn an entirely new set of platforms and skills. Often being solution oriented implies you will be building off of existing knowledge and not starting from scratch in an entirely alien platform. I believe the difference that Sposky is trying to hit upon is that Windows programmers don't hate or belittle Unix programmers whilst the Unix culture tends to be ripe with bigotry. That said, die emacs die. Vi forever. Ah, screw em both, I want an IDE.
That's not always true. For example, for practical purposes, the only logic my high school taught was Geometry. There were some formal proofs and lots of bisecting of lines and protractor games. I think this could have been taught much better as a separate logic course and then ground in with required programming courses (aka applied logic).
Another example would be writing. serves as a nice slap on the wrist whenever I write poorly phrased sentences.
I volunteered in a high school where students didn't know how to draw or interpret a line graph, they just knew that you typed certain into the computer and it gave you a picture that satisfied the teacher, and then you could screw around behind your monitor - it was complete crap.
The problem here is that the technology was used as an ends and not a means. In other words, the computer was not used to help kids learn how to interpret graphs, it was used to help kids learn how to use it. That's not the computer's fault.
I even know science grad students who don't really understand certain basic things about functions and calculus because they got too much help from graphing calculators and such.
Technology is a tool - you should use it to do things that you could do, but are no longer worth your time. The prerequisite for this to work is that you must first be able to do things WITHOUT machines, or you don't really understand them.
I basically agree with you except I don't think you need to understand how to do things without a tool before you can use a tool. For a kinda goofy example, imagine a microwave. I don't need to know how a microwave works in order to be justified in using it. In a more knowledge based example, in programming I often don't want to know how my tools work because it would be impossible to get anything done if Ihad to learn everything.
The classic forms of learning reading, writing, and arithmetic worked -- and they worked much better than any new fangled and more expensive method we have today.
I think the main problem with our educational system is that it clings too tightly to outdated classics. They end up taking up all our time and resources when we should be teaching other subjects like logic, programming, communication (speech/debate), psychology, sociology (religion), and law.
what happened to the classical forms of education. Young stundents in their mid-teens could do complex mathetmatics in their heads, and knew classical Greek and Latin fluently in some upper-scale schools in the 1800s.
Regarding mathematics, I'm probably one of the few people that believes it's not important to be able to do complex math in your head. My reason is that a machine can do it much faster and more accurately than a human. Of course you still need to understand the problem well enough to ask the machine to solve it, which probably implies a broad understanding of the Math involved (just not the in your head level).
As for Greek and Latin, this is in part a matter of priorities. In high school (grad 97), I took a variety of classes including two years of chem, two years of bio, two years of physics, four years of math, four years of band, four years of English/Literature, three years of History, three years of Spanish, as well as a host of other classes like art, sociology, government, logic, programming, mythology, and even a bit of Latin.... and yes it was a public school.
Now getting back to what I was saying earlier, I'm sure there was enough irrelevant material/overlap in Algebra II/Pre-Calc/Geometry to make room for more thorough logic and programming. Likewise, one of the main points of my four years of English were critical thinking and self expression. Some of that time spent reading Pygmalian, Chaucer, Hamlet (twice), Oedipus (twice), could have been spent in a speech and debate class focussed more closely on critical thinking and expression. History could have been toned down as well considering half of my high school history was a repeat of what we had in junior high. Perhaps we could spend less time talking about how our forefathers fought and more time on what they were fighting for, eg government and laws.
I can't imagine any town or city in the U.S. were they wouldn't know what a "bill" is in the context of a meal at a resturaunt
I can't speak for this particular circumstance, but I think there are a number of factors that can turn an understandable statement like that into something completely incoherent. I have worked with a lot of foreigners and sometimes my brain is going overtime just trying to understand what they are saying, let alone what they mean. It's like in order to understand the speaker, you need to back way off certain speech cues and you end up losing a lot of your ability to process what they mean. When they say something a little off that would make sense coming out of a native speaker's mouth, it still doesn't make sense because you can't pick up on those cues.
Another related possibility is that when you start talking with a non-Native speaker, your brain loads up an alternate meaning interpretation engine with a reduced set of colloquialisms and meanings. For example, if my brain were in non-Natve speaker mode, I might not expect someone to use a phrase like "give a ring" to indicate calling a person or calling on a person. This is a kind of advanced phrase I might only load up for a native speaker. Instead, I might be inclined to take it literally, at least at first.
For Red Hat 7.3, my understanding is updates will end in one month on December 31st. Is Fedora Legacy going to be ready by then? I can't find any substantial documentation on the legacy project, pretty much just the mailing list. What are the alternatives for stretching the life of RH 7.3 for say another six months on a production server?
To doubt that is to cast doubt on every single other community Linux project such as Debian, Slackware, Gentoo et al.
Is it? I'm an outsider to distribution internals, but it would seem to me Debian, Slackware, and Gentoo are all reasonably established community driven projects that attract certain community oriented people. Meanwhile, Fedora Legacy is a new and untested attempt at community support of a previously corporate sponsored distribution. For me it seems natural to question the Fedora Legacy project, especially if you presently use RH in a production environment.
In some ways, these kinds of weapons are almost worse than conventional weapons in that they can thoroughly attack a country's infrastructure while not invoking the guilt of actually killing people. New York had a half day blackout 3 months ago and we're still getting news about it. Imagine what it would be like if someone dropped a big E-bomb on New York. How could anyone even begin to think about repairing the damage? How long would it take? Years? Decades?
I'm not saying we'd be better off with conventional weapons or even that these kinds of EMP weapons, used for small targets, are bad. What I am saying is that people need to look at more than body count when evaluating how humane a weapon is. If someone dropped a nuke on my home town (pop 60,000), it might create more outrage than an EMP in New York, but the EMP will be much much harder to recover from.
But here's the catch: GUI apps are easier to learn because they limit the functionality of the computer. GUI's blatantly advertise the few options that are available and help the user carry those out with a minimum of fuss.
A GUI does not limit the functionality of a computer. It implements and organizes a subset of those features in a logical and intuititive manner. This is exactly what a command line interface does as well.
The primary difference between a CLI and a GUI is that the CLI typically has more options per interface (often too many) and it is easier to combine with other commands.
Look left... glance right.... don fire retardant suit.... I actually think Microsoft provides a much richer security infrastructure (eg acls, user rights, etc)... that their administration tools have come a very long way over the past few years especially with free products like SUS and all the stuff that's configurable through active directory. In the grand scheme of things, all of those remote exploits like the recent RPC problems don't make a damn bit of difference to me. If it got hit, it probably shouldn't have been exposed and it definitely should have been patched.
How is this faster than using alt-tab to bring windows to top?
For me, it is more of a mental thing. Let's say I have Visual Studio, winamp, and 15 others apps open and I want to skip to the next song. I press Alt-Tab once and my brain searches the screen for the active program. It is a notepad memo I made to myself two hours ago. I hit alt-tab again, search the screeen and see an open ftp session. I hit alt-tab again and search the screen, it is a word app containing design documentation. I hit alt-tab again and search the screen, it is a Find Files/Search result task I started 5 minutes ago that is still running. Hey, it found that file I was looking for. Hit alt-tab again and identify the active program, email. Hey Jim sent me a response to that message. What was I doing again? More succinctly: Programming, Need Change Thing, Search, ooh other thing shiny.
If I have two monitors and I can immediately identify the app I am trying to use, the temporary context switch is much much much less stressful on my train of thought. It's almost like the quick adjustments you make to the other app is an extension of your current train of thought.
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I want to know why they seized his xbox controllers?
Halo LAN party in the evidence locker. Why else?
I've never understood (agreed with?) the usage of Good and Bad without context. I mean, what does it mean for people to be inherently bad? Bad with respect to which entities or what goals?
You suggest greed and hunger for power to be bad characteristics of humanity. So the question is bad with respect to who or what? If you are talking about God or the planet, then I can accept it, but I don't believe these are bad traits for humans. Where would we be without them?
If we weren't greedy, then we'd probably all still be living in caves if we even would have survived that long. After all, we didn't move into air conditioned houses because we needed them but because we wanted more than we needed.
If we didn't have a hunger for power, I'm sure we wouldn't have lasted long. In the wild and without tools, humans are not particularly formidable creatures. Where would we be if no one hungered for the power to bring down dinner with a spear, to grow food out of the ground, to harness fire and electricity, to organize people into communities?
What I'm saying here is I've never seen a blade that couldn't cut in any direction and I've never seen anything inherently good or bad.
Yeah, that's the one he was thinking of. It's a pretty cool display too though. I used to live in Huntsville (Madison to be exact) about 3 miles from the rocket park. Even at the rocket park, the Saturn 5 lies on its side and isn't visible from the road. There is one rocket on display there that you can see for miles, but it's not the Saturn 5.
r ess/t-z/usspace.htmla src4.html
s ter/sv-asrc.html
I don't know that the rocket is worth $5 million dollars to save, but it sure was cool to see. When you take into account the PR value of having such a beast, then maybe it is worth it. Well, on to the pictures.
Pictures of the Rocket Park:
http://aesp.nasa.okstate.edu/fieldguide/pages/add
http://www.themindspill.com/air_space/space/ASRC/
Picture of the Saturn5:
http://aesp.nasa.okstate.edu/fieldguide/pages/boo
Dangers of a Poorly Designed Sandbox: My first tech job was working on a cd/dvd manufacturers software system. We had test and production databases, but codewise they were mostly the same. While I was debugging an error and later testing my fix (using dev), I started and then cancelled all the orders for one of our major customers several times. After spending several hours doing this, the department head/VP came over to talk to me, the lowly intern. Apparently, the testing code was sending out automatic emails to essentially every single station in the manufacturing process to let them know the jobs had been cancelled or restarted. All of these were old jobs (dev db was snapped from prod a few months ago), but there had to have been thousands of messages and it undoubtedly caused a lot of confusion. The VP realized it was an honest mistake and left mumbling something like, "Well it's good you're testing."
Why we Don't Use SQL commands to update single records: This one wasn't me, but rather a very experienced friend of mine. One day a request came in to reset an individuals password within our web application. My friend, who wrote about half the code in this particular $20 million business, executed the following code in query analyzer: update user_account set password = 'newpasswd'. Oops, no where clause.... All of the passwords were wiped and due to the nature of our backup system, it took several hours to restore and what we got was a few days old. In the meantime, we had to make temporary passwords for all of our hundred or so employees while fielding a constant stream of calls from fortune 500 customers.
Fun With Backups: I jointly administer a machine with a software company. They handle anything related to their application and I get the rest. Well one day, the mysql database had grown to the point where it no longer fit on its partition. The company moved the data to a new partition and created a softlink from the old location and then sent us a note about the change (which was promptly forgotten). The individual who designed our backups didn't know a lot about mysql and was basically just copying the database files after stopping the server. Well, nobody updated the backup script after the data files were moved. Sure enough, a week later, someone did something through the (brand new) application that fubared a lot of data. When I went to restore from our tapes, I untared everything and verified the data was there (ls). Then I moved all of the current/fubar data out of the mysql data directory and went to copy the backup in. Only when I got to the backup directory, all of the backup data was gone! It then took me embarassingly long to figure out that what I had untarred was actually a soft link to the production data and not backed up production data. Hence when I moved the current/fubar stuff, the data in my backup directory "disappeared."
That would seem like the easy way to do it but... Would they really need a search warrant in order to do that (maybe)? And if you are going to set up a sting like this, don't you want to make sure it is going to work? A lot of people block images, and I don't think you can safely make the assumption that a cracker would not be doing this.
Yeah, and then there is the widespread enslavement and killing of the Jews, the queers, and the dissenters...
Of course, this was Bush the senior... "No, I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." I suppose you gotta start somewhere.
You have to pretend that men and women are equal... Patently untrue. People love talking about the differences between genders.
One day I was thinking about the sale of computer services and I started wondering about which sex was better at computer services in terms of sales and support. A couple observations started to bounce around my head. First, the vast majority of "after sale" service reps I have known were female and generally fairly attractive. The sales reps I know tend to be male more often than not. This seemed odd to me since I would have expected a more even distribution across these two activities. This made me wonder if people (men?) were less inclined to trust a woman in a technical sales role. With there being so many attractive women working after sale relationships, I similarly wondered if this was a job that males were particularly bad at.
To make a long story short, I brought this topic up in the above context during a lunch one day. The two managers at the table immediately and very seriously told me to drop it and that I couldn't even suggest the possibility of such things. The funny thing is, one of those managers makes jokes about women all of the time and at one Christmas party he found himself totally trashed and groping various ladies in the customer service department.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, despite there being many sheltered forums in which it is acceptable to discuss differences between the sexes (Ex. in jest or drunken stupor), it is not generally acceptable.
I agree with you and think this is one of those problems that is gradually going to move to the fore front of personal computing as we become more and more dependant on the data stored on our drives.
Some examples:
How may people do we know with massive collections of digital only photo albums?
How many of us have stopped purchasing music in cd form, instead using services like iTunes and storing all of our music on our hard drives? How long before the same sorts of things start happening with video?
And of course there's all that other data too.
It's not going to happen overnight or all at once, but gradually more and more people are going to have hard drive failures (like I did). Once that happens they will never accept a solution without some level of redundancy. With serial ATA out, the four device limitation is gone and I wouldn't be surprised if we see raided (or oterhwise redundant) home systems in the core market in the next 5 years.
Visual C++ is targeted at "all skill levels".
.NET 2003." I haven't touched the VC++ stuff under .Net, but doing what little VC++ work I did was hellish compared to anything involving .Net. For example, I remember there being like half a zillion peculiarly named string classes: CComBSTR, BSTR, bstr_t. Having to screw around with safe arrays was equally annoying. The .net framework is much much more intuitive than VC++ ever was. It's a lot more like Java plus a few improvements.
.net, I have never had to use make directly. Of course, that's not to say that windows doesn't have some pretty gruesome tools as well for things like dll hell, creating type libraries, idls and such.
The exact sentence is actually, "Developers of all skill levels will enjoy powerful features in Visual C++
No, but the ability to do great work with such primitive tools as make and gdb demonstrates that you are a skilled and experienced programmer.
How?
And if you have never acquired that skill, it strongly suggests that you really don't have that much experience because even in Windows programming, it comes up with regularity.
In two years of windows development working in VC++, VB, VBScript, C#, ASP, ASP.net, COM+,
It's been cmd going back to NT. "command" will still get you a shell, you just won't like it very much. Also, not trying to flame or anything, but in terms of names, cmd's not all that much worse than csh, ksh, bash, etc....
There's still a pretty good amount of functionality in the windows command line, especially if you have the reskit. Besides, the first thing I do on any windows workstation I get is to install cygwin and add the binaries to the path. Then you've got the best of both worlds.
Where programmers have ONLY used Microsoft's Visual Studio and have ONLY produced end-user, non-programmer apps, their skills I feel are limited. UNIX programmers can certainly produce apps for non-programmers (Open Office, Gimp, KDE etc...), but I think that "Windows Cultured" programmers cannot as easily develop "programmer's tools".
I agree that people who have only produced end user apps will have difficulty producing many kinds of developer tools. However, I have trouble believing that all or even most "Windows Cultured" programmers' experiences are limited to developing end user applications. I know mine aren't.
You seriously want to argue that the hordes of VC++ and VB programmers are experienced and skilled programmers?
My first inclination was yes, but after thinking about it, I figured it wouldn't do any good to argue. Suffice to say, I know many good developers who spend most of their time working with VB/VC++. I used to work for one such chap who had a doctorate from MIT and founded his own company.
I do the same when working in unix and am typically fairly unworried while working in windows. I think this has to do with familiarity more than anything.
It's rather rare to find such bigotry among Windows programmers, who are, on the whole, olution-oriented and non-ideological.
Au contraire, Mr. Sposky, most Windows people I deal with are ignorant of anything that doesn't come from Redmond, and not willing to learn.
People can be solution-oriented and non-ideological without being willing to learn an entirely new set of platforms and skills. Often being solution oriented implies you will be building off of existing knowledge and not starting from scratch in an entirely alien platform. I believe the difference that Sposky is trying to hit upon is that Windows programmers don't hate or belittle Unix programmers whilst the Unix culture tends to be ripe with bigotry. That said, die emacs die. Vi forever. Ah, screw em both, I want an IDE.
Computers don't help people learn these things.
That's not always true. For example, for practical purposes, the only logic my high school taught was Geometry. There were some formal proofs and lots of bisecting of lines and protractor games. I think this could have been taught much better as a separate logic course and then ground in with required programming courses (aka applied logic).
Another example would be writing. serves as a nice slap on the wrist whenever I write poorly phrased sentences.
I volunteered in a high school where students didn't know how to draw or interpret a line graph, they just knew that you typed certain into the computer and it gave you a picture that satisfied the teacher, and then you could screw around behind your monitor - it was complete crap.
The problem here is that the technology was used as an ends and not a means. In other words, the computer was not used to help kids learn how to interpret graphs, it was used to help kids learn how to use it. That's not the computer's fault.
I even know science grad students who don't really understand certain basic things about functions and calculus because they got too much help from graphing calculators and such.
Technology is a tool - you should use it to do things that you could do, but are no longer worth your time. The prerequisite for this to work is that you must first be able to do things WITHOUT machines, or you don't really understand them.
I basically agree with you except I don't think you need to understand how to do things without a tool before you can use a tool. For a kinda goofy example, imagine a microwave. I don't need to know how a microwave works in order to be justified in using it. In a more knowledge based example, in programming I often don't want to know how my tools work because it would be impossible to get anything done if Ihad to learn everything.
The classic forms of learning reading, writing, and arithmetic worked -- and they worked much better than any new fangled and more expensive method we have today.
... and yes it was a public school.
I think the main problem with our educational system is that it clings too tightly to outdated classics. They end up taking up all our time and resources when we should be teaching other subjects like logic, programming, communication (speech/debate), psychology, sociology (religion), and law.
what happened to the classical forms of education. Young stundents in their mid-teens could do complex mathetmatics in their heads, and knew classical Greek and Latin fluently in some upper-scale schools in the 1800s.
Regarding mathematics, I'm probably one of the few people that believes it's not important to be able to do complex math in your head. My reason is that a machine can do it much faster and more accurately than a human. Of course you still need to understand the problem well enough to ask the machine to solve it, which probably implies a broad understanding of the Math involved (just not the in your head level).
As for Greek and Latin, this is in part a matter of priorities. In high school (grad 97), I took a variety of classes including two years of chem, two years of bio, two years of physics, four years of math, four years of band, four years of English/Literature, three years of History, three years of Spanish, as well as a host of other classes like art, sociology, government, logic, programming, mythology, and even a bit of Latin.
Now getting back to what I was saying earlier, I'm sure there was enough irrelevant material/overlap in Algebra II/Pre-Calc/Geometry to make room for more thorough logic and programming. Likewise, one of the main points of my four years of English were critical thinking and self expression. Some of that time spent reading Pygmalian, Chaucer, Hamlet (twice), Oedipus (twice), could have been spent in a speech and debate class focussed more closely on critical thinking and expression. History could have been toned down as well considering half of my high school history was a repeat of what we had in junior high. Perhaps we could spend less time talking about how our forefathers fought and more time on what they were fighting for, eg government and laws.
Fun design. What's the point?
Are you unaware of the extreme shortage of organ donors?
I can't imagine any town or city in the U.S. were they wouldn't know what a "bill" is in the context of a meal at a resturaunt
I can't speak for this particular circumstance, but I think there are a number of factors that can turn an understandable statement like that into something completely incoherent. I have worked with a lot of foreigners and sometimes my brain is going overtime just trying to understand what they are saying, let alone what they mean. It's like in order to understand the speaker, you need to back way off certain speech cues and you end up losing a lot of your ability to process what they mean. When they say something a little off that would make sense coming out of a native speaker's mouth, it still doesn't make sense because you can't pick up on those cues.
Another related possibility is that when you start talking with a non-Native speaker, your brain loads up an alternate meaning interpretation engine with a reduced set of colloquialisms and meanings. For example, if my brain were in non-Natve speaker mode, I might not expect someone to use a phrase like "give a ring" to indicate calling a person or calling on a person. This is a kind of advanced phrase I might only load up for a native speaker. Instead, I might be inclined to take it literally, at least at first.
For Red Hat 7.3, my understanding is updates will end in one month on December 31st. Is Fedora Legacy going to be ready by then? I can't find any substantial documentation on the legacy project, pretty much just the mailing list. What are the alternatives for stretching the life of RH 7.3 for say another six months on a production server?
To doubt that is to cast doubt on every single other community Linux project such as Debian, Slackware, Gentoo et al.
Is it? I'm an outsider to distribution internals, but it would seem to me Debian, Slackware, and Gentoo are all reasonably established community driven projects that attract certain community oriented people. Meanwhile, Fedora Legacy is a new and untested attempt at community support of a previously corporate sponsored distribution. For me it seems natural to question the Fedora Legacy project, especially if you presently use RH in a production environment.
In some ways, these kinds of weapons are almost worse than conventional weapons in that they can thoroughly attack a country's infrastructure while not invoking the guilt of actually killing people. New York had a half day blackout 3 months ago and we're still getting news about it. Imagine what it would be like if someone dropped a big E-bomb on New York. How could anyone even begin to think about repairing the damage? How long would it take? Years? Decades?
I'm not saying we'd be better off with conventional weapons or even that these kinds of EMP weapons, used for small targets, are bad. What I am saying is that people need to look at more than body count when evaluating how humane a weapon is. If someone dropped a nuke on my home town (pop 60,000), it might create more outrage than an EMP in New York, but the EMP will be much much harder to recover from.
But here's the catch: GUI apps are easier to learn because they limit the functionality of the computer. GUI's blatantly advertise the few options that are available and help the user carry those out with a minimum of fuss.
A GUI does not limit the functionality of a computer. It implements and organizes a subset of those features in a logical and intuititive manner. This is exactly what a command line interface does as well.
The primary difference between a CLI and a GUI is that the CLI typically has more options per interface (often too many) and it is easier to combine with other commands.
Look left... glance right.... don fire retardant suit.... I actually think Microsoft provides a much richer security infrastructure (eg acls, user rights, etc)... that their administration tools have come a very long way over the past few years especially with free products like SUS and all the stuff that's configurable through active directory. In the grand scheme of things, all of those remote exploits like the recent RPC problems don't make a damn bit of difference to me. If it got hit, it probably shouldn't have been exposed and it definitely should have been patched.
And yet there are people out there without any vested interests that know a lot about computers and think Windows is actually more secure.
How is this faster than using alt-tab to bring windows to top?
For me, it is more of a mental thing. Let's say I have Visual Studio, winamp, and 15 others apps open and I want to skip to the next song. I press Alt-Tab once and my brain searches the screen for the active program. It is a notepad memo I made to myself two hours ago. I hit alt-tab again, search the screeen and see an open ftp session. I hit alt-tab again and search the screen, it is a word app containing design documentation. I hit alt-tab again and search the screen, it is a Find Files/Search result task I started 5 minutes ago that is still running. Hey, it found that file I was looking for. Hit alt-tab again and identify the active program, email. Hey Jim sent me a response to that message. What was I doing again? More succinctly: Programming, Need Change Thing, Search, ooh other thing shiny.
If I have two monitors and I can immediately identify the app I am trying to use, the temporary context switch is much much much less stressful on my train of thought. It's almost like the quick adjustments you make to the other app is an extension of your current train of thought.