Doesn't the House have slightly more important things to be doing than... INVESTIGATING TITTIES IN A VIDEO GAME
The question isn't whether or not the house has more important things to do, the question is, given their track record on things like titties in video games, do you WANT them to focus on anything more important.
It's also stupid to give the union soooo much free publicity. Besides all the free hits, admitedly from non TELUS subscribers, they are getting free tv/radio time. If they had just let the site remain available, the affects would likely have been negligible.
Start simple and add complexity. Realize that you don't need to start maintaining your own domain controller, file server, web server, mail server, backup server all on day one. You can get by without much of this stuff, and much of the stuff you need like web hosting and email can be outsourced relatively inexpensively.
If you don't know the difference between a $20 linksys router and a $1,000 cisco monstrosity, buy the linksys. If you want a file server for 6 people, buy the $300 dell dimension desktop and not the $2500 powervault file server. Setup a simple backup script, ignore raid and complex programs like veritas until you are ready to deal with them.
Other tips:
Identify useful technologies and have a plan in place to gradually improve services.
Resist the temptation to put everything on one machine. The life of a system administrator is much easier when all the eggs are in different baskets because you can take one system offline without disrupting everything. Also, some server software does not "play nice" with other software even amongst the same vendor.
Start teaching programming in elementary school. Everyone thinks that logic and reasoning skills are some of the most important things taught in school. However, we typically rely on subjects like Math and Literary analysis courses to convey these skills. Literary analysis is fairly subjective. This is not bad, it still employs logic, but it is more a fuzzy logic. It takes a long while to get feedback on either subject. Typically, a teacher has to grade the homework and return it a few days or weeks later. Lastly, it is hard to do anything fun with either subject. Compare this to a subject like programming. The subject is essentially applied logic and reasoning. Compilation and execution give you near instantaneous feedback. Lastly, you can create many useful/fun things with programming skills or put another way, the products of programming are more concrete.
Teach personal finance and increase government/civics courses. When you teach an intro to programming course, you invariably spend a large chunk of time discussing the syntax and semantics of the language. This is because you need to know and understand these rules before you can successfully navigate the intricacies of programming in that language. Similarly, it makes sense to teach the syntax and semantics of adult society to students in intro to adulthood schools. By the time everyone graduates from high school, they should know how to become active in government, how to evaulate laws, legislation, and platforms, how to file taxes effectively, how to plan for their retirement.
Teach religion. Every student should have a thorough understanding of the most popular perspectives of the most popular religions. This includes christianity but also other religions like islam. These classes should be taught by some kind of priest of the religion being taught in order to insure that the bias is consistent. The purpose here is not to teach people what to believe, rather, what others believe.
Physical activity, health, and nutrition. None of my gym classes helped me create a regular excerscise schedule. If anything, they had the opposite effect. I learned next to nothing about nutrition beyond the 5 food groups. Our health class was generally a joke.
The earth is 2/3 covered with water. Everyone should know how to swim.
How do you make room for new subjects?
Cut and condense subjects. My elementary school had a strong focus on things like prescriptive grammar and spelling. These things don't strike me as particularly efficient uses of time. I say, let the language evolve.
Spend less time on things like rote multiplication, addition, and subtraction. If you give someone 6 months to memorize the multiplication tables, it will take 6 months. It can be learned much faster.
Introduce more cross disciplinary education. Two birds, one stone. Write a program that calculates the multiplication table different ways (eg 6*9): 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9, or 6*10-6*(10-9). It's amazing how much easier it is to understand something once you program it... it's like being forced to carefully read the manual. In civics class, program a workflow system for how a bill becomes a law. Have people designated to represent different stakeholders in the system.
Some other ideas:
More study abroad, even if it is just a few states over. It is much easier to appreciate cultural differences after you've lived somewhere else for a while.
More summer programs. Eg, I did a month long trip camping out west. A group of 30 high school sophomores/juniors/seniors were lead by two teachers and two assistants all over the southwest studying geology and botany. We went to Padre Island, Big Bend, hiked the Grand Canyon, rafted the colorado in Canyonlands, saw Arches, crossed the border into Mexico a few times, went to Carlsbad, and
Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150."
If this is true, why don't the employees immediately start their own similar business with higher profit sharing. The startup costs are probably not very high and they know the operation. Even if they are severely economically disadvantaged, a few employees could team up together.
If you are actively against the way copyright law is being handled, you shouldn't work for Disney. Don't work for the man who's keeping you down, don't be another brick in the wall, etc.
Companies become souless monstrosities when people decide to work for them despite the fact that they disagree with them on a fundamental, moral point.
Right now, or sometime in the near future, the number of people who use English as a second language is going to exceed the number of native speakers. I think that is going to have a large effect on the variation and change, and regularization of English... there are lots of interesting examples like this where the function of a word changes to encompass new uses. Are you also going to bitch about someone who says "Can you pass me the salt" (instead of using COULD) for a polite request.
I couldn't agree with you more. Personally, I think one contributing factor to a divergence in IT peoples' use of the english language has to do with a large influx of non-native english speakers within the field. my dos centavos
This is probably going to be an unpopular sentiment, but I think loss of language skills has to do, in part, with increased reliance on international labor.
At my first three IT jobs, most everyone was a native english speaker. My english was exemplary. Next, I worked in an IT department where I was one of only a few native english speakers. For the first week or two, I found myself struggling to communicate. However, soon everything just started making sense. Immersed in an environment of bad grammar, I soon found myself picking up bad habits.
When you spend all day talking with native english speakers. The mind loads a different parser than when you are speaking with non-native speakers. With a native speaker, syntax is fairly important. Correct syntax is expected, and if you don't find it, the mental parser has trouble deciphering the speech. However, with a non native speaker, semantics are all that matters. You don't expect proper syntax and you definitely don't expect things like colloquialisms. Sometimes the presence of either can actually throw off your mental parser.
What is really strange in all of this, is that this phenomenon, if it exists, isn't really a loss of communication skills. Rather, the person who has "lost" communications skills has actually learned to communicate more effectively with a new group of people. This may adversely affect communication with others, but probably not to the point that it is seriously damaging.
Now, I'm not saying this is the greatest factor in terms of "bad" language skills amongst IT staff. Certainly there are others. However, I do think that being immersed in non-native english speakers does have a strong effect on ones ability to speak syntactically correct english.
Along the same lines, if you're looking to get started in wiki's and want something designed for documentation, but find twiki intimidating (which I did), you could try dokuwiki. It doesn't have nearly as many features as twiki, but it's easier to setup and it is made for documenting IT stuff.
How would you design an OS from scratch that would target individuals who are blind and/or deaf?
I think the best answer is that you don't. If you were to build such a thing, what applications would be available for your OS? Who would write applicatoins for your OS? How would your OS interact with the web. How would it open excel or word documents? It just doesn't seem like it would be possible to make something that could satisfy a fraction of the needs presently met by software designed for sighted people which can be accessed clumsily through JAWs.
Of course, this doesn't mean you couldn't make a suite of applications designed specifically for the blind: email, word processing, an attempt at general purpose web browsing, possibly an application to deliver web data from specific sites in a consumable format (movie listings, news rss feeds, xml feeds, etc).
AFAIK, firearm manufacturers aren't marketing their guns to gangs.
Certain gunmakers have marketted "fingerprint resistant" guns. This is a marketting strategy that could very well be aimed at criminals, and I believe there has been at least one lawsuit based on this claim. Of course, in this case, the gun makers are not advocating use of the product for crime, simply advertising a feature that would be primarily useful to criminals. It is the difference between creating a p2p client "with strong anonymity features" and one that "is great for downloading the latest hollywood movies".
Maybe this goes back to what the original poster was saying and perhaps I didn't get his point. There seems to be a difference in the acceptability of the level of government regulation for something like Viagra and something like an artificial heart translant. For a potentially life saving illness, I feel like the ultimate decision to try an experimental treatment should be mine. I should have the opportunity to attempt to understand the issues and then make an informed decision.
If the average recipient is estimated to have a year to live and people who receive the artificial heart live an average of 3 months immobilized in excruciating pain... I could see it getting shot down then... although I'm not sure it is the government's place to make that decision.
yes, and that bothers me too. One egregious waste should not distract us from all egregious wastes... especially if they are occurring at different levels of the government.
Right. Sometimes the government can help people the most by cancelling unpopular bus routes and not trying to be an ISP.
At my old university (Ohio State), through a contract with the city, every student was required to pay a mandatory $9 per quarter bus fee. In my time at OSU, I paid around $150 for a bus service I only used once. Most everyone I know was exactly like me. According to a recent article in a local newspaper, the city of Columbus has one of the top 5 highest costs per rider (buses) in the nation.
Governments should not be allowed to perpetuate programs like this unchecked.
I think that is the real problem here. Their target demographic didnt even know about it!
That's probably just one part of a larger issue. If they had no idea how to advertise the product, it's likely they had no idea how to market it, and it's likely it was just a hair brained idea, not thought out and poorly implemented. My city can't even clean the streets 3 times a year without costing my block $500-1000 per visit in addition to taxes. There's no way in hell I'd trust them running an ISP efficiently.
It has been shown through the virtue of patches that it can be done and since it can be patched it could also have been done right the first time had they only taken the time and effort to write it correctly to begin with.
Historically speaking, humans rarely do anything right the first, second, third, or nth time. Believing people can create secure software correctly the first time is like believing no one will try to hack the software you create.
The world is filled with failure, that's what makes it so good. Software, Governments, Societies, even evolution itself are all itterative processes.
The goal is probably to put all of NASA's funding towards a big popular initiative, starve other programs, then cancel the initiative or allow it to be cancelled. It's a politically safe way of reducing funding.
Personally, I don't like to hear about people cutting funding for organizations like NASA, but on the other hand, I've always suspected that they were hemoraging money with an inadequate return on the investment. Maybe some of that 16.5 billion dollar budget could be spent on improving education for the approximately 80 million school aged kids in the country. Even better, fork over some of that $420+ billion dollar defense budget. Smarter kids = better science, better weapons, hopefully less need for war, and countless other benefits.
We have a bunch of people at work that take appointments and schedule appointments for each other. It's a situation where half the office seems to have access to each others calendars. We use Outlook/Exchange, not the simplest of calendar systems, and none of the users are particularly savy (several only use computers at work). Anyways, we periodically encounter a problem where some user will delete a schedule-appointments-here reoccurence or do something else and end up deleting 1/3 of their appointments (or someone else's) for weeks at a time and then somehow not notice for a week. Of course, any time this happens, it's always, "Exchange ate my appointments again!"
Anyways, we've come close to just throwing it all away and using paper where there's virtually no opportunity to screw up short of physically losing the schedule.
Ditto. I also lean towards the philosophy that if I can't remember I need to do something, but can remember to do 10 other things, the 10 other things are probably more important anyway. This strategery also has the benefit that stupid useless tasks sometimes drop off the map unless the user has some degree of persistence. For example, when a user finds an 8 year old $60 inkjet in a closet somewhere and decides they want it in their office as a personal printer even though we have about 1 networked laser printer for every 3 people (including some color), then I can conveniently forget about this task.
The only time I like to keep a todo list is when I'm swamped, customers are complaining of the backlog, and I need some way of demonstrating and documenting the workload. In this case, help desk systems become the todo lists.
I'm a somehwat experienced developer specializing mostly in web related things. In the past year, I took two classes at Ohio State that are related to what you describe. One was a design class (think print design) using the web as the medium. The other was a usability class geared towards engineers (Industrial, Cognitive) which revolved largely around a data driven web project. The engineers all had taken some kind of freshman class where they wrote "hello world" in C.
My first bit of advice is that first time programmers/web site creators invariably tend to get mired in the technical details of implementing things. It becomes very hard to see the forest for the trees.
In the design class, students spent the majority of their time struggling with Dreamweaver/HTML/CSS. In the Usability course, they spent most of their time struggling with FrontPage/ASP/Access/HTML. If the focus of your course is HCI, it may be a mistake to be teaching web coding skills because this will detract from the true focus of the course. If the focus of your class is to give them web development skills, then you still may be better off looking at the big picture instead of getting mired in web implementation. If you are trying to give them web implementation skills, it may be better to give them structured fill-in-the-blanks homework assignments instead of an open ended project.
So moving on, if you're going to teach the programming skills, you want to make everything as simple as possible.
First off, consider not using MySQL. Instead, consider using MSDE and Access Data Projects (adp). MSDE is a free version of MS SQL server. The one big difference is that MSDE has a governor that prevents it from hosting high traffic databases. Access Data Projects (adp files) let you connect to an MSDE/MSSQL database using access as a front end. This is similar in principle to linked tables in access but it is much better. You can create msde tables and views in access while you can't do that with linked tables.
Using MSDE/ADP will make things much harder on you for setup, but much easier on the newbies. Here is the basic reasoning. People know access or if not they can figure it out via the stumble method. You can make and store somewhat complex queries as views without knowing SQL. An interface like phpmyadmin or even the new mysql query browser or the buggy admin interface is frightening in comparison.
For database access, don't teach them sql, mysql_connect style functions, or pear::Db. Instead, teach them DB_DataObject. DB_DataObject is the standard pear data access layer generator library based off of Pear:DB. You point it at a database (pretty much any kind) and it generates an extendable class for every table and view. All classes inherit the base object's methods like insert, update, and delete. It has a fairly simple yet modestly powerful search/query interface.
Why use DB_DataObject? It is much simpler than peardb/mysql_conect alternatives. You don't need to mess with connection strings. When combined with the capability to make views, you probably don't need to mess with any sql at all except in a few rare circumstances. The interface is consistent and it introduces them to valuable notions of a data access layer, object orient programming, the benefit of community libraries, etc.
Incidentally, there's some other libraries that plug DB_DataObject into HTML_QuickForms so that may have perks.
That brings up another point. Don't teach them anything involving html forms. Instead teach them HTML_QuickForms (another pear library). Again, the advantage here is that html_quickforms are waaaaay easier to understand and work with effectively than are plain html forms... especially when it comes to input validation. Of course, they are not very easy to format without using the Smarty template renderer and that opens a whole other can of worms (but you might want to teach templates anyway).
Right, open source is hurting companies like siebel because they don't know how to remain competitive in the new market. If anything, open source software is creating entirely new vertical market spaces everywhere you look.
For example, I work with a college career services office and, 3-4 years ago, all of the college office specific online systems were handled by centralized inflexible giants like eRecruiting and Career Connections. They offered very little if any direct access to data. No one was all that happy with them, but it just would have cost too much to develop internally hosted alternatives.
Now other companies, like Symplicity, have entered the marketspace and are licensing software that the offices themselves can run. They use php, pear, mysql, and their code is riddled with other lesser known free software like HtmlArea. Because of all of this open source software, development and maintenance costs came down to the point where they were able to tap into a previously non existent market of office hosted career services software.
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Doesn't the House have slightly more important things to be doing than ... INVESTIGATING TITTIES IN A VIDEO GAME
The question isn't whether or not the house has more important things to do, the question is, given their track record on things like titties in video games, do you WANT them to focus on anything more important.
It's also stupid to give the union soooo much free publicity. Besides all the free hits, admitedly from non TELUS subscribers, they are getting free tv/radio time. If they had just let the site remain available, the affects would likely have been negligible.
If you don't know the difference between a $20 linksys router and a $1,000 cisco monstrosity, buy the linksys. If you want a file server for 6 people, buy the $300 dell dimension desktop and not the $2500 powervault file server. Setup a simple backup script, ignore raid and complex programs like veritas until you are ready to deal with them.
Other tips:
How do you make room for new subjects?
Some other ideas:
Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150."
If this is true, why don't the employees immediately start their own similar business with higher profit sharing. The startup costs are probably not very high and they know the operation. Even if they are severely economically disadvantaged, a few employees could team up together.
If you are actively against the way copyright law is being handled, you shouldn't work for Disney. Don't work for the man who's keeping you down, don't be another brick in the wall, etc.
Companies become souless monstrosities when people decide to work for them despite the fact that they disagree with them on a fundamental, moral point.
Right now, or sometime in the near future, the number of people who use English as a second language is going to exceed the number of native speakers. I think that is going to have a large effect on the variation and change, and regularization of English... there are lots of interesting examples like this where the function of a word changes to encompass new uses. Are you also going to bitch about someone who says "Can you pass me the salt" (instead of using COULD) for a polite request.
I couldn't agree with you more. Personally, I think one contributing factor to a divergence in IT peoples' use of the english language has to do with a large influx of non-native english speakers within the field. my dos centavos
This is probably going to be an unpopular sentiment, but I think loss of language skills has to do, in part, with increased reliance on international labor.
At my first three IT jobs, most everyone was a native english speaker. My english was exemplary. Next, I worked in an IT department where I was one of only a few native english speakers. For the first week or two, I found myself struggling to communicate. However, soon everything just started making sense. Immersed in an environment of bad grammar, I soon found myself picking up bad habits.
When you spend all day talking with native english speakers. The mind loads a different parser than when you are speaking with non-native speakers. With a native speaker, syntax is fairly important. Correct syntax is expected, and if you don't find it, the mental parser has trouble deciphering the speech. However, with a non native speaker, semantics are all that matters. You don't expect proper syntax and you definitely don't expect things like colloquialisms. Sometimes the presence of either can actually throw off your mental parser.
What is really strange in all of this, is that this phenomenon, if it exists, isn't really a loss of communication skills. Rather, the person who has "lost" communications skills has actually learned to communicate more effectively with a new group of people. This may adversely affect communication with others, but probably not to the point that it is seriously damaging.
Now, I'm not saying this is the greatest factor in terms of "bad" language skills amongst IT staff. Certainly there are others. However, I do think that being immersed in non-native english speakers does have a strong effect on ones ability to speak syntactically correct english.
Along the same lines, if you're looking to get started in wiki's and want something designed for documentation, but find twiki intimidating (which I did), you could try dokuwiki. It doesn't have nearly as many features as twiki, but it's easier to setup and it is made for documenting IT stuff.
Google is more of a hydra that just keeps on growing new heads all over the place...
How many of google's different heads actually make money? How many of them spend their time devouring company resources?
How would you design an OS from scratch that would target individuals who are blind and/or deaf?
I think the best answer is that you don't. If you were to build such a thing, what applications would be available for your OS? Who would write applicatoins for your OS? How would your OS interact with the web. How would it open excel or word documents? It just doesn't seem like it would be possible to make something that could satisfy a fraction of the needs presently met by software designed for sighted people which can be accessed clumsily through JAWs.
Of course, this doesn't mean you couldn't make a suite of applications designed specifically for the blind: email, word processing, an attempt at general purpose web browsing, possibly an application to deliver web data from specific sites in a consumable format (movie listings, news rss feeds, xml feeds, etc).
AFAIK, firearm manufacturers aren't marketing their guns to gangs.
Certain gunmakers have marketted "fingerprint resistant" guns. This is a marketting strategy that could very well be aimed at criminals, and I believe there has been at least one lawsuit based on this claim. Of course, in this case, the gun makers are not advocating use of the product for crime, simply advertising a feature that would be primarily useful to criminals. It is the difference between creating a p2p client "with strong anonymity features" and one that "is great for downloading the latest hollywood movies".
Maybe this goes back to what the original poster was saying and perhaps I didn't get his point. There seems to be a difference in the acceptability of the level of government regulation for something like Viagra and something like an artificial heart translant. For a potentially life saving illness, I feel like the ultimate decision to try an experimental treatment should be mine. I should have the opportunity to attempt to understand the issues and then make an informed decision.
If the average recipient is estimated to have a year to live and people who receive the artificial heart live an average of 3 months immobilized in excruciating pain... I could see it getting shot down then... although I'm not sure it is the government's place to make that decision.
yes, and that bothers me too. One egregious waste should not distract us from all egregious wastes... especially if they are occurring at different levels of the government.
its there to help the people, not turn a profit
Right. Sometimes the government can help people the most by cancelling unpopular bus routes and not trying to be an ISP.
At my old university (Ohio State), through a contract with the city, every student was required to pay a mandatory $9 per quarter bus fee. In my time at OSU, I paid around $150 for a bus service I only used once. Most everyone I know was exactly like me. According to a recent article in a local newspaper, the city of Columbus has one of the top 5 highest costs per rider (buses) in the nation.
Governments should not be allowed to perpetuate programs like this unchecked.
I think that is the real problem here. Their target demographic didnt even know about it!
That's probably just one part of a larger issue. If they had no idea how to advertise the product, it's likely they had no idea how to market it, and it's likely it was just a hair brained idea, not thought out and poorly implemented. My city can't even clean the streets 3 times a year without costing my block $500-1000 per visit in addition to taxes. There's no way in hell I'd trust them running an ISP efficiently.
It has been shown through the virtue of patches that it can be done and since it can be patched it could also have been done right the first time had they only taken the time and effort to write it correctly to begin with.
Historically speaking, humans rarely do anything right the first, second, third, or nth time. Believing people can create secure software correctly the first time is like believing no one will try to hack the software you create.
The world is filled with failure, that's what makes it so good. Software, Governments, Societies, even evolution itself are all itterative processes.
DNA is more like machine code. He could still have been written in C and compiled to DNA. Personally, I suspect perl is involved somewhere.
The goal is probably to put all of NASA's funding towards a big popular initiative, starve other programs, then cancel the initiative or allow it to be cancelled. It's a politically safe way of reducing funding.
Personally, I don't like to hear about people cutting funding for organizations like NASA, but on the other hand, I've always suspected that they were hemoraging money with an inadequate return on the investment. Maybe some of that 16.5 billion dollar budget could be spent on improving education for the approximately 80 million school aged kids in the country. Even better, fork over some of that $420+ billion dollar defense budget. Smarter kids = better science, better weapons, hopefully less need for war, and countless other benefits.
We have a bunch of people at work that take appointments and schedule appointments for each other. It's a situation where half the office seems to have access to each others calendars. We use Outlook/Exchange, not the simplest of calendar systems, and none of the users are particularly savy (several only use computers at work). Anyways, we periodically encounter a problem where some user will delete a schedule-appointments-here reoccurence or do something else and end up deleting 1/3 of their appointments (or someone else's) for weeks at a time and then somehow not notice for a week. Of course, any time this happens, it's always, "Exchange ate my appointments again!"
Anyways, we've come close to just throwing it all away and using paper where there's virtually no opportunity to screw up short of physically losing the schedule.
Ditto. I also lean towards the philosophy that if I can't remember I need to do something, but can remember to do 10 other things, the 10 other things are probably more important anyway. This strategery also has the benefit that stupid useless tasks sometimes drop off the map unless the user has some degree of persistence. For example, when a user finds an 8 year old $60 inkjet in a closet somewhere and decides they want it in their office as a personal printer even though we have about 1 networked laser printer for every 3 people (including some color), then I can conveniently forget about this task.
The only time I like to keep a todo list is when I'm swamped, customers are complaining of the backlog, and I need some way of demonstrating and documenting the workload. In this case, help desk systems become the todo lists.
I'm a somehwat experienced developer specializing mostly in web related things. In the past year, I took two classes at Ohio State that are related to what you describe. One was a design class (think print design) using the web as the medium. The other was a usability class geared towards engineers (Industrial, Cognitive) which revolved largely around a data driven web project. The engineers all had taken some kind of freshman class where they wrote "hello world" in C.
My first bit of advice is that first time programmers/web site creators invariably tend to get mired in the technical details of implementing things. It becomes very hard to see the forest for the trees.
In the design class, students spent the majority of their time struggling with Dreamweaver/HTML/CSS. In the Usability course, they spent most of their time struggling with FrontPage/ASP/Access/HTML. If the focus of your course is HCI, it may be a mistake to be teaching web coding skills because this will detract from the true focus of the course. If the focus of your class is to give them web development skills, then you still may be better off looking at the big picture instead of getting mired in web implementation. If you are trying to give them web implementation skills, it may be better to give them structured fill-in-the-blanks homework assignments instead of an open ended project.
So moving on, if you're going to teach the programming skills, you want to make everything as simple as possible.
First off, consider not using MySQL. Instead, consider using MSDE and Access Data Projects (adp). MSDE is a free version of MS SQL server. The one big difference is that MSDE has a governor that prevents it from hosting high traffic databases. Access Data Projects (adp files) let you connect to an MSDE/MSSQL database using access as a front end. This is similar in principle to linked tables in access but it is much better. You can create msde tables and views in access while you can't do that with linked tables.
Using MSDE/ADP will make things much harder on you for setup, but much easier on the newbies. Here is the basic reasoning. People know access or if not they can figure it out via the stumble method. You can make and store somewhat complex queries as views without knowing SQL. An interface like phpmyadmin or even the new mysql query browser or the buggy admin interface is frightening in comparison.
For database access, don't teach them sql, mysql_connect style functions, or pear::Db. Instead, teach them DB_DataObject. DB_DataObject is the standard pear data access layer generator library based off of Pear:DB. You point it at a database (pretty much any kind) and it generates an extendable class for every table and view. All classes inherit the base object's methods like insert, update, and delete. It has a fairly simple yet modestly powerful search/query interface.
Why use DB_DataObject? It is much simpler than peardb/mysql_conect alternatives. You don't need to mess with connection strings. When combined with the capability to make views, you probably don't need to mess with any sql at all except in a few rare circumstances. The interface is consistent and it introduces them to valuable notions of a data access layer, object orient programming, the benefit of community libraries, etc.
Incidentally, there's some other libraries that plug DB_DataObject into HTML_QuickForms so that may have perks.
That brings up another point. Don't teach them anything involving html forms. Instead teach them HTML_QuickForms (another pear library). Again, the advantage here is that html_quickforms are waaaaay easier to understand and work with effectively than are plain html forms... especially when it comes to input validation. Of course, they are not very easy to format without using the Smarty template renderer and that opens a whole other can of worms (but you might want to teach templates anyway).
Anyways, I've just got done teaching a
Right, open source is hurting companies like siebel because they don't know how to remain competitive in the new market. If anything, open source software is creating entirely new vertical market spaces everywhere you look.
For example, I work with a college career services office and, 3-4 years ago, all of the college office specific online systems were handled by centralized inflexible giants like eRecruiting and Career Connections. They offered very little if any direct access to data. No one was all that happy with them, but it just would have cost too much to develop internally hosted alternatives.
Now other companies, like Symplicity, have entered the marketspace and are licensing software that the offices themselves can run. They use php, pear, mysql, and their code is riddled with other lesser known free software like HtmlArea. Because of all of this open source software, development and maintenance costs came down to the point where they were able to tap into a previously non existent market of office hosted career services software.
Why can't our legislators deal with real problems, you know like our economy and the environment. Oh yeah, because this makes for an easy deamon.
If this is how they deal with Video games, do you really want them going anywhere near the economy and environment?