PPS -- if you were any any position to make this decision, you'd have all of the numbers for what the institution pays for MS Office and so on. But you don't, so shut up and make more coffee.
This is why voting rights were originally restricted to those with land, because those without land would be trying to use their votes to steal money from the landed (i.e. parasitism).
I was personally amazed at how my politics became more conservative as soon as I bought a house. Having a permanent stake in a community really does alter the way you look at things.
At the very least, I would like to see school board elections restricted to property owners in the district; we're the ones who get stuck with the consequences in the long term.
You can unionize service jobs that can't be moved but it will just make healthcare, teaching, civil service, fire and police and all the other heavily unionized service jobs more expensive and they will suck even more life out of the rest of the economy.
The State of New York currently has fifty billion dollars in union public employee retiree health care obligations. Completely unfunded.
Looks like it's free nose jobs for retired cops and poverty for the rest of us saps.
No kidding. Apple's hardware starting tanking a few years ago, when they responded to the "Macs are too expensive" hype by bringing down prices as much as possible. Surprise, surprise, quality came down as well.
I'm a Mac user myself, and I'm two power supplies and three or four hard drives into my iMac G5 at work.
I need that PIM functionality more in a smart phone then I need the entertainment stuff.
I'm with you. I wanted a smartphone that could sync properly with my Linux box, and wasn't a complete pain in the ass to use to update the calendar and the to-do list. It seems so simple.
I ended up buying a Treo 650 for fifty bucks on eBay.
Go easy on him, he's not yet old enough to realize Ayn Rand was talking out of her ass.
I couldn't agree more. It drives me nuts when some whitebread suburbanite who has never wanted for anything quotes _Atlas Shrugged_ like it's a valid sociological text.
Now imagine you could plug the AC adapter directly into the battery. Now you never have to tether the laptop itself, just swap batteries every now and then.
This sort of thing is pretty common in "corporate" laptop sales. We've got a cart full of laptops in the library here that can be checked out by students; there's a charging unit on top of it that holds a dozen batteries or so, so there's always one that's topped off to put in a laptop as it goes out.
I have yet to meet an ex-New Yorker who isn't excessively proud of the fact that he once lived in "The City". They're worse than Texans.
Amen. I work at a college in Buffalo, and the students from downstate are just insufferable. I actually had one correct me when I referred to Buffalo as "the city", as I clearly didn't know that there is only _one_ "the city" and this ain't it.
The fact that we're closer to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Rochester, or a dozen other cities than we are to that five-borough monster doesn't even register.
Our problem is that the last hardware refresh for our computer labs (I work for a college) was all Gateway Profile all-in-one systems. They're nice, but almost none of the parts are standard; and, from what I hear from our desktop support people, the power supplies are prone to failure.
Well, this certainly makes me feel secure about the hundreds and hundreds of Gateway computers we've got at work. I'm sure warranty repair parts will be easily available.
Christianity isn't a form of government. Go ahead and place blame, but do it appropriately.
Thanks heavens it's not. Otherwise we'd have a bunch of uptight fundie assholes running the country, making sure the fags can't get married and so forth.
Oh.
--saint
Re:Nerds.
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think there is a good portion of people that do not consider a post on the internet to be worthy of proof reading.
That's sad. I would imagine there's a pretty large intersection between those people and the ones that claim "language is a living construct, so I can break the rules whenever I want."
On the Internet, we don't have things like body language, voice inflection, or eye contact to help convey extra information. The words that you use become more important in those circumstances, not less.
McCain shouldn't have been collecting a paycheck for being a Senator, neither should Kerry, or Dole, or Obama even, or any of the Senate/House goobs that ran for the nominations and lost.
Amen.
Signed,
A pissed-off Western New Yorker with only one senator.
It's curious that nerds, who are generally very precise in matters of technology, are such painfully sloppy writers.
Like, say, this review.
I don't remember the username, but someone on here had an excellent signature for this: "Slashdot, where people know the difference between grep, zgrep, and ngrep, but not there, their, and they're."
I don't really see what you're saying -- if you want a LIRC mapping for a different application than the internal video player, how is that Myth's problem?
The reason I'm confused by this is that I've got a couple of MCE remotes that I use with my Myth box, and I was able to do so with just the sample config I linked and another one from the mplayer site (for MythVideo). I suppose I must have misinterpreted your original complaints.
The private schools I'm talking about are the $10-12K a year ones that are popular here with senators, diplomats, and the highly egotistical.
Ah, okay -- misinterpretation on my part. We don't really have those here. As I mentioned a few posts up, this is a heavily Catholic city, and with the exception of Nichols School, any private school around here is run by the Church.
One last anecdote. My wife and I are expecting our first child in a matter of weeks. We live in the city of Buffalo itself, not in one of the suburbs. Despite the fact that we're in a nice, quiet, residential neighborhood, my inlaws are all convinced that we're in some Boyz In The Hood style crack alley, and the most common question we get is "are you really going to send your kid to city schools?"
Apparently, the idea that the schools really will collapse if parents who care _all_ pull out has never occurred to them.
I'm posting from work, so I don't really have time to respond to your entire, excellent, post. But thanks for giving me so much to think about.
(Civility? On Slashdot? Cue the four horsemen...)
The answer is one of the most important things about education. If you allow education to stratify, you are risking the very real possibility that the richest Americans will get the best education and the poorest will get the minimum mandated by law. We're already inching that way right now (see also: Buffalo teachers coming to Northern VA). It's true that catering schools to help even the lowest students might stifle some students. However, students can still excel. They just need to take control of their own education and work instead of just letting mommy and daddy pay for their ticket to the aristocracy.
This stratification already exists, even within the public school district. We've got two schools (City Honors and Hutchinson Technical) that are commonly ranked among the best public schools in the nation. And we've got others that make the dysfunctional ones in season 4 of The Wire look like utopias. And that's to say nothing of the differences between the public, charter, and private schools that I mentioned in my last post.
Another issue here, which I mentioned in the original draft of my last post but forgot in its reconstruction, is that like many poor urban school districts we're stuck with an itinerant superintendent. I'm sure you're familiar with the type; he moves from city to city every five to seven years, makes a bunch of promises, and then leaves for more money before the rubes realize they've been had. Dr. Williams destroyed Dayton, he's been buggering up the Buffalo district, and a few months ago was interviewing to take over in Memphis. I have to imagine that when the top of the food chain is ever-changing and the whole philosophy of the district keeps getting modified, the lack of stability takes its toll.
One last note -- I wouldn't be so cavalier about tossing around the term "aristocratic" when discussing private schools. Sure, we have places like Nichols, which was founded in the late 1800s so that the wealth WASP scions wouldn't have their minds polluted by all the Popery of the priests. But most of the Catholic schools here charge only a few thousand dollars a year in tuition, and offer plenty of need-based scholarships and discounts for parishioners. They've always been egalitarian about education. Of course, instructors that have taken an oath of poverty probably makes that more affordable.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy shit, Itanium existed? I thought that was all just a horrible dream.
Even as Windows itself has not been ported to anything else than x86.
Yes it has.
The NT 4.0 operating system ran on four different architectures -- x86, PowerPC, MIPS, and Alpha.
--saint
PPS -- if you were any any position to make this decision, you'd have all of the numbers for what the institution pays for MS Office and so on. But you don't, so shut up and make more coffee.
At least I have an American car, even if it was put together in Canada.
Good choice. It's much more important that your money go to American executives than American line workers.
[/troll]
--saint
Look for people in educational institutions. We're all mixed environments. Post job ads on the lists at EDUCAUSE.
(The school I work for is a mixed OpenLDAP, Netware, AD environment with OS X, Windows, and Linux clients.)
--saint
Per capita income in my ZIP code, according to the last census, was roughly $16k. Some places are cheaper to live than others.
--saint
This is why voting rights were originally restricted to those with land, because those without land would be trying to use their votes to steal money from the landed (i.e. parasitism).
I was personally amazed at how my politics became more conservative as soon as I bought a house. Having a permanent stake in a community really does alter the way you look at things.
At the very least, I would like to see school board elections restricted to property owners in the district; we're the ones who get stuck with the consequences in the long term.
--saint
You can unionize service jobs that can't be moved but it will just make healthcare, teaching, civil service, fire and police and all the other heavily unionized service jobs more expensive and they will suck even more life out of the rest of the economy.
The State of New York currently has fifty billion dollars in union public employee retiree health care obligations. Completely unfunded.
Looks like it's free nose jobs for retired cops and poverty for the rest of us saps.
--saint
No kidding. Apple's hardware starting tanking a few years ago, when they responded to the "Macs are too expensive" hype by bringing down prices as much as possible. Surprise, surprise, quality came down as well.
I'm a Mac user myself, and I'm two power supplies and three or four hard drives into my iMac G5 at work.
--saint
Seriously, read Atlas Shrugged.
It's a novel, not a sociological text.
And it's a shitty novel, at that.
--saint
On the up side, we've got all of that cheap hydropower from the falls. I'm sure downstate appreciates it.
--saint
I need that PIM functionality more in a smart phone then I need the entertainment stuff.
I'm with you. I wanted a smartphone that could sync properly with my Linux box, and wasn't a complete pain in the ass to use to update the calendar and the to-do list. It seems so simple.
I ended up buying a Treo 650 for fifty bucks on eBay.
--saint
Go easy on him, he's not yet old enough to realize Ayn Rand was talking out of her ass.
I couldn't agree more. It drives me nuts when some whitebread suburbanite who has never wanted for anything quotes _Atlas Shrugged_ like it's a valid sociological text.
Shit, it's not even a decent novel.
--saint
Now imagine you could plug the AC adapter directly into the battery. Now you never have to tether the laptop itself, just swap batteries every now and then.
This sort of thing is pretty common in "corporate" laptop sales. We've got a cart full of laptops in the library here that can be checked out by students; there's a charging unit on top of it that holds a dozen batteries or so, so there's always one that's topped off to put in a laptop as it goes out.
--saint
I have yet to meet an ex-New Yorker who isn't excessively proud of the fact that he once lived in "The City". They're worse than Texans.
Amen. I work at a college in Buffalo, and the students from downstate are just insufferable. I actually had one correct me when I referred to Buffalo as "the city", as I clearly didn't know that there is only _one_ "the city" and this ain't it.
The fact that we're closer to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Rochester, or a dozen other cities than we are to that five-borough monster doesn't even register.
--saint
Our problem is that the last hardware refresh for our computer labs (I work for a college) was all Gateway Profile all-in-one systems. They're nice, but almost none of the parts are standard; and, from what I hear from our desktop support people, the power supplies are prone to failure.
Awesome.
--saint
Well, this certainly makes me feel secure about the hundreds and hundreds of Gateway computers we've got at work. I'm sure warranty repair parts will be easily available.
*cough*
--saint
Christianity isn't a form of government. Go ahead and place blame, but do it appropriately.
Thanks heavens it's not. Otherwise we'd have a bunch of uptight fundie assholes running the country, making sure the fags can't get married and so forth.
Oh.
--saint
I think there is a good portion of people that do not consider a post on the internet to be worthy of proof reading.
That's sad. I would imagine there's a pretty large intersection between those people and the ones that claim "language is a living construct, so I can break the rules whenever I want."
On the Internet, we don't have things like body language, voice inflection, or eye contact to help convey extra information. The words that you use become more important in those circumstances, not less.
--saint
McCain shouldn't have been collecting a paycheck for being a Senator, neither should Kerry, or Dole, or Obama even, or any of the Senate/House goobs that ran for the nominations and lost.
Amen.
Signed,
A pissed-off Western New Yorker with only one senator.
It's curious that nerds, who are generally very precise in matters of technology, are such painfully sloppy writers.
Like, say, this review.
I don't remember the username, but someone on here had an excellent signature for this: "Slashdot, where people know the difference between grep, zgrep, and ngrep, but not there, their, and they're."
--saint
I don't really see what you're saying -- if you want a LIRC mapping for a different application than the internal video player, how is that Myth's problem?
The reason I'm confused by this is that I've got a couple of MCE remotes that I use with my Myth box, and I was able to do so with just the sample config I linked and another one from the mplayer site (for MythVideo). I suppose I must have misinterpreted your original complaints.
--saint
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/MCE_Remote
Use the box that says "example lircrc config". Although you might want to remap one of the buttons to "stop trolling".
--saint
The private schools I'm talking about are the $10-12K a year ones that are popular here with senators, diplomats, and the highly egotistical.
Ah, okay -- misinterpretation on my part. We don't really have those here. As I mentioned a few posts up, this is a heavily Catholic city, and with the exception of Nichols School, any private school around here is run by the Church.
One last anecdote. My wife and I are expecting our first child in a matter of weeks. We live in the city of Buffalo itself, not in one of the suburbs. Despite the fact that we're in a nice, quiet, residential neighborhood, my inlaws are all convinced that we're in some Boyz In The Hood style crack alley, and the most common question we get is "are you really going to send your kid to city schools?"
Apparently, the idea that the schools really will collapse if parents who care _all_ pull out has never occurred to them.
--saint
I'm posting from work, so I don't really have time to respond to your entire, excellent, post. But thanks for giving me so much to think about.
(Civility? On Slashdot? Cue the four horsemen...)
The answer is one of the most important things about education. If you allow education to stratify, you are risking the very real possibility that the richest Americans will get the best education and the poorest will get the minimum mandated by law. We're already inching that way right now (see also: Buffalo teachers coming to Northern VA). It's true that catering schools to help even the lowest students might stifle some students. However, students can still excel. They just need to take control of their own education and work instead of just letting mommy and daddy pay for their ticket to the aristocracy.
This stratification already exists, even within the public school district. We've got two schools (City Honors and Hutchinson Technical) that are commonly ranked among the best public schools in the nation. And we've got others that make the dysfunctional ones in season 4 of The Wire look like utopias. And that's to say nothing of the differences between the public, charter, and private schools that I mentioned in my last post.
Another issue here, which I mentioned in the original draft of my last post but forgot in its reconstruction, is that like many poor urban school districts we're stuck with an itinerant superintendent. I'm sure you're familiar with the type; he moves from city to city every five to seven years, makes a bunch of promises, and then leaves for more money before the rubes realize they've been had. Dr. Williams destroyed Dayton, he's been buggering up the Buffalo district, and a few months ago was interviewing to take over in Memphis. I have to imagine that when the top of the food chain is ever-changing and the whole philosophy of the district keeps getting modified, the lack of stability takes its toll.
One last note -- I wouldn't be so cavalier about tossing around the term "aristocratic" when discussing private schools. Sure, we have places like Nichols, which was founded in the late 1800s so that the wealth WASP scions wouldn't have their minds polluted by all the Popery of the priests. But most of the Catholic schools here charge only a few thousand dollars a year in tuition, and offer plenty of need-based scholarships and discounts for parishioners. They've always been egalitarian about education. Of course, instructors that have taken an oath of poverty probably makes that more affordable.
--saint