Re:A strange thought...
on
Pirate DNS?
·
· Score: 1
That would break the definition of URLs IINM. The protocol part of a URL (e.g. "http") refers to the protocol one layer above TCP (I can't remember the way k00l OSI name for it) and has nothing to do with name lookups. It would be much easier to just get named to play those tricks for you, though.
IPv6 addresses are 128 bits in length in total. They are expressed like so (IIRC): word:word:word:word:word:word:word:word where each 'word' is a hexadecimal number with length 4 (i.e. 16 bits).
When an ISP assigns you an "IP", however, it doesn't assign you a single IP. It assigns you a block. It might assign you 048a:3092:1a8e:ff44:3900:x:x:x. This gives you 2^48 separate IP addresses to use. The idea is that the remaining 48 bits correspond to your MAC address, so that as long as each computer you have connected has a different MAC, it will have its own IP. This also has the added benefit of making routing painfully easy (routing at the Ethernet level is much easier than routing at the IP level).
I'm sure I've got something mixed up, but that's the basics behind it.
But unfortunately, Linux is not an OS. Having IPv6 in the kernel is fine, but it is a *major* PITA to get even the basics (ping, traceroute) recompiled, etc. FreeBSD is way ahead of the game in this case.
Hmm that's a good point. Although IPv6 theoretically speeds up (or at least) eases routing, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of the major switches started going to IPv6 within the next few years. If that can trickledown to the minor backbones (armbones maybe), then it Mom and Pop ISPs should be able to offer IPv6, forcing the ISP oligopolies to compete. I still think it's over 5 years until we see the "big shift", where things go from mostly-IPv4 to mostly-IPv6, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were select colo's or ISPs offering IPv6 addresses in the major centres within a couple years.
256^6 (better stated as 2^48) is the number of individual IP addresses per "IP block" (what your ISP would give you). The total number of IP addresses would be 2^128, or 3.40e38.
Not to be too offensive, but you do understand the ideas behind a free market, right? "What's in it" for ISPs is that if they don't get their ass in gear, they are out of business because everyone else has a better product.
So you're saying that because the web isn't perfect and it doesn't reflect the general society, it won't be useful to historians? If you ask me, this would make it more interesting, not less. This transition will have an extremely short lifespan (probably under 20 years in length), so the more data the better (for the historians).
And, FYI, just because the Royal Family doesn't reflect English society, it does not mean that historians don't find them interesting.
No, this is completely false. Win32 is an API, not an ABI. WINE is "emulating" Win32 in the same way that GGI is "emulating" GGI. Microsoft's Win32 and WineHQ's WINE just happen to be different implementations of the same API.
That said, WINE does come with an emulator which, confusingly enough, they called "wine".
You have to keep in mind that his comment was pointed at CmdrTaco. Even if it cost $8000, Rob not buying it still qualifies him as a "CHEAPASS MOFO" I would say. The banners probably bring that in in a day.
To answer your last question, no the NeXT stuff has not been dumped completely, or at all for that matter. <a href="http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx /macosx.html">Cocoa</a> is (I believe) entirely a superset of OpenStep (which the <a href="http://www.gnustep.org">GNUstep</a> people are still trying to keep up with). You'll notice that in addition to Objective C (which was the sole implementation of the OpenStep API AFAIK), they've added a Java binding.
I don't see it as a good thing. There is still no decent graphical browser for X Windows. Our new poster boy, Mozilla, however, is not only a browser, but a newsgroup client, an e-mail client, a replacement for MAME, and, hell, why not an entire OS as well? It's like they're in competition with the Emacs people or something: see who can create the most complete yet unusable operating system that requires another operating system to run.
The whole idea is a little strange, though. Having cross-platform data (HTML) apparently wasn't good enough; now we need cross-platform programs too. Oh, pretty well the whole thing has to be rendered in software? Good! Just as long as every single pixel looks exactly the same in Windows as it does in Linux. That we can be sure that it will not look, feel, or act like any other program on any other platform, a sure-fire way to confuse our customers to no end. Then again, who needs to use programs on different platforms when they can run programs running on this new OS called Mozilla? I can only hope that some day Emacs will be ported to Mozilla, so that we can run an OS inside an OS inside an OS for no apparent reason.
Anyway I'm done bitching. I've got fed up with waiting for a decent, free web browser to appear; it's apparently never going to happen (Konqueror aside; I don't like KDE, OK?), so I've started the arduous task of writing my own. Blah. Mozilla looked so promising at the start, too. At around M8, it was the coolest thing on Earth.
Oh sorry, I was under the impression that you were talking about teaching computer science.
I don't really care about the other applications. The article suggests that using computers may hamper kids' growths and it makes sense to some degree. Just let the little buggers write it out. They need to improve their handwriting anyway. This are K-4 we're talking about here; it's not like they're writing 15 page essays. If you ask me, for anything under, say, two pages of simple text (which is probably what these kids are gonna be doing), the benefits of handwriting outweigh the benefits of word processing. If they're not doing simple text (charts, graphs, etc.), then most kids I've ever seen would prefer a pencil crayon over Illustrator any day.
Once the kids get closer to junior high school, then maybe they'll have a use for boring things like word processors, but I can't see any use for them before that.
I've heard anthropologists used the word 'gender' when describing people. I can't think of any reason why Susie can't be both a woman *and* feminine. Of course then the article would be suggesting that along with feminine women, feminine men are underrepresented in tech jobs, which I don't think is the case.
I seem to recall that in the Cree days (before the Europeans came out to start up some trouble, etc.), the grandparents would take care of the children if the parents were too busy. The mother conventionally took care of the children (since they didn't have really much cleaning or anything in the way that European housewives did), but she would be busy now and then (making/repairing clothes, preparing skins, etc.), so the grandparents would take over.
This seems to be a win-win-win situation. On the obvious hand, the children are well-suprvised while the the parents can carry on with whatever incredibly important (heh) work they're doing. Secondarily, the children get a teacher/babysitter who has many many years of wisdom beyond that of their parents. Finally, it ensures that the grandparents are important to the society (many seniors nowadays complain that they're not respected, they're neglected, etc.)
Obviously the kids aren't going to be learning the same sorts of things in that situation that they do currently. As I understand it, the majority of teaching that the grandparents gave was in the form of stories. And I don't think you can expect to learn much calculus or cell biology from your typical grandparent (I suppose there will be exceptions now and then, though).
So I think this would fit in well with the classical form of education, which was more meta-education than actual education. You taught the kids how to live their lives ("don't touch your tongue to the flagpole") from someone trusted (a family member) and knowledgable (old), and you also taught them how to teach themselves (reading, writing, research, etc.). Beyond that, all you would really want to do is help them out with whatever they were doing and maybe help them come up with/develop some ideas of what to do. Similar to home schooling, I guess.
Anyway, like with most things, it would all depend on the implementation. For an extraordinarily lathargic child, you would have to have an equally extraordinarily good teacher. With people having so many old relatives nowadays chomping at the bit to spend time with their grandchildren, grandnephews, grandneices, etc., though, chances are you could find someone decent. Plus hopefully this 80 hour work week (if you combine both parents) idea will die out soon. I dunno, could use some work.
On the topic of computers, though, I still don't see what a computer could provide in terms of general education that a person couldn't. The use of computers seems to be in reaction to the increasing size of classes, but I don't think putting kids in front of a computer is going to help things out much. As mentioned before, if the kid is interested in computer science, then obviously a computer will help things, but if the kid's interested in biology, taking him down to the museum or local university (you'd be surprised (or not) at how willing professors are to talk to people about their work if you ask) will do more good than a few hours wandering through websites.
If the children are required to do these "mundane" calculations, then I think the curriculum is seriously fucked up. The only classes where these kinds of calculations would be required would be for things like physics and chemistry classes, which I highly doubt would be taught in any great detail in junior high (well maybe a little bit at the end of junior high). For all math classes, calculators are useless, and are actually prohibited in any undergraduate university math class I've been in.
If there are very few people with high computer skill at the school, then buying faster hardware does not solve anything. If you do not have the resources to teach interested children computer skills on a useful XT, then I'm afraid all the computing resources in the world are not going to help you.
The problem is that everything on Slashdot has to happen server-side. This means that you can't format things the way you want, you can't filter out the things you want, and you basically have no freedom at all. As long as Slashdot requires money to run, it's going to suck ass.
Well I never claimed I had a solution:). Somehow I doubt the high school junior they showcased in the article is very representative (guess what, most guys don't like computer science either), but most studies seem to suggest that females really do not like computer science (relative to males). The problem with Barbie games (specifically) is that they're created by company which prides itself on taking advantage of small girls.
Perhaps all it will take is a group of girls to come up with something a little more interesting (i.e. a new field of computer science). Females don't seem to dislike computers, and they don't seem to dislike science, so it seems as though it's the current implementation of the union of the two that puts a lot of them off. Who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
That would break the definition of URLs IINM. The protocol part of a URL (e.g. "http") refers to the protocol one layer above TCP (I can't remember the way k00l OSI name for it) and has nothing to do with name lookups. It would be much easier to just get named to play those tricks for you, though.
I thought that was a Diet Coke along with the Foster's can used as grenades.
Nice to see that "too dumb to figure out 'user preferences'" now counts as "insightful".
Insults aside, I thought their kill*.jpg scene was very well done. With a bit of imagination, it looks eerily similar to firing a weapon in Quake.
IPv6 addresses are 128 bits in length in total. They are expressed like so (IIRC): word:word:word:word:word:word:word:word where each 'word' is a hexadecimal number with length 4 (i.e. 16 bits).
When an ISP assigns you an "IP", however, it doesn't assign you a single IP. It assigns you a block. It might assign you 048a:3092:1a8e:ff44:3900:x:x:x. This gives you 2^48 separate IP addresses to use. The idea is that the remaining 48 bits correspond to your MAC address, so that as long as each computer you have connected has a different MAC, it will have its own IP. This also has the added benefit of making routing painfully easy (routing at the Ethernet level is much easier than routing at the IP level).
I'm sure I've got something mixed up, but that's the basics behind it.
But unfortunately, Linux is not an OS. Having IPv6 in the kernel is fine, but it is a *major* PITA to get even the basics (ping, traceroute) recompiled, etc. FreeBSD is way ahead of the game in this case.
Hmm that's a good point. Although IPv6 theoretically speeds up (or at least) eases routing, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of the major switches started going to IPv6 within the next few years. If that can trickledown to the minor backbones (armbones maybe), then it Mom and Pop ISPs should be able to offer IPv6, forcing the ISP oligopolies to compete. I still think it's over 5 years until we see the "big shift", where things go from mostly-IPv4 to mostly-IPv6, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were select colo's or ISPs offering IPv6 addresses in the major centres within a couple years.
No.
Roughly, total area of Earth == 5.11e14 m^2 (if I've done my calculations right).
Total number of IPv6 IPs available == 3.40e38
IPv6 density == 6.66e23/m^2
Total number of IPv4 IPs available == 4.29e9
IPv4 density == 8.40e-6/m^2
So with IPv6, you will get an IP density 7.29e28 (or 73 nonillion for Americans; 73 sexiard (?) for Europeans) times greater.
256^6 (better stated as 2^48) is the number of individual IP addresses per "IP block" (what your ISP would give you). The total number of IP addresses would be 2^128, or 3.40e38.
Not to be too offensive, but you do understand the ideas behind a free market, right? "What's in it" for ISPs is that if they don't get their ass in gear, they are out of business because everyone else has a better product.
So you're saying that because the web isn't perfect and it doesn't reflect the general society, it won't be useful to historians? If you ask me, this would make it more interesting, not less. This transition will have an extremely short lifespan (probably under 20 years in length), so the more data the better (for the historians).
And, FYI, just because the Royal Family doesn't reflect English society, it does not mean that historians don't find them interesting.
No, this is completely false. Win32 is an API, not an ABI. WINE is "emulating" Win32 in the same way that GGI is "emulating" GGI. Microsoft's Win32 and WineHQ's WINE just happen to be different implementations of the same API.
That said, WINE does come with an emulator which, confusingly enough, they called "wine".
Yes. Let this be a lesson to all of you: get your rabies shots.
You have to keep in mind that his comment was pointed at CmdrTaco. Even if it cost $8000, Rob not buying it still qualifies him as a "CHEAPASS MOFO" I would say. The banners probably bring that in in a day.
To answer your last question, no the NeXT stuff has not been dumpedx /macosx.html">Cocoa</a> is
completely, or at all for that matter. <a
href="http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macos
(I believe) entirely a superset of OpenStep (which the <a
href="http://www.gnustep.org">GNUstep</a> people are still trying to keep up
with). You'll notice that in addition to Objective C (which was the sole
implementation of the OpenStep API AFAIK), they've added a Java binding.
Just a question, but it be possible to just go to the gas station to get some nice and cheap bulk vegetable oil? Yum.
I don't see it as a good thing. There is still no decent graphical browser for X Windows. Our new poster boy, Mozilla, however, is not only a browser, but a newsgroup client, an e-mail client, a replacement for MAME, and, hell, why not an entire OS as well? It's like they're in competition with the Emacs people or something: see who can create the most complete yet unusable operating system that requires another operating system to run.
The whole idea is a little strange, though. Having cross-platform data (HTML) apparently wasn't good enough; now we need cross-platform programs too. Oh, pretty well the whole thing has to be rendered in software? Good! Just as long as every single pixel looks exactly the same in Windows as it does in Linux. That we can be sure that it will not look, feel, or act like any other program on any other platform, a sure-fire way to confuse our customers to no end. Then again, who needs to use programs on different platforms when they can run programs running on this new OS called Mozilla? I can only hope that some day Emacs will be ported to Mozilla, so that we can run an OS inside an OS inside an OS for no apparent reason.
Anyway I'm done bitching. I've got fed up with waiting for a decent, free web browser to appear; it's apparently never going to happen (Konqueror aside; I don't like KDE, OK?), so I've started the arduous task of writing my own. Blah. Mozilla looked so promising at the start, too. At around M8, it was the coolest thing on Earth.
Oh sorry, I was under the impression that you were talking about teaching computer science.
I don't really care about the other applications. The article suggests that using computers may hamper kids' growths and it makes sense to some degree. Just let the little buggers write it out. They need to improve their handwriting anyway. This are K-4 we're talking about here; it's not like they're writing 15 page essays. If you ask me, for anything under, say, two pages of simple text (which is probably what these kids are gonna be doing), the benefits of handwriting outweigh the benefits of word processing. If they're not doing simple text (charts, graphs, etc.), then most kids I've ever seen would prefer a pencil crayon over Illustrator any day.
Once the kids get closer to junior high school, then maybe they'll have a use for boring things like word processors, but I can't see any use for them before that.
I've heard anthropologists used the word 'gender' when describing people. I can't think of any reason why Susie can't be both a woman *and* feminine. Of course then the article would be suggesting that along with feminine women, feminine men are underrepresented in tech jobs, which I don't think is the case.
I seem to recall that in the Cree days (before the Europeans came out to start up some trouble, etc.), the grandparents would take care of the children if the parents were too busy. The mother conventionally took care of the children (since they didn't have really much cleaning or anything in the way that European housewives did), but she would be busy now and then (making/repairing clothes, preparing skins, etc.), so the grandparents would take over.
This seems to be a win-win-win situation. On the obvious hand, the children are well-suprvised while the the parents can carry on with whatever incredibly important (heh) work they're doing. Secondarily, the children get a teacher/babysitter who has many many years of wisdom beyond that of their parents. Finally, it ensures that the grandparents are important to the society (many seniors nowadays complain that they're not respected, they're neglected, etc.)
Obviously the kids aren't going to be learning the same sorts of things in that situation that they do currently. As I understand it, the majority of teaching that the grandparents gave was in the form of stories. And I don't think you can expect to learn much calculus or cell biology from your typical grandparent (I suppose there will be exceptions now and then, though).
So I think this would fit in well with the classical form of education, which was more meta-education than actual education. You taught the kids how to live their lives ("don't touch your tongue to the flagpole") from someone trusted (a family member) and knowledgable (old), and you also taught them how to teach themselves (reading, writing, research, etc.). Beyond that, all you would really want to do is help them out with whatever they were doing and maybe help them come up with/develop some ideas of what to do. Similar to home schooling, I guess.
Anyway, like with most things, it would all depend on the implementation. For an extraordinarily lathargic child, you would have to have an equally extraordinarily good teacher. With people having so many old relatives nowadays chomping at the bit to spend time with their grandchildren, grandnephews, grandneices, etc., though, chances are you could find someone decent. Plus hopefully this 80 hour work week (if you combine both parents) idea will die out soon. I dunno, could use some work.
On the topic of computers, though, I still don't see what a computer could provide in terms of general education that a person couldn't. The use of computers seems to be in reaction to the increasing size of classes, but I don't think putting kids in front of a computer is going to help things out much. As mentioned before, if the kid is interested in computer science, then obviously a computer will help things, but if the kid's interested in biology, taking him down to the museum or local university (you'd be surprised (or not) at how willing professors are to talk to people about their work if you ask) will do more good than a few hours wandering through websites.
If the children are required to do these "mundane" calculations, then I think the curriculum is seriously fucked up. The only classes where these kinds of calculations would be required would be for things like physics and chemistry classes, which I highly doubt would be taught in any great detail in junior high (well maybe a little bit at the end of junior high). For all math classes, calculators are useless, and are actually prohibited in any undergraduate university math class I've been in.
If there are very few people with high computer skill at the school, then buying faster hardware does not solve anything. If you do not have the resources to teach interested children computer skills on a useful XT, then I'm afraid all the computing resources in the world are not going to help you.
You don't need the Internet to teach to a child as an individual; you need a real parent (or better yet, a grandparent).
The problem is that everything on Slashdot has to happen server-side. This means that you can't format things the way you want, you can't filter out the things you want, and you basically have no freedom at all. As long as Slashdot requires money to run, it's going to suck ass.
And? I'd rather have a spammer than a whore any day.
Well I never claimed I had a solution :). Somehow I doubt the high school junior they showcased in the article is very representative (guess what, most guys don't like computer science either), but most studies seem to suggest that females really do not like computer science (relative to males). The problem with Barbie games (specifically) is that they're created by company which prides itself on taking advantage of small girls.
Perhaps all it will take is a group of girls to come up with something a little more interesting (i.e. a new field of computer science). Females don't seem to dislike computers, and they don't seem to dislike science, so it seems as though it's the current implementation of the union of the two that puts a lot of them off. Who knows.