It's not like mainstream distros put you in handcuffs. There are plenty of us who customise our chosen distro quite extensively (for example, I've used Redhat/Fedora ever since I switched from Slackware ages ago, and I use WindowMaker instead of GNOME, disable SELinux, reclaim/media for storing my media files, tweak the categories of things the package manager will install from an rpm, replace a subset of the software with things I compile myself, etc). I have multiple terminals open all the time too, and as I said above, I *have* the WM of my choice - I have as much control over my system as you do yours and can change my defaults.
Not everyone really wants to be on the cutting edge, and I like being at least a bit closer to Fedora/CentOS because i use them a lot at work (Debian and CentOS/RHEL are among the best Linuces for servers, while Gentoo is completely inappropriate (although this almost never comes up because Gentoo fans are also completely inappropriate as sysadmins)).
I haven't played with it much, but the idea behind SQLite (same as MySQLe) is pretty neat. Provided it has a reasonably standard SQL dialect (I haven't looked, but I hope it does a better job than MySQL), SQLite might be pretty awesome for its niche.
What specifically do you think makes PostgreSQL not accessible? I can see Oracle not being accessible - I like it as a database but learning how to install and configure it correctly took me awhile. Oracle is not Postgres though.
MySQL is the Visual Basic of databases - clumsy and of poor quality, used most strongly by people who don't know any better. I would be delighted to see MySQL fail as a project and have its mindshare go to projects that are superior, like PostgreSQL. There are only two things I can think of that the world would miss - MySQLe (the embedded version, which competes with BDB-esque type uses - it's a really cool idea) and the solid Windows support (PostgreSQL added this about a year ago - I'm not sure how solid it is yet).
MySQL's wins tend to be based on good marketing for a bad product.
I don't understand why there would be security implications in having open designs for physical objects, unless those designs are pretty lousy and have faults that are only visible with the design.
You're a patriotic cliche-spouting quack that would destroy society. So?
Sure, there are problems with corruption, much of it systemic. While you're calling it "stupidity and evil", other people are thinking about ways to fix it (try Lawrence Lessig, whose essays on corruption are quite insightful). Your notion of the state of things is deficient (Royalty? seriously? and our government actually does a lot of things pretty well), your notion of history is ignorant (the founding fathers had very serious disagreements with each other, had problems with corruption more severe than we have today, and the first government they made was even more lousy than the one we have today because it was far too decentralised).
A few criticisms of yours are appropriate, but what you want to do about them is utter rubbish.
I was thinking about getting one of these a month or so ago - this makes the device a lot more attractive.
With the amount of convergence in the marketplace nowadays, it's not easy for a geek to choose hardware - do we want an advanced cellphone, one of the book readers that seem to be coming in vogue (maybe the BN one?), small tablets, or small generic PC-like things? Assuming we have a laptop already but don't always want to pull it out and we're not sure what other features we want...
Your points would be warranted if: 1) CPAN were Perl itself. 2) CPAN were atypical for a collection of useful modules for any programming language. 3) C were better.
C has lousy string support. It's really easy to screw them up, just like most memory allocation-related stuff in C is a big burden. Perl, Python, PHP, and even Fortran handle strings more sensibly, eliminating one of the most common sources of security problems in one go.
It may be true in theory that compiled languages that enforce discipline (ML, for example) would be better yet for security, particularly when used by people who have a good security model in mind, but Perl, PHP, and Python do well with such a model. In C, even if you have a good security model, every strcpy() or strncpy() is a potential vulnerability.
It's possible to wrap all the dangerous bits of C up into a programming framework, using functions that handle your mallocs for you, using objects to replace strings, etc. Very few people do that.
Neurologically speaking, the brain is not really finished maturing until around age 20.
Our ancestors lived in more ignorant times. We have higher expectations now - in times past only the very wealthy had access to university education, while at present it is affordable for everyone. Preparation for university is in fact quite a good role for pre-university schooling - unless we want to raise a bunch of people who don't understand the world and are doomed never to do so (e.g. your "shop and home ec" people), mimicing the exact beliefs and understandings of prior generations, we need to give people the chance to do better.
This generation and future ones deserve better than just a high school education, and they deserve better than to be simple repetition of their parents. Sending everyone to university (preparing them in every way we can, from parents to schools) is the best way to ensure a well-educated, intellectual people.
Local "knowledge", that small-town mentality where people never change, where they never have their beliefs and ideas shaken, where they're satisfied with being done with their education after high school, that's selling our future short.
There simply is not time to understand what one needs to be a good citizen by the time one finishes high school. High schools, orchestrated properly, are a great preparation for learning, and they can provide some background for University, but the brain is not done developing by the time one graduates high school, and one is also still under the thumb of one's parents. University is the sole time in many people's lives when they're able to define themselves - they're exposed to ideas outside their community, outside their family, and distant from church influence. Pre-university learning is an extention of family while one is still "in the egg", while University learning is a grand transition where people are exposed, for the first and often only time in their lives, to those who may be on the cutting edge of their disciplines. It's very important, and people who miss out on it lose the chance to be very different than their parents and community.
Skills training at that point is a waste of potential. Success at college is not (entirely) about grades, it's about exposure to ideas while away from the nest, it's about a chance to redefine oneself, it's about a chance to figure out what, out of the things one grew up with are really worth keeping and what should be discarded or rethought. Job training is part of it, but it's a small part. Those who don't go to university lose out on something fundamental to adulthood and citizenhood in modern society.
People in Washington have faces. What people really need is a solid background in the sciences, arts, and humanities. They need that everywhere. Having some experience with mechanics is useful everywhere, and perhaps some home skills everywhere too. Both guys and gals can use both - dividing the two and assigning them roles like that is regressive and sexist.
Everyone should go to college. It's necessary to help them be good citizens, even if it's more than what they strictly need to be good workers. Not everyone will get the same thing out of university, but everyone should go, and be exposed to knowledge of the entire world.
The purpose of education os to install knowledge about the world to society at large. Local school districts don't live in different realities, each with their own specifics.
It is in fact not particularly elitist - I don't want knowledge to only exist in ivory towers - I want it to spread as widely as possible. Education does not belong to backwards parents who don't accept modern medicine, who reject biology, who reject the rich cultural heritage that is the western enlightenment. Children in this country deserve a good education, even if their parents either lack the time/background to push for it or are actively backwards.
There is, of course, a place for parents - if we can engage the parents, education will be more effective - good education is much improved by an appropriate home environment and good parenting. When reasonable, curriculum should be flexible to a certain extent, but it should not be entirely locally created nor should it allow things that are anti-science.
I'd rather ditch this idiotic tendency to think that locals do everything better. Efforts to ditch the DoE are primarily funded by one of two group of nutters - libertarians and creationists. The DoE is widely misunderstood - it does not mandate very much (It probably should mandate a lot more!), it primarily collects metrics and publishes model curricula.
If we want to have a high quality educational system, we should look at countries that do it better than we do, not listening to Cato clowns or Ken Ham-esque bible-thumpers. Longer school years, efforts to engage parents more, much higher standards, more funding, and efforts to attract, retain, and better train the best talent we can manage as teachers are the way to do it.
Better than that - the letters patent are meant to protect and aid business ventures in order to promote the interests of society. If any company is unwilling to do that, we should revoke it and dissolve them.
Was it Cato? It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between the big businesses that want freedom from any laws that they find inconvenient and the "philosophers" who have what amounts to be almost the same thing.
We're all for being sensible and doing what's needed to face challenges... unless you threaten *our* toys. We don't even need to be a jerk to bend over backwards to protect the jerks we might become!
Slashdot Mirror
It's not like mainstream distros put you in handcuffs. There are plenty of us who customise our chosen distro quite extensively (for example, I've used Redhat/Fedora ever since I switched from Slackware ages ago, and I use WindowMaker instead of GNOME, disable SELinux, reclaim /media for storing my media files, tweak the categories of things the package manager will install from an rpm, replace a subset of the software with things I compile myself, etc). I have multiple terminals open all the time too, and as I said above, I *have* the WM of my choice - I have as much control over my system as you do yours and can change my defaults.
Not everyone really wants to be on the cutting edge, and I like being at least a bit closer to Fedora/CentOS because i use them a lot at work (Debian and CentOS/RHEL are among the best Linuces for servers, while Gentoo is completely inappropriate (although this almost never comes up because Gentoo fans are also completely inappropriate as sysadmins)).
I haven't played with it much, but the idea behind SQLite (same as MySQLe) is pretty neat. Provided it has a reasonably standard SQL dialect (I haven't looked, but I hope it does a better job than MySQL), SQLite might be pretty awesome for its niche.
What specifically do you think makes PostgreSQL not accessible? I can see Oracle not being accessible - I like it as a database but learning how to install and configure it correctly took me awhile. Oracle is not Postgres though.
MySQL is the Visual Basic of databases - clumsy and of poor quality, used most strongly by people who don't know any better. I would be delighted to see MySQL fail as a project and have its mindshare go to projects that are superior, like PostgreSQL. There are only two things I can think of that the world would miss - MySQLe (the embedded version, which competes with BDB-esque type uses - it's a really cool idea) and the solid Windows support (PostgreSQL added this about a year ago - I'm not sure how solid it is yet).
MySQL's wins tend to be based on good marketing for a bad product.
After all, if an 8 year old can't understand it, we know it's elitist nonsense :P
Is Murdoch's News Corp actually going to enter the news business?
I don't understand why there would be security implications in having open designs for physical objects, unless those designs are pretty lousy and have faults that are only visible with the design.
No different than Adams and several other founding fathers.
You're a patriotic cliche-spouting quack that would destroy society. So?
Sure, there are problems with corruption, much of it systemic. While you're calling it "stupidity and evil", other people are thinking about ways to fix it (try Lawrence Lessig, whose essays on corruption are quite insightful). Your notion of the state of things is deficient (Royalty? seriously? and our government actually does a lot of things pretty well), your notion of history is ignorant (the founding fathers had very serious disagreements with each other, had problems with corruption more severe than we have today, and the first government they made was even more lousy than the one we have today because it was far too decentralised).
A few criticisms of yours are appropriate, but what you want to do about them is utter rubbish.
The purpose of any government is to support the public good.
I was thinking about getting one of these a month or so ago - this makes the device a lot more attractive.
With the amount of convergence in the marketplace nowadays, it's not easy for a geek to choose hardware - do we want an advanced cellphone, one of the book readers that seem to be coming in vogue (maybe the BN one?), small tablets, or small generic PC-like things? Assuming we have a laptop already but don't always want to pull it out and we're not sure what other features we want...
Do they take the bus?
Your points would be warranted if:
1) CPAN were Perl itself.
2) CPAN were atypical for a collection of useful modules for any programming language.
3) C were better.
C has lousy string support. It's really easy to screw them up, just like most memory allocation-related stuff in C is a big burden. Perl, Python, PHP, and even Fortran handle strings more sensibly, eliminating one of the most common sources of security problems in one go.
It may be true in theory that compiled languages that enforce discipline (ML, for example) would be better yet for security, particularly when used by people who have a good security model in mind, but Perl, PHP, and Python do well with such a model. In C, even if you have a good security model, every strcpy() or strncpy() is a potential vulnerability.
It's possible to wrap all the dangerous bits of C up into a programming framework, using functions that handle your mallocs for you, using objects to replace strings, etc. Very few people do that.
Researchers have found Italians that don't like Spaghetti!
I've never heard that we're supposed to hate Mexico - where do you get that from?
Also, there is no apostrophe in "Americans".
You don't need to have above average to go to unioversity. Everybody can and should benefit from it.
Neurologically speaking, the brain is not really finished maturing until around age 20.
Our ancestors lived in more ignorant times. We have higher expectations now - in times past only the very wealthy had access to university education, while at present it is affordable for everyone. Preparation for university is in fact quite a good role for pre-university schooling - unless we want to raise a bunch of people who don't understand the world and are doomed never to do so (e.g. your "shop and home ec" people), mimicing the exact beliefs and understandings of prior generations, we need to give people the chance to do better.
This generation and future ones deserve better than just a high school education, and they deserve better than to be simple repetition of their parents. Sending everyone to university (preparing them in every way we can, from parents to schools) is the best way to ensure a well-educated, intellectual people.
Local "knowledge", that small-town mentality where people never change, where they never have their beliefs and ideas shaken, where they're satisfied with being done with their education after high school, that's selling our future short.
There simply is not time to understand what one needs to be a good citizen by the time one finishes high school. High schools, orchestrated properly, are a great preparation for learning, and they can provide some background for University, but the brain is not done developing by the time one graduates high school, and one is also still under the thumb of one's parents. University is the sole time in many people's lives when they're able to define themselves - they're exposed to ideas outside their community, outside their family, and distant from church influence. Pre-university learning is an extention of family while one is still "in the egg", while University learning is a grand transition where people are exposed, for the first and often only time in their lives, to those who may be on the cutting edge of their disciplines. It's very important, and people who miss out on it lose the chance to be very different than their parents and community.
Skills training at that point is a waste of potential. Success at college is not (entirely) about grades, it's about exposure to ideas while away from the nest, it's about a chance to redefine oneself, it's about a chance to figure out what, out of the things one grew up with are really worth keeping and what should be discarded or rethought. Job training is part of it, but it's a small part. Those who don't go to university lose out on something fundamental to adulthood and citizenhood in modern society.
People in Washington have faces. What people really need is a solid background in the sciences, arts, and humanities. They need that everywhere. Having some experience with mechanics is useful everywhere, and perhaps some home skills everywhere too. Both guys and gals can use both - dividing the two and assigning them roles like that is regressive and sexist.
Everyone should go to college. It's necessary to help them be good citizens, even if it's more than what they strictly need to be good workers. Not everyone will get the same thing out of university, but everyone should go, and be exposed to knowledge of the entire world.
The world you paint is one of wasted potential.
The purpose of education os to install knowledge about the world to society at large. Local school districts don't live in different realities, each with their own specifics.
It is in fact not particularly elitist - I don't want knowledge to only exist in ivory towers - I want it to spread as widely as possible. Education does not belong to backwards parents who don't accept modern medicine, who reject biology, who reject the rich cultural heritage that is the western enlightenment. Children in this country deserve a good education, even if their parents either lack the time/background to push for it or are actively backwards.
There is, of course, a place for parents - if we can engage the parents, education will be more effective - good education is much improved by an appropriate home environment and good parenting. When reasonable, curriculum should be flexible to a certain extent, but it should not be entirely locally created nor should it allow things that are anti-science.
I'd rather ditch this idiotic tendency to think that locals do everything better. Efforts to ditch the DoE are primarily funded by one of two group of nutters - libertarians and creationists. The DoE is widely misunderstood - it does not mandate very much (It probably should mandate a lot more!), it primarily collects metrics and publishes model curricula.
If we want to have a high quality educational system, we should look at countries that do it better than we do, not listening to Cato clowns or Ken Ham-esque bible-thumpers. Longer school years, efforts to engage parents more, much higher standards, more funding, and efforts to attract, retain, and better train the best talent we can manage as teachers are the way to do it.
Better than that - the letters patent are meant to protect and aid business ventures in order to promote the interests of society. If any company is unwilling to do that, we should revoke it and dissolve them.
Was it Cato? It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between the big businesses that want freedom from any laws that they find inconvenient and the "philosophers" who have what amounts to be almost the same thing.
We're all for being sensible and doing what's needed to face challenges... unless you threaten *our* toys. We don't even need to be a jerk to bend over backwards to protect the jerks we might become!