If I wanted to do that then I would probably just read a book. Very few subjects require formal instruction spread over a semester or a year or several years. Formal education was not created for the person who wants to learn it was created for the person who is to be made to learn.
I think you'll find that's fairly person and subject dependent. I am currently taking a course for which I could simply be reading the book - why am I taking the course? Because the subject matter is very hard, and the book very terse. Having someone who does understand the material well provide further explanation, alternate ways of looking at things, and just generally more detail, does make it much easier to learn.
If we're talking about a lot of high school level material, then yes, a lot of people can simply get by reading about it. The principle of university is to be providing instruction in material that is hard, that is currently at the edge of research (universities are primarily there to provide research to begin with), and thus benefits from being taught. No, not all courses at universities actually fit that - that doesn't mean universities are worthless, merely that some courses are rather poor.
A university, originally, was supposed to be a place of learning; a place where like minded people could congregate together, collect and share their knowledge and explore and seek new knowledge. Courses, as offered by universities, are supposed to be an opportunity for a person wishing to learn to gain expert instruction in cutting edge subject area.
You say that if I want to learn something I should just read a book? Currently I am learning about analytic pro-p-groups, and Lie p-rings. Which book should I "just read" to learn that easily without formal courses? Where, exactly, am I expected to find that book? I'll lay odds my local library doesn't have it - my university library might, but that's back to the point of universities providing a collection of knowledge and a place to learn.
How much of the constraints in University are about providing pieces of paper and proof of ability for purely vocational purposes though? I mean really, all a University is doing is offering a variety of courses that you can choose to do if you find them interesting. The whole deal with the degree, associated course requirements, the examinations and assessments etc. is all largely about providing prospective employers with a nice checklist. If universities managed to free themselves of their vocational training aspects a little more I think you would find them much more to you liking.
A place where you can go: to be with other people interested in learning; to have access to a wide variety and depth of material (the internet, for all its breadth, fails to offer equivalent depth in any subject to that of a good university library); a place where people with knowledge, experience and interest (their prime job is purely research) provide courses in subjects.
There is nothing wrong with trade schools when you simply want to learn a trade, or how to do a job, and those qualifications should not be looked down on as (for some reason) they are now. That shouldn't stop a person from also wanting to attend an institution that is solely about learning, and not interested in vocations etc. That is part of the current issue with Universities.
The point is, people who focus on getting their degree so that they can get to work ASAP are not necessarily disintrested in learning. Their financial situation may be such that they have no other economically responsible alternatives.
And I have no problem with that. I myself got a job to get myself into a more economically viable position to further my education.
What I am questioning is the shoehorning together of vocational training, and general education. Why do universities have to be a place to get vocational training - why can't we actually leave that to places that actually specialise in vocational training... and will hence be a lot cheaper (not having to fund research for its lecturers for a start)!
I think somewhere along the line some wires got crossed. I admit that the job market looks for a "college degree" as opposed to an accreditation from a vocational school; but that's pretty damn stupid on their part really. The whole system has twisted itself into a rather nasty mess.
The reason for this is that college is expensive! If you would feel comfortable not getting paid more than a nurse with a two-year degree, yet being piled in debt for ten years, all while knowing how to write a critique of Dante's Inferno, then more power to you...I guess.
It's a matter of value - do you value what you can learn. I'm learning pure mathematics. That will have little real immediate application in the world, but it is interesting, and it extends my mind. I place value on that; I enjoy doing it; and am willing to spend money to be able to pursue what I enjoy.
Did you consider that maybe university is not for everyone? Perhaps, if all you want is to make a lot of money, you should skip college and head straight to a trade school that will teach you how to make a lot of money.
The question is, what exactly is it that you value in life?
Learning for learning's sake is great, if you've got a full ride. Learning for learning's sake on your own dime (and debt) is another story altogether.
Which is another way of saying that you don't really place much value on knowledge and learning. Which is what I was suggesting was an interesting dilemma.
I am currently back at University, learning what I am interested in learning simply because I want to know and extend myself. How did I pay for that? I spent 4 years working very hard and saving cash. The fact that, given my previous university record and my work experience, I was offered a scholarship certainly helps, but I have enough money to support myself through this if I choose. Nor do I fear finding a job when I decide to go back to working - I know wat the workplace is like, I know what employers are looking for (having been involved in reviweing resumes and conducting interviews while working), and I'm confident I can provide that.
I think there are a lot of people that just want universities to crank out trained worker bees at age 22.
I'm rather troubled by that attitude here on Slashdot - there seem to be many many people who view a degree as pointless unless it fast tracks you to a job. There seem to be many people who view High School and University as solely vocational training, and judge the success or failure of those institutions solely by how successfuly they tain you to do a job.
Whatever happened to learning for learning's sake? What ever happened to just expanding your own mind, and your own understanding of the world? That was originally the role of Universities - a place to go and learn. The things you learned at University didn't used to have to have any relevance to practical life, or employment; It used to be acceptable to just go and learn something simply because you wanted to know about it.
Vocational training used to come via apprenticeships, community colleges, polytechnics, trade schools - whatever you want to call them - and they did a far etter job of it than Universities do now because they were unashamedly about vocational training, with no delusions of grandeur, no requirement for research. Their goal was to teach people how to do a job, and how to do it well.
We now exist in a situation where the community colleges and polytechs have aspirations to be universities, and the universities are now expected to be little more than trade schools. Great; now everything sucks!
Worse still, however, is the core change in attitude: now learning is all about fnding a job. Learning is all about your vocation, and not about merely wanting to know. People who wish to know more about the world, simply to know more about the world are people who will always seek out new information, and question existing information. People who don't think that way are precisely those who are inclined to simply believe whatever their told without question. How is it that our society is trending toward the latter cases?
Europeans also have MUCH higher tax rates, higher unemployment, and lower economic growth rates.
I can't speak for Europe, but I can speak for New Zealand. New Zealand has Universal Healthcare (as well as a parallel private system if you're willing to pay), long unemployment benefits, and many of the other features attributed to western european countries.
And as for taxes - I can give a good comparison there: For a time I was working in New Zealand and my brother was working in the US. We were earning the same salary in local currency. After tax (including social security payments, state taxes, and all the rest) I had more cash in hand than my rother. In practical terms New Zealand had a lower tax rate than the US.
New Zealand is far from perfect (it has many problems in fact), but it is an example that universal healthcare and unemplyment benefits needn't result in Europe's tax, unemployment and growth rates.
Please note that I am neither advocating for or against either the US or European style of doing things here, merely pointing out that your correlation doesn't always hold up.
Drug companies take on huge risk when developing drugs and shouldn't their prices be high enough to cover past and future risks? The total cost of a drug has to include the drug company's failures in R&D, which I would presume are higher than other industries.
That's an interesting question though: How much does drug R&D cost? How much does a few big selling lifestyle drugs like viagra offset those costs? Should we trust the drug companies coporate accountants on those figure? I'm not suggesting that the drug companies necessarily are gouging, merely that it's a question few of us can actually provide any real answers to, and though we can speculate all we like I think most everyone would be pulling figures out of their asses.
While we're asking questions though: If we are going to suggest that profit motive is the driving force behind all drug research, shouldn't we note that research will thus be directed toward lifestyle drugs that can be sold to the rich rather than, for instance, drugs for malaria which will mostly be sought after by people who won't be able to afford it.
I'm guessing it's a matter of expectations. Pause for a moment and consider every other science fiction TV series you've ever seen. In fact, we could probably throw in science fiction films too. There are some exceptions (and they are generally wildly popular, relatively speaking), but for the most part none of them sport acting or dialogue the least bit better than Babylon 5. Many are, in fact, far worse. In that respect B5 is par for the course for science fiction TV shows with regard to the issues of acting, writing and directing. And then you have that long 5 season story arc, which makes it stand out from the others. That's enough to gain serious attention from the sort of people (slashdot readers for instance) who will watch anything branded as sci-fi that comes on the television.
In essence B5 used that long arc (and the resulting back references to episodes from a season or more before) to provide a sense of character development (the characters to actually change through the course of the 5 seasons), and more importantly character depth through context (i.e. through all those back references). No, this sort of character depth is not a substitute for good per episode writing and good acting, but the relative depth and context was something that no other science fiction show was offering at the time. It is no surprise it developed a following (amongst geeks).
It has reached the point where proving a number prime is MUCH easier than finding any factors of it.
Primality is in P in fact. It is just not a very conveniently low exponent (about O(n^9) dropping to about O(n^6) for most cases) so porbablistic algorithms are still the popular way to go.
You must have never worked in tech support. People are stupid. To reiterate, people are stupid.
That's a rather biased statistical sampling though. Yes, you will get an unending stream of remarkably stupid people calling tech support. As a total percentage of computer users, however, they make up rather less than you think. The GP post is correct - the majority of people don't really care (because it is not important to their lives) about Linux, but that doesn't mean they will be stupid enough to try and run Windows software on Linux.
Yes, you will have an unending stream of stupid people who tried to run Microsoft Word on Linux and don't understand why it works. Remember that you also had an unending stream of people that couldn't even use Windows either. If everyone was as stupid as the average tech support caller the internet would be practically content free.
I'm not sure whether you are directly addressing the GP post on general filmmaking on a low budget (with the advent of digital video, editing on computer, etc.) or particularly the Discworld project. I'll assume you're discussing general filmmaking (with a lean toward science fiction/fantasy).
1. Scenery/Models. Unless it is set in contemporary earth, this is one of the really hard ones. By models I mean models of castles, spaceships etc., which tend to look like they were made of Lego.
Depends on who you know. I know people entirely capable of constructing extremely impressive models (he has another job, but could easily do model work professionally). Then again, if you are a good enough writer you ought to be able to limit what you need to depict without it seeming forced.
2. Getting enough angles.
That is still pretty tough. Digital video cameras are getting cheaper and cheaper however, so in a few years this will be the result of laziness rather than inability.
3. Acting of B-class characters.
Again, very hard, but it also hangs heavily on what you're doing. The biggest problems involve the filmmakers not bothering to understand their constraints before they start, then working within them. People can act surprisingly well when they have to play (essentially) themselves and they have halfway competent direction. Of course, I am not a film director. Then again, I do know some.
4. Cheesy CG/special effects.
This one really does come down to a lack of proper forethought and design by the filmmakers. Write something you are capable of filming with the resources you have. This is not as constraining as you might think. Some great science fiction films have been shot with minimal special effects (see Pi, or The Sticky Fingers of Time). If the filmmakers don't know how to go about constructing a good film within their means, is it any surprise it sucks?
5. Audio effects.
Are just plain hard if you have anything much to do in the way of real foley work. This is one area that remains relatively inaccessible to everyday people as it just requires a lot of skill (and imagination). On the other hand, the trick is to stay away from things that are going to require such foley work.
So in the end the main issue is having the core team of writer/director/producer actually having a decent idea of what can be done, and working within those constraints. You can make surprisingly good material providing you are creative within those restrictions, and have a few clues as to what you are doing.
No, random people are not going to be making great films, but a small group of people with a real interest in film (the sort that actually read books on shot framing, directing etc.) can produce remarkably impressive material. I would suggest that there are enough people with such interests in the world that we will see more and more quality amateur productions showing up over the next 10 years.
Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab (the big 3 for commercial mathematics software) are probably a little on the high powered side for high school. That's not to say high school students couldn't learn a lot from using them, merely that the price tag for such software just isn't going to be justified by the usage.
You can get similar stuff for free in Octave and Maxima. Neither are as complete as the 3 mentioned, but then I doubt many high school students will be using Maple's ability to generate the Galois group of a polynomial. Octave and Maxima (and R for Statistics) should be enough for most high school level work.
As an off topic note, Maple for Linux really hasn't been as well maintained as the Windows version in the last few releases, and has tended to be slower/buggier (at least in the GUI interface department). I'd suggest Mathematica would be a better bet under the circumstances.
What educational software packages are available for Linux?
I'm not sure what you're looking for exactly, but off the top of my head (and a little freshmeat help):
Primary school level: Gcompris is great, has a large bundle of games targetting everything from spelling to geography to math, and is easily extensible.
Astronomy: Both Celestia and Stellarium provide great tools for teaching kids of all levels about our universe.
Mathematics: You can use basic spreadsheets if you like, but there's also Octave for vector and matrix mathematics and Maxima (and several others that I can't recall right now) for symbolic algebra.
Chemistry: There's stuff like Ghemical and Gperiodic which aren't half bad for exploring various chemistry concepts. Then there's stuff like GenChemLab which is pretty neat.
Physics: There's physics simulation software like Physics3D , and there are others around if you care to look.
Computing: Well, you've got all the programming tools you want, but also things like DrPython to make it easier/fun for students (even at lower school levels).
General knowledge: Wikipedia is accessible from anywhere.
Okay, there's a science bias there, but it's not a bad start for what I can think of, or find in 2 minutes of freshmeat.
I'm not terribly familiar with Conectiva. What does the Mandrake distribution gain with this merger? Just more experienced developers or did Conectiva have certain features that made it attractive?
Well Connectiva were one of the first distributions to embrace apt-rpm (they may even have done a lot of the development work, I can't recall) and provide some of the major development impetus behind Synpatic which is far and away the best GUI package manager around. As far as I am concerned what Mandrake could gain from Connectiva is a move to apt-rpm and Synaptic. I know URPMI has a lot of fans but I think apt and Aynaptic may be the way to go for pakcage management. It helps standardise things as well - all the Debian based distros use apt, and several use Synaptic by default as well, and despite yum being the default apt-rpm and Synaptic is very popular on Fedora, and even SuSE (instead of YaST).
At the very least I hope Connectiva stays with apt-rpm and Synaptic. I would hate to see them shift to URPMI at this stage.
open source software is inherently more secure and any problems that do come up will be fixed quickly.
I get sick of this claim as well. Open Source is neither a magic bullet for quality nor security. A project being open source guarantees nothing. I can point you at a thousand open source projects on freshmeat or sourceforge that are either crap, insecure, or both.
Firefox will most likely be more secure than IE even with similar market share, but that will be more to do with being engineered with security closer to mind (not a product of open source, more so of the developers who decided to work on it), and yes it will probably be slightly better at producing patches for problems, but that will be because it is popular with developers as well as users - and yes, open source is responsible for assisting there, but so is the actual quality of the Firefox codebase.
The key here is that it is not "an Open Source project" that is the key to quality and security, but rather the fact that Open Source projects are in the market for developers as well as users, and hence "a popular Open Source project" is the thing to look for. Even then that's no guarantee, but it is progress.
I think Mozilla is on the right track by making Thunderbird and Firefox and focusing on them doing their specific tasks very well. If parts can be shared, excellent, but don't break your back figuring out how to share components when the goal is to have good, alternative products for people who want quality.
Because all that work on XUL, Gecko and all at the beginning wasn't back breaking work. It only took years and years. Firefox and Thunderbird have been able to "[focus] on... doing their specific tasks very well" because the Mozilla team sat down and designed and engineered a powerful, flexible, and most importantly shared, backend right at the outset.
You can only focus on the cutting face tools if you supporting architecture of shared components is sufficient to hold them up. Eventually you'll find yourself wanting to do things with your tools that you shared components don't support, and that's when the trouble starts. Mozilla, and particularly Firefox and Thunderbird, are doing well because they spent a lot of time actually engineering that backend, focussing solely on the backend really. That has given them a good base to work from. There will be plenty of people who will claim it is not ideal, but it has certainly been powerful enough to support all the mozilla foundation projects, which is a pretty good start.
Focussing on tools rather than shared components only sees you reinventing the wheel over and over. If more software were seriously engineered rather than evolved/cobbled together we would be far better off.
Why not compare the two? I want to run an app (say, Kate) at home, to edit some files. I open konsole, type ssh -Y etc., then type kate&. Okay, there it is, but it's slow as hell.
I connect to a Windows XP box at work from my Windows laptop. Bingo, I can do what I want at near-native speed. Sure, it shows the whole desktop and not just individual apps, but I don't care. I just want to get some work done.
What's the difference? The difference is that with X I can connect and run software from (as I said in my initial post) half a dozen (or more) different machines. If you want to do that with WTS you need half a dozen different windows with half a dozen different desktops and the whole thing is just icky. With X I get something that is in no way dissimilar (in fact it is identical) to what I would see if I were running all the apps locally.
If I want to do what you're doing I can run TightVNC or something. It is not in any way the same or comparable to running apps over X.
Bsides, if you want speed use FreeNX - which will likely be getting quite mainstream very soon. The X protocol isn't broken, but the implementation most widely found is for LANs not the internet. That's improving as we speak though.
The world has changed since X was designed, nobody needs the font server, few people need network transparency
Hold on there. "Few people need the network transparency"? How about "Few people bother to take advantage of the network transparency because they aren't used to thinking that way". If you bothered to set systems up to take advantage of X11's network transparency you'd be using it all the time too. The network transparency is a huge advantage. I can (and often do) have applications running on half a dozen different machines, yet have them all integrate elegantly into my desktop as if they were running locally.
People who claim network transparency should be dropped from X, or X should be dropped because of its network transparency are ignorant, trolls, or both.
But where can I find it? I run E17. Before today I'd never even seen nor heard of edje and edje equipped thingies, specifically a neato moving desktop thingie.
That's odd because to get E17 working you need to compile from CVS, which requires, at the least, that you install RPMs for various packages from EFL, which includes edje.
I would suggest one of three possibilities:
(1) You are not running Enlightenment at all. (2) You are running E16.7 and somehow have this confused. (3) You are running some very very old "E17" as packaged many years ago by some random person. As such that "E17" bears zero relation to what Raster is talking about.
Why the hell are you running E17 if you aren't a developer anyway? It is, currently, not much use to anyone as it is still very much alpha code.
In the case of Eiffel I really think it's a case of not offering anything truly significant for programmer productivity. I mean, yeah, Design by Contract is generally a good idea, but it's nothing assert() and good coding standards can't provide. Non-trivial "contracts" can't be verified until run-time anyway, and assert() works just fine for that.
Yes, and I can do OO programming in C using structs and function pointers. That doesn't mean I wouldn't appreciate a language that provides easy access to the tools in a manner that is easier to read, write and maintain. That's what DbC does for you with regard to assert statements. Yes, you can go around sticking asserts everywhere (and have an extra method run after any method to check the object invariants have remained unchanged), but that does get messy, and it doesn't scale well when you start doing class inheritence and having to worry about weakening of strengthening of constraints (you want to be able to weaken preconditions, but not post conditions or invariants) and so on. Contracts make it clear what you are doing, and actually supporting them explicitly in the language is a good idea. You can do DbC in Java, Python, and presumably other languages if you want, you're not just restricted to Eiffel. The catch is that those DbC systems require using add ons to the standard interpreters - why not just build it into the language? Is it really going to hurt anyone?
As to CSP - someone else seems to have gotten to that, and they seem to have a far better grasp of it than I do, so I'll simply refer you to their comments.
Incidently, wxWidgets provides functionlity to do exactly what you're saying - an abstracted widget you can use to provide correctly ordered stock buttons on any platform.
Well, not exactly no - that's coding the HIG into the widget library. I would think the logical thing to do would be to code the HIG into the platform. Thus GNOME as a platform has an abstracted way of building a GUI application that it can share with KDE, MacOS and whoever else wants in, such that when you run/compile the application in/for a GNOME environment it applies GNOME HIG rules to construct the GUI, and when you use KDE it uses KDE HIG rules to construct the GUI and...
That way it is the platform that is responsible for defining their HIG, not the cross platform widget library.
Sure, there are some HIG rules you can't enforce via this "this is how to construct the GUI" way, but it would be useful for a lot of things. Perhaps it would be worth the time to see what sorts of concepts and objects one would have to use/define to be able toi build a UI in this manner.
You can avoid whole classes of bugs by having proper language support, and programmer time can be reduced considerably.
Very true. So the question is why are you choosing a language that doesn't support nice features like Design by Contract (which helps avoid whole classes of bugs, makes debugging far simpler, and thus reduces programmer time considerably), or (a new one to me) CSP style programming (which makes writing multithreaded programs a breeze, meaning you can just do things multithreaded from the outset, obviously reducing programmer time considerably)?
Yes C# and OO languages have nice language features that aid in development. That's not the be all and end all however. Both ideas I just mentioned are very old (DbC is decades old, CSP about 20 years old), yet we haven't gotten around to using them, mostly because people simply don't know what they are, what they can do, and how much simpler they can make things.
Each platform has different HIGs which determine how an application should behave as well as how it should look. Using the same UI code on multiple platforms results in apps that don't match the HIGs on any platform except (if you're lucky) the one on which they were developed.
Which raises the interesting question of whether we should be looking for another level of abstraction for GUIs beyond widget toolkits that let you write one codebase that then applies the HIG rules of the platform (which, of course, have to be something formally codified rather than just a spec document) to generate a (relatively speaking) HIG compliant UI.
Imagine having applications written on a level such that the "OK/Cancel" button order is determined by the platform rather than by where the code explicitly placed the buttons. Such would certainly make GNOME and KDE much more compatible. At the same time it would formalise the HIG from a "reccomended way of doing things" into a mandated consistent GUI.
Slashdot Mirror
If I wanted to do that then I would probably just read a book. Very few subjects require formal instruction spread over a semester or a year or several years. Formal education was not created for the person who wants to learn it was created for the person who is to be made to learn.
I think you'll find that's fairly person and subject dependent. I am currently taking a course for which I could simply be reading the book - why am I taking the course? Because the subject matter is very hard, and the book very terse. Having someone who does understand the material well provide further explanation, alternate ways of looking at things, and just generally more detail, does make it much easier to learn.
If we're talking about a lot of high school level material, then yes, a lot of people can simply get by reading about it. The principle of university is to be providing instruction in material that is hard, that is currently at the edge of research (universities are primarily there to provide research to begin with), and thus benefits from being taught. No, not all courses at universities actually fit that - that doesn't mean universities are worthless, merely that some courses are rather poor.
A university, originally, was supposed to be a place of learning; a place where like minded people could congregate together, collect and share their knowledge and explore and seek new knowledge. Courses, as offered by universities, are supposed to be an opportunity for a person wishing to learn to gain expert instruction in cutting edge subject area.
You say that if I want to learn something I should just read a book? Currently I am learning about analytic pro-p-groups, and Lie p-rings. Which book should I "just read" to learn that easily without formal courses? Where, exactly, am I expected to find that book? I'll lay odds my local library doesn't have it - my university library might, but that's back to the point of universities providing a collection of knowledge and a place to learn.
Jedidiah.
How much of the constraints in University are about providing pieces of paper and proof of ability for purely vocational purposes though? I mean really, all a University is doing is offering a variety of courses that you can choose to do if you find them interesting. The whole deal with the degree, associated course requirements, the examinations and assessments etc. is all largely about providing prospective employers with a nice checklist. If universities managed to free themselves of their vocational training aspects a little more I think you would find them much more to you liking.
A place where you can go: to be with other people interested in learning; to have access to a wide variety and depth of material (the internet, for all its breadth, fails to offer equivalent depth in any subject to that of a good university library); a place where people with knowledge, experience and interest (their prime job is purely research) provide courses in subjects.
There is nothing wrong with trade schools when you simply want to learn a trade, or how to do a job, and those qualifications should not be looked down on as (for some reason) they are now. That shouldn't stop a person from also wanting to attend an institution that is solely about learning, and not interested in vocations etc. That is part of the current issue with Universities.
Jedidiah
Q: Why learn for learning's sake?
A: Because it satisfies my desire to know.
Jedidiah.
The point is, people who focus on getting their degree so that they can get to work ASAP are not necessarily disintrested in learning. Their financial situation may be such that they have no other economically responsible alternatives.
And I have no problem with that. I myself got a job to get myself into a more economically viable position to further my education.
What I am questioning is the shoehorning together of vocational training, and general education. Why do universities have to be a place to get vocational training - why can't we actually leave that to places that actually specialise in vocational training... and will hence be a lot cheaper (not having to fund research for its lecturers for a start)!
I think somewhere along the line some wires got crossed. I admit that the job market looks for a "college degree" as opposed to an accreditation from a vocational school; but that's pretty damn stupid on their part really. The whole system has twisted itself into a rather nasty mess.
Jedidiah.
The reason for this is that college is expensive! If you would feel comfortable not getting paid more than a nurse with a two-year degree, yet being piled in debt for ten years, all while knowing how to write a critique of Dante's Inferno, then more power to you...I guess.
It's a matter of value - do you value what you can learn. I'm learning pure mathematics. That will have little real immediate application in the world, but it is interesting, and it extends my mind. I place value on that; I enjoy doing it; and am willing to spend money to be able to pursue what I enjoy.
Did you consider that maybe university is not for everyone? Perhaps, if all you want is to make a lot of money, you should skip college and head straight to a trade school that will teach you how to make a lot of money.
The question is, what exactly is it that you value in life?
Jedidiah.
Learning for learning's sake is great, if you've got a full ride. Learning for learning's sake on your own dime (and debt) is another story altogether.
Which is another way of saying that you don't really place much value on knowledge and learning. Which is what I was suggesting was an interesting dilemma.
I am currently back at University, learning what I am interested in learning simply because I want to know and extend myself. How did I pay for that? I spent 4 years working very hard and saving cash. The fact that, given my previous university record and my work experience, I was offered a scholarship certainly helps, but I have enough money to support myself through this if I choose. Nor do I fear finding a job when I decide to go back to working - I know wat the workplace is like, I know what employers are looking for (having been involved in reviweing resumes and conducting interviews while working), and I'm confident I can provide that.
Jedidiah.
I think there are a lot of people that just want universities to crank out trained worker bees at age 22.
I'm rather troubled by that attitude here on Slashdot - there seem to be many many people who view a degree as pointless unless it fast tracks you to a job. There seem to be many people who view High School and University as solely vocational training, and judge the success or failure of those institutions solely by how successfuly they tain you to do a job.
Whatever happened to learning for learning's sake? What ever happened to just expanding your own mind, and your own understanding of the world? That was originally the role of Universities - a place to go and learn. The things you learned at University didn't used to have to have any relevance to practical life, or employment; It used to be acceptable to just go and learn something simply because you wanted to know about it.
Vocational training used to come via apprenticeships, community colleges, polytechnics, trade schools - whatever you want to call them - and they did a far etter job of it than Universities do now because they were unashamedly about vocational training, with no delusions of grandeur, no requirement for research. Their goal was to teach people how to do a job, and how to do it well.
We now exist in a situation where the community colleges and polytechs have aspirations to be universities, and the universities are now expected to be little more than trade schools. Great; now everything sucks!
Worse still, however, is the core change in attitude: now learning is all about fnding a job. Learning is all about your vocation, and not about merely wanting to know. People who wish to know more about the world, simply to know more about the world are people who will always seek out new information, and question existing information. People who don't think that way are precisely those who are inclined to simply believe whatever their told without question. How is it that our society is trending toward the latter cases?
Jedidiah.
Europeans also have MUCH higher tax rates, higher unemployment, and lower economic growth rates.
I can't speak for Europe, but I can speak for New Zealand. New Zealand has Universal Healthcare (as well as a parallel private system if you're willing to pay), long unemployment benefits, and many of the other features attributed to western european countries.
New Zealand has an unemployment rate of 3.6% which is very respectable, and a decent economic growth rate.
And as for taxes - I can give a good comparison there: For a time I was working in New Zealand and my brother was working in the US. We were earning the same salary in local currency. After tax (including social security payments, state taxes, and all the rest) I had more cash in hand than my rother. In practical terms New Zealand had a lower tax rate than the US.
New Zealand is far from perfect (it has many problems in fact), but it is an example that universal healthcare and unemplyment benefits needn't result in Europe's tax, unemployment and growth rates.
Please note that I am neither advocating for or against either the US or European style of doing things here, merely pointing out that your correlation doesn't always hold up.
Jedidiah.
Drug companies take on huge risk when developing drugs and shouldn't their prices be high enough to cover past and future risks? The total cost of a drug has to include the drug company's failures in R&D, which I would presume are higher than other industries.
That's an interesting question though: How much does drug R&D cost? How much does a few big selling lifestyle drugs like viagra offset those costs? Should we trust the drug companies coporate accountants on those figure? I'm not suggesting that the drug companies necessarily are gouging, merely that it's a question few of us can actually provide any real answers to, and though we can speculate all we like I think most everyone would be pulling figures out of their asses.
While we're asking questions though: If we are going to suggest that profit motive is the driving force behind all drug research, shouldn't we note that research will thus be directed toward lifestyle drugs that can be sold to the rich rather than, for instance, drugs for malaria which will mostly be sought after by people who won't be able to afford it.
Jedidiah.
I'm guessing it's a matter of expectations. Pause for a moment and consider every other science fiction TV series you've ever seen. In fact, we could probably throw in science fiction films too. There are some exceptions (and they are generally wildly popular, relatively speaking), but for the most part none of them sport acting or dialogue the least bit better than Babylon 5. Many are, in fact, far worse. In that respect B5 is par for the course for science fiction TV shows with regard to the issues of acting, writing and directing. And then you have that long 5 season story arc, which makes it stand out from the others. That's enough to gain serious attention from the sort of people (slashdot readers for instance) who will watch anything branded as sci-fi that comes on the television.
In essence B5 used that long arc (and the resulting back references to episodes from a season or more before) to provide a sense of character development (the characters to actually change through the course of the 5 seasons), and more importantly character depth through context (i.e. through all those back references). No, this sort of character depth is not a substitute for good per episode writing and good acting, but the relative depth and context was something that no other science fiction show was offering at the time. It is no surprise it developed a following (amongst geeks).
Jedidiah.
It has reached the point where proving a number prime is MUCH easier than finding any factors of it.
Primality is in P in fact. It is just not a very conveniently low exponent (about O(n^9) dropping to about O(n^6) for most cases) so porbablistic algorithms are still the popular way to go.
Jedidiah.
You must have never worked in tech support. People are stupid. To reiterate, people are stupid.
That's a rather biased statistical sampling though. Yes, you will get an unending stream of remarkably stupid people calling tech support. As a total percentage of computer users, however, they make up rather less than you think. The GP post is correct - the majority of people don't really care (because it is not important to their lives) about Linux, but that doesn't mean they will be stupid enough to try and run Windows software on Linux.
Yes, you will have an unending stream of stupid people who tried to run Microsoft Word on Linux and don't understand why it works. Remember that you also had an unending stream of people that couldn't even use Windows either. If everyone was as stupid as the average tech support caller the internet would be practically content free.
Jedidiah.
I'm not sure whether you are directly addressing the GP post on general filmmaking on a low budget (with the advent of digital video, editing on computer, etc.) or particularly the Discworld project. I'll assume you're discussing general filmmaking (with a lean toward science fiction/fantasy).
1. Scenery/Models. Unless it is set in contemporary earth, this is one of the really hard ones. By models I mean models of castles, spaceships etc., which tend to look like they were made of Lego.
Depends on who you know. I know people entirely capable of constructing extremely impressive models (he has another job, but could easily do model work professionally). Then again, if you are a good enough writer you ought to be able to limit what you need to depict without it seeming forced.
2. Getting enough angles.
That is still pretty tough. Digital video cameras are getting cheaper and cheaper however, so in a few years this will be the result of laziness rather than inability.
3. Acting of B-class characters.
Again, very hard, but it also hangs heavily on what you're doing. The biggest problems involve the filmmakers not bothering to understand their constraints before they start, then working within them. People can act surprisingly well when they have to play (essentially) themselves and they have halfway competent direction. Of course, I am not a film director. Then again, I do know some.
4. Cheesy CG/special effects.
This one really does come down to a lack of proper forethought and design by the filmmakers. Write something you are capable of filming with the resources you have. This is not as constraining as you might think. Some great science fiction films have been shot with minimal special effects (see Pi, or The Sticky Fingers of Time). If the filmmakers don't know how to go about constructing a good film within their means, is it any surprise it sucks?
5. Audio effects.
Are just plain hard if you have anything much to do in the way of real foley work. This is one area that remains relatively inaccessible to everyday people as it just requires a lot of skill (and imagination). On the other hand, the trick is to stay away from things that are going to require such foley work.
So in the end the main issue is having the core team of writer/director/producer actually having a decent idea of what can be done, and working within those constraints. You can make surprisingly good material providing you are creative within those restrictions, and have a few clues as to what you are doing.
No, random people are not going to be making great films, but a small group of people with a real interest in film (the sort that actually read books on shot framing, directing etc.) can produce remarkably impressive material. I would suggest that there are enough people with such interests in the world that we will see more and more quality amateur productions showing up over the next 10 years.
Jedidiah.
Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab (the big 3 for commercial mathematics software) are probably a little on the high powered side for high school. That's not to say high school students couldn't learn a lot from using them, merely that the price tag for such software just isn't going to be justified by the usage.
You can get similar stuff for free in Octave and Maxima. Neither are as complete as the 3 mentioned, but then I doubt many high school students will be using Maple's ability to generate the Galois group of a polynomial. Octave and Maxima (and R for Statistics) should be enough for most high school level work.
As an off topic note, Maple for Linux really hasn't been as well maintained as the Windows version in the last few releases, and has tended to be slower/buggier (at least in the GUI interface department). I'd suggest Mathematica would be a better bet under the circumstances.
Jedidiah.
What educational software packages are available for Linux?
I'm not sure what you're looking for exactly, but off the top of my head (and a little freshmeat help):
Primary school level: Gcompris is great, has a large bundle of games targetting everything from spelling to geography to math, and is easily extensible.
Astronomy: Both Celestia and Stellarium provide great tools for teaching kids of all levels about our universe.
Mathematics: You can use basic spreadsheets if you like, but there's also Octave for vector and matrix mathematics and Maxima (and several others that I can't recall right now) for symbolic algebra.
Chemistry: There's stuff like Ghemical and Gperiodic which aren't half bad for exploring various chemistry concepts. Then there's stuff like GenChemLab which is pretty neat.
Physics: There's physics simulation software like Physics3D , and there are others around if you care to look.
Computing: Well, you've got all the programming tools you want, but also things like DrPython to make it easier/fun for students (even at lower school levels).
General knowledge: Wikipedia is accessible from anywhere.
Okay, there's a science bias there, but it's not a bad start for what I can think of, or find in 2 minutes of freshmeat.
Jedidiah.
I'm not terribly familiar with Conectiva. What does the Mandrake distribution gain with this merger? Just more experienced developers or did Conectiva have certain features that made it attractive?
Well Connectiva were one of the first distributions to embrace apt-rpm (they may even have done a lot of the development work, I can't recall) and provide some of the major development impetus behind Synpatic which is far and away the best GUI package manager around. As far as I am concerned what Mandrake could gain from Connectiva is a move to apt-rpm and Synaptic. I know URPMI has a lot of fans but I think apt and Aynaptic may be the way to go for pakcage management. It helps standardise things as well - all the Debian based distros use apt, and several use Synaptic by default as well, and despite yum being the default apt-rpm and Synaptic is very popular on Fedora, and even SuSE (instead of YaST).
At the very least I hope Connectiva stays with apt-rpm and Synaptic. I would hate to see them shift to URPMI at this stage.
Jedidiah.
open source software is inherently more secure and any problems that do come up will be fixed quickly.
I get sick of this claim as well. Open Source is neither a magic bullet for quality nor security. A project being open source guarantees nothing. I can point you at a thousand open source projects on freshmeat or sourceforge that are either crap, insecure, or both.
Firefox will most likely be more secure than IE even with similar market share, but that will be more to do with being engineered with security closer to mind (not a product of open source, more so of the developers who decided to work on it), and yes it will probably be slightly better at producing patches for problems, but that will be because it is popular with developers as well as users - and yes, open source is responsible for assisting there, but so is the actual quality of the Firefox codebase.
The key here is that it is not "an Open Source project" that is the key to quality and security, but rather the fact that Open Source projects are in the market for developers as well as users, and hence "a popular Open Source project" is the thing to look for. Even then that's no guarantee, but it is progress.
Jedidiah.
I think Mozilla is on the right track by making Thunderbird and Firefox and focusing on them doing their specific tasks very well. If parts can be shared, excellent, but don't break your back figuring out how to share components when the goal is to have good, alternative products for people who want quality.
... doing their specific tasks very well" because the Mozilla team sat down and designed and engineered a powerful, flexible, and most importantly shared, backend right at the outset.
Because all that work on XUL, Gecko and all at the beginning wasn't back breaking work. It only took years and years. Firefox and Thunderbird have been able to "[focus] on
You can only focus on the cutting face tools if you supporting architecture of shared components is sufficient to hold them up. Eventually you'll find yourself wanting to do things with your tools that you shared components don't support, and that's when the trouble starts. Mozilla, and particularly Firefox and Thunderbird, are doing well because they spent a lot of time actually engineering that backend, focussing solely on the backend really. That has given them a good base to work from. There will be plenty of people who will claim it is not ideal, but it has certainly been powerful enough to support all the mozilla foundation projects, which is a pretty good start.
Focussing on tools rather than shared components only sees you reinventing the wheel over and over. If more software were seriously engineered rather than evolved/cobbled together we would be far better off.
Jedidiah.
Why not compare the two? I want to run an app (say, Kate) at home, to edit some files. I open konsole, type ssh -Y etc., then type kate&. Okay, there it is, but it's slow as hell.
I connect to a Windows XP box at work from my Windows laptop. Bingo, I can do what I want at near-native speed. Sure, it shows the whole desktop and not just individual apps, but I don't care. I just want to get some work done.
What's the difference? The difference is that with X I can connect and run software from (as I said in my initial post) half a dozen (or more) different machines. If you want to do that with WTS you need half a dozen different windows with half a dozen different desktops and the whole thing is just icky. With X I get something that is in no way dissimilar (in fact it is identical) to what I would see if I were running all the apps locally.
If I want to do what you're doing I can run TightVNC or something. It is not in any way the same or comparable to running apps over X.
Bsides, if you want speed use FreeNX - which will likely be getting quite mainstream very soon. The X protocol isn't broken, but the implementation most widely found is for LANs not the internet. That's improving as we speak though.
Jedidiah.
The world has changed since X was designed, nobody needs the font server, few people need network transparency
Hold on there. "Few people need the network transparency"? How about "Few people bother to take advantage of the network transparency because they aren't used to thinking that way". If you bothered to set systems up to take advantage of X11's network transparency you'd be using it all the time too. The network transparency is a huge advantage. I can (and often do) have applications running on half a dozen different machines, yet have them all integrate elegantly into my desktop as if they were running locally.
People who claim network transparency should be dropped from X, or X should be dropped because of its network transparency are ignorant, trolls, or both.
Yes, yes, IHBT, HAND.
Jedidiah.
But where can I find it? I run E17. Before today I'd never even seen nor heard of edje and edje equipped thingies, specifically a neato moving desktop thingie.
That's odd because to get E17 working you need to compile from CVS, which requires, at the least, that you install RPMs for various packages from EFL, which includes edje.
I would suggest one of three possibilities:
(1) You are not running Enlightenment at all.
(2) You are running E16.7 and somehow have this confused.
(3) You are running some very very old "E17" as packaged many years ago by some random person. As such that "E17" bears zero relation to what Raster is talking about.
Why the hell are you running E17 if you aren't a developer anyway? It is, currently, not much use to anyone as it is still very much alpha code.
Jedidiah.
In the case of Eiffel I really think it's a case of not offering anything truly significant for programmer productivity. I mean, yeah, Design by Contract is generally a good idea, but it's nothing assert() and good coding standards can't provide. Non-trivial "contracts" can't be verified until run-time anyway, and assert() works just fine for that.
Yes, and I can do OO programming in C using structs and function pointers. That doesn't mean I wouldn't appreciate a language that provides easy access to the tools in a manner that is easier to read, write and maintain. That's what DbC does for you with regard to assert statements. Yes, you can go around sticking asserts everywhere (and have an extra method run after any method to check the object invariants have remained unchanged), but that does get messy, and it doesn't scale well when you start doing class inheritence and having to worry about weakening of strengthening of constraints (you want to be able to weaken preconditions, but not post conditions or invariants) and so on. Contracts make it clear what you are doing, and actually supporting them explicitly in the language is a good idea. You can do DbC in Java, Python, and presumably other languages if you want, you're not just restricted to Eiffel. The catch is that those DbC systems require using add ons to the standard interpreters - why not just build it into the language? Is it really going to hurt anyone?
As to CSP - someone else seems to have gotten to that, and they seem to have a far better grasp of it than I do, so I'll simply refer you to their comments.
Jedidiah.
Incidently, wxWidgets provides functionlity to do exactly what you're saying - an abstracted widget you can use to provide correctly ordered stock buttons on any platform.
Well, not exactly no - that's coding the HIG into the widget library. I would think the logical thing to do would be to code the HIG into the platform. Thus GNOME as a platform has an abstracted way of building a GUI application that it can share with KDE, MacOS and whoever else wants in, such that when you run/compile the application in/for a GNOME environment it applies GNOME HIG rules to construct the GUI, and when you use KDE it uses KDE HIG rules to construct the GUI and...
That way it is the platform that is responsible for defining their HIG, not the cross platform widget library.
Sure, there are some HIG rules you can't enforce via this "this is how to construct the GUI" way, but it would be useful for a lot of things. Perhaps it would be worth the time to see what sorts of concepts and objects one would have to use/define to be able toi build a UI in this manner.
Jedidiah.
You can avoid whole classes of bugs by having proper language support, and programmer time can be reduced considerably.
Very true. So the question is why are you choosing a language that doesn't support nice features like Design by Contract (which helps avoid whole classes of bugs, makes debugging far simpler, and thus reduces programmer time considerably), or (a new one to me) CSP style programming (which makes writing multithreaded programs a breeze, meaning you can just do things multithreaded from the outset, obviously reducing programmer time considerably)?
Yes C# and OO languages have nice language features that aid in development. That's not the be all and end all however. Both ideas I just mentioned are very old (DbC is decades old, CSP about 20 years old), yet we haven't gotten around to using them, mostly because people simply don't know what they are, what they can do, and how much simpler they can make things.
Jedidiah.
Each platform has different HIGs which determine how an application should behave as well as how it should look. Using the same UI code on multiple platforms results in apps that don't match the HIGs on any platform except (if you're lucky) the one on which they were developed.
Which raises the interesting question of whether we should be looking for another level of abstraction for GUIs beyond widget toolkits that let you write one codebase that then applies the HIG rules of the platform (which, of course, have to be something formally codified rather than just a spec document) to generate a (relatively speaking) HIG compliant UI.
Imagine having applications written on a level such that the "OK/Cancel" button order is determined by the platform rather than by where the code explicitly placed the buttons. Such would certainly make GNOME and KDE much more compatible. At the same time it would formalise the HIG from a "reccomended way of doing things" into a mandated consistent GUI.
Jedidiah.