Still allows the other students to see what "the shy student" or "the embarrassed student" said.
Some students feel that being made a fool of in front of class is embarrassing enought that they would rather fail the class than be ridiculed.
Yes, it's stupid, but I bet you a full 1/2 of students feel that way.
Yes I go to school still at night, so this is not from 1984. And yes, I usually don't care who thinks what so I open my big mouth whenever, but others say nothing the entire semester, and are happy with a C.
I tell you it's bad because my current teacher asks: "Does anybody _not_ understand this concept?" and the class stays silent, looking confortable. Then the teacher asks: "Does anybody understand this concept?" and the room also stays silent and still, very unconfortable now. (he's doing a lousy job btw)
The key is that people try to make friends of other students, not professors, so student-to-student image is veeeery important.
I know I'm going off-topic, but I can tell you that this is the very reason educators need something like the clicker.
Ultimately, the teaching environment sucks. Teachers are too few and many are very bad, can't be understood because of poor english speaking skills, can't make the subject interesting, or simply don't care.
The younger students I see (and I do pity them) are adrift in a sea of bureaucracy that is absolutely sucking their creativity dry. They look like zombies, listening like drones for hours on end and just memorizing enough to pass the next test. Cumulative final? Have to remember this crap more than 4 weeks straight? Drop the class, or suffer through yet-another crappy class taught by someone who can't teach.
laser pointers, 4 large areas above the boards: A, B, C, D. A&D substitute for yes/no.
Have people point to the area they want. roughly count the dots.
Anonymous too: it's hard to tell in a room of 100 students where 1 in patricular is pointing to.
Of course, this could also be used as a mass weapon against a professor who insists on lecturing until the very last minute of class, and _then_ giving out the assignment for next class.
Treat them like machines on the internet, since you have no control over the machine itself. (I've seen people reinstall the OS because they can't get their kid's game to play.)
Assume the machines have viruses and trojans, and spyware throught the wazoo.
Oh, have a policy that every 4 months, people have to turn in their machines in for maintenance and reassignment. They won't think of these machines as "theirs" and they won't install crap (like their palm-pilot synch software).
I'm still out on filesystem encryption. I think it does not really block determined hackers, especially if they have government funding.
Finally, the reason why people get paid good money to find solutions is that these problems are not trivial. Good luck.
That would not happen until the consensus vote was successful in deciding that a man would be sent to Mars as opposed to another planet/moon.
Also, it would probably still be mired in the courts by appeals from the "Friends of the Woman on Mars Foundation".
Furthermore, funding for the project would still have to be collected from member nations, and each one would, instamagically, face a grave domestic crisis of dire financial consequences on the day of the wire transfer.
Lastly, the Men of Much Religion would encourage their followers to rid the world of the scourge of science: this evil that poisons the holy hearts of men and makes them think of themselves as gods. They would cite the Holy, Sacred, and Inviolate Scriptures to denounce the Man on Mars program as the establishment of a Worship of Mars Cult, and pressure local politician with sunday school bake-sales and fiery sermons from the Pulpits of Righteousness.
If you want things done: Put the geeks in the control room, find some shrewd bankers, sleazy politicians, and greedy businessmen, add a sprinkle of alpha military types and you've got yourself a space program that will make the general population ooh and aah with wonderment. Oh, and a few billion dollars. But the money is generally forthcoming.
Let's not forget, however, that the kids who buy dedicated machines to colo are usually the same kids who run business services for the local mom and pops, and who, as a whole, have been a large community of dell 1U buyers.
So I give it to Sun to actually recognize their market.
An advice for Sun:
Jonathan, if you want the geeks to take you seriously, come and open a slashdot account and post here. You'll get your boots dirty, but at least you'll know what it feels like in the trenches.
You've got no money, no staff, no power, and a hazardous environment.
You are adept at unix/linux/bsd.
You are capable of writing scripts.
Forget expensive machines, you'll never get them.
If I were you:
Let the users run windows, it's good enough for the desktop, and you already have licenses for it (came with the machines, no?)
On the servers:
A firewall, pix ($350 on ebay)
A spam filter (repurposed pc)
An email server. Looks like you have that covered.
Try to get 1 windows 2003 server for active directory, stick the teachers on the same domain and play with the policies to get permissions right.
You will be setting up 2 networks: one for the school to get work done, one for students to play with: firewall them from each other.
Build your infrastructure on non-windows stuff. Keep exchange down.
Document everything.
Remember that you cannot secure the machines students have access to. Some will boot from CDs. Some will reformat and put linux on them.
Spend most of your money on hardware. You can code software from scratch, but you can't get "make" hardware.
Try to get graduates who have moved on to local colleges talking IT courses to help out. Offer internships for college students. Nothing like running a high school network on a shoestring budget to get your feet wet.
Use what little money you have left to buy a good library of books. I would stick with O'Reilly, Wiley and Sons, and Addison Wesley. Remember, the admin after you should be able to learn on the job.
For the teachers, they just want the stuff to work with minimal effort. Find out how many use hotmail or yahoo at home. You might be surprised. ask them if they would be ok with a web-based email program.
The only thing that matters is that you deliver stable service. Doesn't have to be fancy, doesn't have to be fast. It has to be reliable.
Finally, a word of advice: document absolutely everything. Make copies of everything, and make memos of all conversations, and print them, and keep them in file folders. In a high-school, you have to be extra careful. But you knew that.
What if I wanted to mirror a full version of all wikipedias, with pictures. We're talking in excess of 60GB. And even then is not unlimited. What if I wanted web services that run night and day at 20+hits per second. They would chew up bandwidth nicely.
"Unlimited disk space" and "unlimited bandwidth" is "not true" in the boolean sense of the word, and thus to geeks: a lie.
Ok, I didn't mean no cart in that sense. I meant that since you don't have to take it out of the cart to put it on the counter for the cashier, you can put it in bags, in the cart.
The only official diploma/certification I have is the GED.
Of course, I'm a software developer for a fortune 500.
All it takes is developing your reading, writing, coding, comprehension, cultural, linguistic, organizational, and networking skills. That, and bitching websites.
If I had $1500 to use on education/career, I'd buy books from O'reilly and Addison Wesley. With another 1500 I'd get a $700 machine and colocate it for a year at $60/mo and put debian+ssh on it, for practicing.
(why colocated? Because I would be able to configure the machine from scratch, and have it be on the net.)
In an interview: they ask: Can set up mod_python on apache with postgresql back end? I answer: I have, from scratch, after installing the OS. Let me chow you (then you goto the web site (thus the colo) and demo it, then you go to putty/ssh and log in as root and show them the config). Then you get the job, because the college graduate is still on his $10/mo windows shared hosted account.:)
The key is to talk to the manager.
The other key is that you want to be the resume they look at after they've unsuccessfully interviewed the 8 college graduates who can't actullay do the job.
No cart anymore. You get bags or bring your on, you pile up the stuff yourself, then you walk out to your car through one of the many exits. You rfid in your wallet identifies you, and points them to the website that holds your budget and card info.
Maybe trollish, but nevertheless quite true where I am concerned.
Now, maybe my knowledge is defective (haven't we heard that before?) so I'll go out there and try to avail myself of the services of my library... We'll see how that goes...
You want to see my property tax bill? It's several thousand dollars larger than a netflix subscription. Also, now the money is wasted to me, since I don't use the library, but the real cost is the money I spend at Borders buying books (last book I bought, Network Programming in Unix, was $70 with tax). Like I said at the bottom of my rant, I'll put my vote to the city council candidate that wants to trim library budgets further and allocate the tax money I contribute to the Police, the Fire Department, the school district, or street construction and maintenance. Currently, the libraries are doing nothing for me.
Oh, and if you think that "society as a whole" is bettered by libraries, think about this some more, and go live in France like I did. Someday you'll see.
-- Stay open until midnight on friday and saturday night.
-- Let me borrow the book as long as I want. Like netflix. Or 1 year.
-- Have a 24 hours pickup/dropoff walk-up counter: I go online, I ask for a book by ISBN, the interlibrary exchange does its thing, and the book is delivered at the location in 24 hours (not 4 weeks), then I get an email: your book is ready. Give me 36 hours to drive by over there and pick it up, on my way home from work, at 9:45 PM, on Tuesday.
-- Have more books. I don't care if you have to rent one million square feet of warehouse space on the poor side of town, I want you to stock at least one copy of every single book currently in print in the western world, and have out-of-print books going back 50 years.
-- Stock comics, magazines, newspapers, car manuals, foreign titles, foreign comics.
-- Stock more than one copy of the latest New York bestsellers top ten list.
-- Have lots and lots of chairs and small tables. Hundreds of them.
-- Drop the computers. Who cares. You see computers at Borders?
-- Stay open until midnight on friday and saturday night. Are you getting it?
-- Copy machines at cost (no more than $0.02 per page) But you shouldn't have to, since the people can just take the books home.
-- Some people have mentioned printing on demand. You wouldn't have to offer that service if you had the book in stock to begin with. Have more books.
-- Forget cds and dvds. Books. But if you got to have DVDs, let people keep them a week or more.
-- Last but not least, allow people to talk to each other. It's not a morgue. I't not a study hall, nor a hospital. People like to go where it's lively.
I have a card (Los Angeles Public Library), but I don't go because, and yes, I'm talking to you my dear tax-consuming librarians: you're closed when I want to go there, you don't have the books I want to read, and I often take more than 3 weeks to read a book, especially if I'm trying to grok an O'Reilly title like "Programming Python".
I buy about 30 books a year (1 every 2 weeks approx.) and about one third are fiction, the others technical, so it's not like I don't like to read.
I hope you guys get it. The post office is open until 5 PM on Saturdays. They're adapting. You adapt too, or we'll use the tax money elsewhere.
same story here. Went from DOS 3.3 -> DOS 5.0 -> DOS 6.22 to Win 3.1 (skipped 2.0 thank god!) Win 95, 98, Win 98SE (still active, wife's PC) Skipped ME. Win 2000 (still in use) Debian stable (current prod systems)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm suddenly wondering what is the lowest uid still in occasional use.
Still allows the other students to see what "the shy student" or "the embarrassed student" said.
Some students feel that being made a fool of in front of class is embarrassing enought that they would rather fail the class than be ridiculed.
Yes, it's stupid, but I bet you a full 1/2 of students feel that way.
Yes I go to school still at night, so this is not from 1984. And yes, I usually don't care who thinks what so I open my big mouth whenever, but others say nothing the entire semester, and are happy with a C.
I tell you it's bad because my current teacher asks: "Does anybody _not_ understand this concept?" and the class stays silent, looking confortable. Then the teacher asks: "Does anybody understand this concept?" and the room also stays silent and still, very unconfortable now. (he's doing a lousy job btw)
The key is that people try to make friends of other students, not professors, so student-to-student image is veeeery important.
I know I'm going off-topic, but I can tell you that this is the very reason educators need something like the clicker.
Ultimately, the teaching environment sucks. Teachers are too few and many are very bad, can't be understood because of poor english speaking skills, can't make the subject interesting, or simply don't care.
The younger students I see (and I do pity them) are adrift in a sea of bureaucracy that is absolutely sucking their creativity dry. They look like zombies, listening like drones for hours on end and just memorizing enough to pass the next test. Cumulative final? Have to remember this crap more than 4 weeks straight? Drop the class, or suffer through yet-another crappy class taught by someone who can't teach.
I know you want to know: CSUN.
laser pointers, 4 large areas above the boards: A, B, C, D. A&D substitute for yes/no.
Have people point to the area they want. roughly count the dots.
Anonymous too: it's hard to tell in a room of 100 students where 1 in patricular is pointing to.
Of course, this could also be used as a mass weapon against a professor who insists on lecturing until the very last minute of class, and _then_ giving out the assignment for next class.
Thank you for that... :)
it says at the top of the page that they would use thatmoney to buy the movies in high demand, thus to satisfy the users. This can only be good.
same here. I have about 30 near-new dvds in a cabinet somewhere. I have no desire to see any of them again. I'll only keep my boxed sets.
If the Palm-pilot is a company-provided device, then the software will also be available.
If the palm-pilot belongs to the employee then they can buy their own laptop and keep it synched on that.
Nothing against palm-pilots. They are great devices for many people.
I liked it too. I've given it to someone at the office to read. It's hard to do with a bunch of web sites.
Treat them like machines on the internet, since you have no control over the machine itself. (I've seen people reinstall the OS because they can't get their kid's game to play.)
Assume the machines have viruses and trojans, and spyware throught the wazoo.
Oh, have a policy that every 4 months, people have to turn in their machines in for maintenance and reassignment. They won't think of these machines as "theirs" and they won't install crap (like their palm-pilot synch software).
I'm still out on filesystem encryption. I think it does not really block determined hackers, especially if they have government funding.
Finally, the reason why people get paid good money to find solutions is that these problems are not trivial. Good luck.
That would not happen until the consensus vote was successful in deciding that a man would be sent to Mars as opposed to another planet/moon.
Also, it would probably still be mired in the courts by appeals from the "Friends of the Woman on Mars Foundation".
Furthermore, funding for the project would still have to be collected from member nations, and each one would, instamagically, face a grave domestic crisis of dire financial consequences on the day of the wire transfer.
Lastly, the Men of Much Religion would encourage their followers to rid the world of the scourge of science: this evil that poisons the holy hearts of men and makes them think of themselves as gods. They would cite the Holy, Sacred, and Inviolate Scriptures to denounce the Man on Mars program as the establishment of a Worship of Mars Cult, and pressure local politician with sunday school bake-sales and fiery sermons from the Pulpits of Righteousness.
If you want things done: Put the geeks in the control room, find some shrewd bankers, sleazy politicians, and greedy businessmen, add a sprinkle of alpha military types and you've got yourself a space program that will make the general population ooh and aah with wonderment. Oh, and a few billion dollars. But the money is generally forthcoming.
I think too that the end is near for Sun... They're too top-heavy, too many competitors in the market they're in who have been doing this for a while.
. php )
If you want cheap rackmounts: http://rackmountsetc.com/
if you want good rackmounts: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/ (wikimedia bought their latest servers from there)
(check out these little bastards: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/c316/dual-opteron
Yes, from webhostingtalk.com
Let's not forget, however, that the kids who buy dedicated machines to colo are usually the same kids who run business services for the local mom and pops, and who, as a whole, have been a large community of dell 1U buyers.
So I give it to Sun to actually recognize their market.
An advice for Sun:
Jonathan, if you want the geeks to take you seriously, come and open a slashdot account and post here. You'll get your boots dirty, but at least you'll know what it feels like in the trenches.
Amen.
Gmail is written java on the back end.
It may seem trollish, but, let me tell you, java vm does some funny things under load. And gmail is under load 24x7.
You've got no money, no staff, no power, and a hazardous environment.
You are adept at unix/linux/bsd.
You are capable of writing scripts.
Forget expensive machines, you'll never get them.
If I were you:
Let the users run windows, it's good enough for the desktop, and you already have licenses for it (came with the machines, no?)
On the servers:
A firewall, pix ($350 on ebay)
A spam filter (repurposed pc)
An email server. Looks like you have that covered.
Try to get 1 windows 2003 server for active directory, stick the teachers on the same domain and play with the policies to get permissions right.
You will be setting up 2 networks: one for the school to get work done, one for students to play with: firewall them from each other.
Build your infrastructure on non-windows stuff. Keep exchange down.
Document everything.
Remember that you cannot secure the machines students have access to. Some will boot from CDs. Some will reformat and put linux on them.
Spend most of your money on hardware. You can code software from scratch, but you can't get "make" hardware.
Try to get graduates who have moved on to local colleges talking IT courses to help out. Offer internships for college students. Nothing like running a high school network on a shoestring budget to get your feet wet.
Use what little money you have left to buy a good library of books. I would stick with O'Reilly, Wiley and Sons, and Addison Wesley. Remember, the admin after you should be able to learn on the job.
For the teachers, they just want the stuff to work with minimal effort. Find out how many use hotmail or yahoo at home. You might be surprised. ask them if they would be ok with a web-based email program.
The only thing that matters is that you deliver stable service. Doesn't have to be fancy, doesn't have to be fast. It has to be reliable.
Finally, a word of advice: document absolutely everything. Make copies of everything, and make memos of all conversations, and print them, and keep them in file folders. In a high-school, you have to be extra careful. But you knew that.
> and in general there seems to have been a lot less fuss than I certainly would have imagined something like this would prompt.
Most people are still in shock, the two of us included.
> what personal problems do these people have that make them want to spend so much time in gaming?
They live in China?
I'm gonna agree with Anon-Cow.
What if I wanted to mirror a full version of all wikipedias, with pictures. We're talking in excess of 60GB. And even then is not unlimited. What if I wanted web services that run night and day at 20+hits per second. They would chew up bandwidth nicely.
"Unlimited disk space" and "unlimited bandwidth" is "not true" in the boolean sense of the word, and thus to geeks: a lie.
Ok, I didn't mean no cart in that sense. I meant that since you don't have to take it out of the cart to put it on the counter for the cashier, you can put it in bags, in the cart.
I did that.
:)
The only official diploma/certification I have is the GED.
Of course, I'm a software developer for a fortune 500.
All it takes is developing your reading, writing, coding, comprehension, cultural, linguistic, organizational, and networking skills.
That, and bitching websites.
If I had $1500 to use on education/career, I'd buy books from O'reilly and Addison Wesley. With another 1500 I'd get a $700 machine and colocate it for a year at $60/mo and put debian+ssh on it, for practicing.
(why colocated? Because I would be able to configure the machine from scratch, and have it be on the net.)
In an interview: they ask: Can set up mod_python on apache with postgresql back end? I answer: I have, from scratch, after installing the OS. Let me chow you (then you goto the web site (thus the colo) and demo it, then you go to putty/ssh and log in as root and show them the config). Then you get the job, because the college graduate is still on his $10/mo windows shared hosted account.
The key is to talk to the manager.
The other key is that you want to be the resume they look at after they've unsuccessfully interviewed the 8 college graduates who can't actullay do the job.
No cart anymore. You get bags or bring your on, you pile up the stuff yourself, then you walk out to your car through one of the many exits. You rfid in your wallet identifies you, and points them to the website that holds your budget and card info.
Maybe trollish, but nevertheless quite true where I am concerned.
Now, maybe my knowledge is defective (haven't we heard that before?) so I'll go out there and try to avail myself of the services of my library... We'll see how that goes...
Someday we'll end up with the Orange Catholic Bible...
You want to see my property tax bill? It's several thousand dollars larger than a netflix subscription. Also, now the money is wasted to me, since I don't use the library, but the real cost is the money I spend at Borders buying books (last book I bought, Network Programming in Unix, was $70 with tax). Like I said at the bottom of my rant, I'll put my vote to the city council candidate that wants to trim library budgets further and allocate the tax money I contribute to the Police, the Fire Department, the school district, or street construction and maintenance. Currently, the libraries are doing nothing for me.
Oh, and if you think that "society as a whole" is bettered by libraries, think about this some more, and go live in France like I did. Someday you'll see.
Advice for libraries:
-- Stay open until midnight on friday and saturday night.
-- Let me borrow the book as long as I want. Like netflix. Or 1 year.
-- Have a 24 hours pickup/dropoff walk-up counter: I go online, I ask for a book by ISBN, the interlibrary exchange does its thing, and the book is delivered at the location in 24 hours (not 4 weeks), then I get an email: your book is ready. Give me 36 hours to drive by over there and pick it up, on my way home from work, at 9:45 PM, on Tuesday.
-- Have more books. I don't care if you have to rent one million square feet of warehouse space on the poor side of town, I want you to stock at least one copy of every single book currently in print in the western world, and have out-of-print books going back 50 years.
-- Stock comics, magazines, newspapers, car manuals, foreign titles, foreign comics.
-- Stock more than one copy of the latest New York bestsellers top ten list.
-- Have lots and lots of chairs and small tables. Hundreds of them.
-- Drop the computers. Who cares. You see computers at Borders?
-- Stay open until midnight on friday and saturday night. Are you getting it?
-- Copy machines at cost (no more than $0.02 per page) But you shouldn't have to, since the people can just take the books home.
-- Some people have mentioned printing on demand. You wouldn't have to offer that service if you had the book in stock to begin with. Have more books.
-- Forget cds and dvds. Books. But if you got to have DVDs, let people keep them a week or more.
-- Last but not least, allow people to talk to each other. It's not a morgue. I't not a study hall, nor a hospital. People like to go where it's lively.
I have a card (Los Angeles Public Library), but I don't go because, and yes, I'm talking to you my dear tax-consuming librarians: you're closed when I want to go there, you don't have the books I want to read, and I often take more than 3 weeks to read a book, especially if I'm trying to grok an O'Reilly title like "Programming Python".
I buy about 30 books a year (1 every 2 weeks approx.) and about one third are fiction, the others technical, so it's not like I don't like to read.
I hope you guys get it. The post office is open until 5 PM on Saturdays. They're adapting. You adapt too, or we'll use the tax money elsewhere.
same story here.
Went from DOS 3.3 -> DOS 5.0 -> DOS 6.22 to
Win 3.1 (skipped 2.0 thank god!)
Win 95, 98,
Win 98SE (still active, wife's PC)
Skipped ME.
Win 2000 (still in use)
Debian stable (current prod systems)