I'm not anti-laptop, but I'm against the idea of wasting so much of money on this, which could be better spent on so many other things. For the amount of money spent on buying laptops, think of the number of libraries that could be opened up, with ordinary PCs and net access.
I do not think my suggestions are "one-way" - I suggested working on pen and paper, and using more logical tools which helps students do things on their own. Despite everything that you may say, you're likely to learn a lot more by ripping open a motor than desgining it or simulating its operations on a laptop.
Our program was a round success as well and the educational results were similar: test scores did rise when students were taught to their style via laptop.
Test scores hardly mean a thing! That's EXACTLY my point! Student end up looking at things objectively. Some of the brightest children I know are pathetic at taking tests, and are just amazing with their hands.
I do agree that this is just my opinion, but I know for sure that if I'd had access to fantastic knowledge at my fingertips, that knowledge would have lost a certain charm, and a certain respect that was hard-earned.
When I meant computers, I did mean modern personal computers. There isn't much you could do by ripping open a laptop, much less one by Apple;-)
The thing is, although I do realize that computers are important, not everyone would grow up to be a programmer, which is my point. Looking at the source would be fantastic for a kid who is fascinated by them, but would not do much to help others. Although I'm into CS now, as a kid I remember being more fascinated with motors, mechanical engineering kits and the like.
In fact, I never gave much importance to computers until a much later date, although I was exposed to them very early. Even now, much of the research work that me or my fellow researchers do are primarily done on paper. What I mean is, give them the basic exposure, but do not make the kids dependent on them to think!
Like you said, perhaps access to a simple 8 bit system, or a basic microcontroller kit, or something simple that can be ripped apart would be indeed nice.
But the unfortunate thing is that even at undergrad level, people would rather get by the simplest way than work hard. How many people actually bother reading transistor and IC data sheets? Its much easier not to, since you can largely get by without having to. But if you are forced to work on problems from a very young age, you would most likely end up looking at them on your own, rather than because you have to. Exposure to powerful tools will rob you of that thrill of finding out things by yourself!
I remember once having had to build a large amplifier with high gain, and then realized that it was almost next to impossible to build one since I inevitably ended up getting oscillations, and faced a million other problems. So it was back to pen and paper, and almost no theoretical book had any reference. Looked up HAM user's manual and the data sheets, and found the problem, and various compensation methods and what not.
My point is that offlate I don't see many people doing this. They're happier getting off the shelf components. A lot of kids are not interested in finding out how things work, they just want to get them working, thats it. I would largely blame this on the fact that they can get by without having to. The system has failed to inspire them to learn.
And the funniest thing is that I'm an Electronics major, I do CS research and am more interested in Physics:-) I have my background to thank for this.
You know, the tools that you provide do not really matter until you reach a certain maturity when you view them as just that - tools. And middle or highschool is hardly the time when you'd view them so.
The idea that giving a bunch of laptops or palm PDAs or whatever sounds more like a political move than anything that would truly help an educational system.
Kids during middle and high school should be taught to work with pen, paper, their heads and their hands. Solving and analyzing puzzles and problems on paper. Thinking up innovative methods. Building stuff. Get them a million Rubik's cubes, Chess sets, puzzle books and yes, even Lego Mindstorm kits.
I have said this before and I'll still say this - by giving a computer at a very early age, you are curtailing their abilities to think all by themselves. Take something like graphics programming - the best ones that I know still do everything in their head and solve it on paper, before they sit and start coding. And in the process, they learn and discover new stuff. By giving them access to computers at this early age, you're not letting them do that! Its far too easy to sit down and use ready made tools.
Like the parent said, get good teachers! Get them good books, teach them to build things, to take part in science fairs and apply what they learn. On a board or on paper dammit.
...and cheap. A half decent FPGA can be obtained for about a dollar and odd in most parts of Asia. And that gives you a whole lot more malleability to play around, and you could mess up without really worrying much:-)
One really cool application is the implementation of various crypto algorithms for realtime simple uses, like this.
Ok, am giving up mod pts to post here, so here goes.
See, the point is that there is indeed a theory behind religion - it is the direct outcome of socio-economic situations.
Religion is based on faith, that's what defines it.
Religion is based on a set of actions which are believed to constitute faith. That some people have faith is in itself besides the point.
Once you start having to 'justify' your beliefs, you have lost faith, and most religions (esp. Judeo-Christian ones) would not consider you a member based on your 'lack of faith'.
Agreed. But justification of a faith need not necessiate the lack of any.
No one gets into heaven (if your religion happens to have one) if they don't have complete faith.
Well no. A lot of Eastern Religions stress on your duty more than your faith. Sure, faith gets in too, but remember that your duty is the reason you're here.
I would not say that religion is a phenomenon that cannot be explained by theory, I would rather include it among the various socio-economic forces, and is perhaps an inevitable consequence. In fact, several behaviour and ritualistic factors of religion can be traced back to the state of the affairs when the religion flourished.
Talking of manufactured words, there are a lot of such words which float around, some of which are created ones, like Medireview or common mistakes, like anyways as well as lingos like wanna/gonna which are part of the langauge.
It gets particularly interesting after a while to watch the stats. I'd infact written a primitive paper on such behaviour long ago, it can be found here at my site. I'd also written an agent based on this, details of the agent can be found here.
Marty and Daniel ARE face dancers, where they develop strange abilities upon taking one too many personalities.
Duncan Idaho could see them because even he had something similar, when all the personalities he had taken for the years and years he's been recreated merged into one. Which is exactly what the Tleilaxu Master says too, and he knows that he could do it too.
Now, what I'm more interested in is what happened to Ix. Ix was taken over by the Tleilaxu, which is mentioned in House Atriedes. But what happened to Ix after that, and the details of how Ix came up, and ofcourse the Butlerian Jehad.
I guess there has been a new book on the Butlerian Jehad, by Brian Herbert. Anyone around who's read it?
But I guess, what Frank Herbert wanted prove is that a single point of failure, like the spice, Arrakkis or Muad'Dib is bound to fail.
And at the end of Dune:Chapterhouse, he created a sitauation where that would impossible to happen, atleast for quite a while. In that way, the book had a fitting ending.
I don't even have to talk about the messing up the roles of the characters and they missed such essentials.
Particularly, they missed Tom Bombadil!
There is a school of thought that says that Bombadil could either be a Vala or a Maia, or perhaps something else, or something more, and what his role might be.
And that's just one character.
2] Where did the beatiful poems go in the movie?
3] And what about the fact that the movie made EXACTLY as an allegory, something that Tolkien so detested (particularly mentioned in the preface of The Silmarillion).
The beauty of middle earth is not just in one story encompassing it, its woven with history, art and some splendid characters portrayal.
I could go on and on, but basically, I for one as a long time Tolkien fan was not at all impressed with the movie, and found it to be a total sacrilege to Tolkien's works.
Where do you get your information from? I really really want to know. Its akin to describing the Americas in the 17th Century.
India has come a long way in the last ten years, but it is hardly a free society despite being a democracy.
India is as much as a free society as any other democracy, and in someways even more than the US is.
Perhaps you should go there, the untold inhumanity of India speaks for itself. The ancient steam engines, relics from Imperial Britain are typical of socialism. Buildings which are on the verge of collapse are still occupied. Few people drive cars as the licenses are difficult to acquire, so they drive home made moter vehicles (the name of which escapes me at the moment)
ROTFL. Well, it so happens that I indeed *do* live there.
Ancient steam engines? Large segments of India have subway metro-rails, perhaps this would enlighten you. More than 30 years ago, all of India's rail services were made 100% electric.
The only relic from Imperial Britain that we still have is probably bureacracy, but that's another point altogether.
Buildings on the verge of collapse? Licenses difficult to acquire? People *make* their own vehicles? I mean, sheesh, you could have added an elephant ride with a snake charmer on top, on a street filled with tigers and a Maharaja too dude. That would have just about been right.
You should probably look at these figures on the number of vehicles in India. In 1998, we had about 40939000 vehicles. That was five years ago.
Indian roads are just as full of Toyotas, Hyuandais, Suzukis, Fords, Mercs and other cars as any other country. Duh. And oh yeah, every other person I know, has a license. LOL!
You may certainly disagree with those views, but to suggest my own are wildly outrageous is absurd. Only those who are most unsure of their beliefs react with the defensiveness with which you respond.
My dear friend, your views are objective, obtained from some second hand sources, while I happen to live in that very country which you so colorfully describe in various shades of gray.
Its always funny how communist sympathizers always want to silence the opposition.
What has setting facts straight gotta do with communism? Are you living in the cold-war era or something? Get over it. There ain't nothing like 100% communistic standpoint, or a perfectly capitalistic standpoint. Its always an eclectic mix.
So much for that rant on economics. Have you even studied economic theory in your life? Go read, and then you'll see for yourself how absurd your statements have been.
Next everyone will go around raving what a wonderful work the Rama Series is, without having read a single line of the book.
Just like the way they killed LoTR. Atleast hope that like in LoTR, they mention that the movie has been inspired from the book, rather than an adaptation.
As one of my friends once said, there's just about one person who can make movies out of Clarke's books just the way they are meant to be, and that is Kubrick*.
*For those of you who do not know, Kubrick did the 2001 - A Space Odessey.
India is practically a communist country, and let me tell you their taxes and government restrictions are far more oppressive than in the US.
What rot.
India is a republic, with a joint-economy model. It has a mix of both public and privately held institutions, with the former being mostly banks and the like, and the latter being the production industry.
While the government holds the majority stakes in a large segment of the public sector financial institutions, a lot of the other sectors have been privatised - telephones, power, agriculture, etc. Even segments of corporate activities have been outsourced to provate organizations - construction, cleaning/maintenance, computerization and so on.
In fact, India has followed an excellent model of privatization of a large number of institutions, after helping them grow as public sector enterprises. In a developing nation, this helps growth, and provides a cashflow back to the government for its investment.
Even since independence, a lot of the big industries have been privately held - ores and minerals (TATA, Birla), petrochemicals (Reliance) and so on.
Just because India has strong ties with Russia hardly makes it communist. Get your facts straight. And its even more appalling that you have been modded up.
Timeline was *way* offbeat. If you are able to enter only parallel Universes, then the actions in those Universes should not affect this Universe.
However, things left in a parallel Universe (glasses) find their way to this Universe, and so on.
If you're saying something like a Multiverse, atleast make sure that you're consistent with what you claim. He himself sounded confused as to where the hell things are supposed to be.
And oh yes, that negative portrayal. The most brilliant physicist gets the boot, lands up in an era where he is subjected to the bubonic plague (or whatever crap it is) and dies. And all the good arts majors and non-techies lived happily ever after.
Oh yeah? Wait until you have been approached by the management to have your data viz. output all jazzed up in XML.
Dude(ette?), it might be obvious, but I speak from unfortunate first hand experience.
Almost all the DBs that I've worked to export into XML have ended up having weird schemas. That is a fact. Take a look at most database schemas in real-life projects. Even by themselves, they are a big pain. Is your DB all normalised and all redundancies removed? Have fun!
Go try exporting any half-decent Natural Language or Gene Data. XML would not even budge. Kiss your data and app goodbye.
What I meant was that XML does not scale for most real-life data apps, which would almost always tend to have large, nested and complex hierarchies. It defeats its purpose, except for maybe in an academic environment or certain exceptional cases, or perhaps when your need far outweighs the payoff.
Re:All this hype about XML
on
DTD vs. XML Schema
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Excellent post. I completely agree. To a great extent, XML is nothing more than hype.
The worst thing is that, if you have a very large XML doc with deeply nested and complex hierarchies, its a killer on performance.
And try exporting large amounts of DB data into XML, and watch your server crash.
XML is all nice and sweet on paper, but all that it can do is handle relatively small amounts of data. And it looks good when you can tell the suits that you can do stuff in XML.
Not to flame, but I felt the following points relevant.
You do realise that you are talking from the perspective of someone from a developed country, where any school can afford to use a PIII/500?
You do realise that there are countries where all that a public school would have is probably ONE computer which all the students get to SEE and not work on?
A school isn't going to teach word processing on anything less than a 500 Mh PIII.
I think Office 97 did indeed run very happily on an 133 Mhz system? My dear friend, applied computer use does not necessiate the use of the latest bleeding edge graphical OS with the latest bloated word-processing app.
A school teaches applied computer use, not CS, so an account isn't much help.
Don't be too sure. Hell, I learnt Basic and Dbase in my 4th and 5th grade in school. That would again depend on your school.
let alone figure out how to install Linux on an old PC.
Here in India, the use of Linux is being spread in several small schools without enough funds.
What are the benefits? You have 8th grade kids who are familiar with the command line and 10th and 12th grade kids who can whip up Perl scripts. They have an environment to explore. And they are learning a technology that is here to stay.
A school isn't going to use a linux firewall.
Duh! And why not?
Is it because its too complex? If it helps, my high-school project for my final CS paper was an Parallel Operating System.
Is it because its not widespread? If you are talking about a school without resources, hell they'll take just about anything you give them.
In MANY schools that I know of with a single dial-up connection being shared by many computers, guess what OS runs the machine connecting to the Internet?
This still doesn't address the long term problem. What do we do with the old PCs in 5 more years (when all the schools have old PCs)?
Well, don't you know? We would have a BEOWULF CLUSTER of those!!!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I hope they didn't charge an arm and a leg for those, or he is still gonna be missing a limb. :)
:-p
Or two
I'm not anti-laptop, but I'm against the idea of wasting so much of money on this, which could be better spent on so many other things. For the amount of money spent on buying laptops, think of the number of libraries that could be opened up, with ordinary PCs and net access.
I do not think my suggestions are "one-way" - I suggested working on pen and paper, and using more logical tools which helps students do things on their own. Despite everything that you may say, you're likely to learn a lot more by ripping open a motor than desgining it or simulating its operations on a laptop.
Our program was a round success as well and the educational results were similar: test scores did rise when students were taught to their style via laptop.
Test scores hardly mean a thing! That's EXACTLY my point! Student end up looking at things objectively. Some of the brightest children I know are pathetic at taking tests, and are just amazing with their hands.
I do agree that this is just my opinion, but I know for sure that if I'd had access to fantastic knowledge at my fingertips, that knowledge would have lost a certain charm, and a certain respect that was hard-earned.
When I meant computers, I did mean modern personal computers. There isn't much you could do by ripping open a laptop, much less one by Apple ;-)
:-) I have my background to thank for this.
The thing is, although I do realize that computers are important, not everyone would grow up to be a programmer, which is my point. Looking at the source would be fantastic for a kid who is fascinated by them, but would not do much to help others. Although I'm into CS now, as a kid I remember being more fascinated with motors, mechanical engineering kits and the like.
In fact, I never gave much importance to computers until a much later date, although I was exposed to them very early. Even now, much of the research work that me or my fellow researchers do are primarily done on paper. What I mean is, give them the basic exposure, but do not make the kids dependent on them to think!
Like you said, perhaps access to a simple 8 bit system, or a basic microcontroller kit, or something simple that can be ripped apart would be indeed nice.
But the unfortunate thing is that even at undergrad level, people would rather get by the simplest way than work hard. How many people actually bother reading transistor and IC data sheets? Its much easier not to, since you can largely get by without having to. But if you are forced to work on problems from a very young age, you would most likely end up looking at them on your own, rather than because you have to. Exposure to powerful tools will rob you of that thrill of finding out things by yourself!
I remember once having had to build a large amplifier with high gain, and then realized that it was almost next to impossible to build one since I inevitably ended up getting oscillations, and faced a million other problems. So it was back to pen and paper, and almost no theoretical book had any reference. Looked up HAM user's manual and the data sheets, and found the problem, and various compensation methods and what not.
My point is that offlate I don't see many people doing this. They're happier getting off the shelf components. A lot of kids are not interested in finding out how things work, they just want to get them working, thats it. I would largely blame this on the fact that they can get by without having to. The system has failed to inspire them to learn.
And the funniest thing is that I'm an Electronics major, I do CS research and am more interested in Physics
You know, the tools that you provide do not really matter until you reach a certain maturity when you view them as just that - tools. And middle or highschool is hardly the time when you'd view them so.
The idea that giving a bunch of laptops or palm PDAs or whatever sounds more like a political move than anything that would truly help an educational system.
Kids during middle and high school should be taught to work with pen, paper, their heads and their hands. Solving and analyzing puzzles and problems on paper. Thinking up innovative methods. Building stuff. Get them a million Rubik's cubes, Chess sets, puzzle books and yes, even Lego Mindstorm kits.
I have said this before and I'll still say this - by giving a computer at a very early age, you are curtailing their abilities to think all by themselves. Take something like graphics programming - the best ones that I know still do everything in their head and solve it on paper, before they sit and start coding. And in the process, they learn and discover new stuff. By giving them access to computers at this early age, you're not letting them do that! Its far too easy to sit down and use ready made tools.
Like the parent said, get good teachers! Get them good books, teach them to build things, to take part in science fairs and apply what they learn. On a board or on paper dammit.
One really cool application is the implementation of various crypto algorithms for realtime simple uses, like this.
There is also something called the FPGA Design Contest - amazing stuff!
Games are entertaining I guess, but if we could implement crypto algos and cool AI stuff at home using FPGAs, nothing quite beats that
Ok, am giving up mod pts to post here, so here goes.
:-)
See, the point is that there is indeed a theory behind religion - it is the direct outcome of
socio-economic situations.
Religion is based on faith, that's what defines it.
Religion is based on a set of actions which are believed to constitute faith. That some people have faith is in itself besides the point.
Once you start having to 'justify' your beliefs, you have lost faith, and most religions (esp. Judeo-Christian ones) would not consider you a member based on your 'lack of faith'.
Agreed. But justification of a faith need not necessiate the lack of any.
No one gets into heaven (if your religion happens to have one) if they don't have complete faith.
Well no. A lot of Eastern Religions stress on your duty more than your faith. Sure, faith gets in too, but remember that your duty is the reason you're here.
I would not say that religion is a phenomenon that cannot be explained by theory, I would rather include it among the various socio-economic forces, and is perhaps an inevitable consequence. In fact, several behaviour and ritualistic factors of religion can be traced back to the state of the affairs when the religion flourished.
Anyways, my 0.02.
Talking of manufactured words, there are a lot of such words which float around, some of which are created ones, like Medireview or common mistakes, like anyways as well as lingos like wanna/gonna which are part of the langauge.
It gets particularly interesting after a while to watch the stats. I'd infact written a primitive paper on such behaviour long ago, it can be found here at my site. I'd also written an agent based on this, details of the agent can be found here.
Marty and Daniel ARE face dancers, where they develop strange abilities upon taking one too many personalities.
:-)
Duncan Idaho could see them because even he had something similar, when all the personalities he had taken for the years and years he's been recreated merged into one. Which is exactly what the Tleilaxu Master says too, and he knows that he could do it too.
Now, what I'm more interested in is what happened to Ix. Ix was taken over by the Tleilaxu, which is mentioned in House Atriedes. But what happened to Ix after that, and the details of how Ix came up, and ofcourse the Butlerian Jehad.
I guess there has been a new book on the Butlerian Jehad, by Brian Herbert. Anyone around who's read it?
But I guess, what Frank Herbert wanted prove is that a single point of failure, like the spice, Arrakkis or Muad'Dib is bound to fail.
And at the end of Dune:Chapterhouse, he created a sitauation where that would impossible to happen, atleast for quite a while. In that way, the book had a fitting ending.
But yeah, if only Herbert were still alive!
Where do I even begin..!
:-)
1] Messed up and/or omitted lots of aharacters
I don't even have to talk about the messing up the roles of the characters and they missed such essentials.
Particularly, they missed Tom Bombadil!
There is a school of thought that says that Bombadil could either be a Vala or a Maia, or perhaps something else, or something more, and what his role might be.
And that's just one character.
2] Where did the beatiful poems go in the movie?
3] And what about the fact that the movie made EXACTLY as an allegory, something that Tolkien so detested (particularly mentioned in the preface of The Silmarillion).
The beauty of middle earth is not just in one story encompassing it, its woven with history, art and some splendid characters portrayal.
I could go on and on, but basically, I for one as a long time Tolkien fan was not at all impressed with the movie, and found it to be a total sacrilege to Tolkien's works.
But then again, that's my opinion
My 0.02.
The Movie was different, and it echoed different sentiments, in a very different way.
You should see this run-through on the movie.
Very neatly done, provides insights into certain parts of the movie that are a little puzzling.
First of all, thanks for humouring me.
Where do you get your information from? I really really want to know. Its akin to describing the Americas in the 17th Century.
India has come a long way in the last ten years, but it is hardly a free society despite being a democracy.
India is as much as a free society as any other democracy, and in someways even more than the US is.
Perhaps you should go there, the untold inhumanity of India speaks for itself. The ancient steam engines, relics from Imperial Britain are typical of socialism. Buildings which are on the verge of collapse are still occupied. Few people drive cars as the licenses are difficult to acquire, so they drive home made moter vehicles (the name of which escapes me at the moment)
ROTFL. Well, it so happens that I indeed *do* live there.
Ancient steam engines? Large segments of India have subway metro-rails, perhaps this would enlighten you. More than 30 years ago, all of India's rail services were made 100% electric.
The only relic from Imperial Britain that we still have is probably bureacracy, but that's another point altogether.
Buildings on the verge of collapse? Licenses difficult to acquire? People *make* their own vehicles? I mean, sheesh, you could have added an elephant ride with a snake charmer on top, on a street filled with tigers and a Maharaja too dude. That would have just about been right.
You should probably look at these figures on the number of vehicles in India. In 1998, we had about 40939000 vehicles. That was five years ago.
Indian roads are just as full of Toyotas, Hyuandais, Suzukis, Fords, Mercs and other cars as any other country. Duh. And oh yeah, every other person I know, has a license. LOL!
You may certainly disagree with those views, but to suggest my own are wildly outrageous is absurd. Only those who are most unsure of their beliefs react with the defensiveness with which you respond.
My dear friend, your views are objective, obtained from some second hand sources, while I happen to live in that very country which you so colorfully describe in various shades of gray.
Its always funny how communist sympathizers always want to silence the opposition.
What has setting facts straight gotta do with communism? Are you living in the cold-war era or something? Get over it. There ain't nothing like 100% communistic standpoint, or a perfectly capitalistic standpoint. Its always an eclectic mix.
So much for that rant on economics. Have you even studied economic theory in your life? Go read, and then you'll see for yourself how absurd your statements have been.
Next everyone will go around raving what a wonderful work the Rama Series is, without having read a single line of the book.
Just like the way they killed LoTR. Atleast hope that like in LoTR, they mention that the movie has been inspired from the book, rather than an adaptation.
As one of my friends once said, there's just about one person who can make movies out of Clarke's books just the way they are meant to be, and that is Kubrick*.
*For those of you who do not know, Kubrick did the 2001 - A Space Odessey.
India is practically a communist country, and let me tell you their taxes and government restrictions are far more oppressive than in the US.
What rot.
India is a republic, with a joint-economy model. It has a mix of both public and privately held institutions, with the former being mostly banks and the like, and the latter being the production industry.
While the government holds the majority stakes in a large segment of the public sector financial institutions, a lot of the other sectors have been privatised - telephones, power, agriculture, etc. Even segments of corporate activities have been outsourced to provate organizations - construction, cleaning/maintenance, computerization and so on.
In fact, India has followed an excellent model of privatization of a large number of institutions, after helping them grow as public sector enterprises. In a developing nation, this helps growth, and provides a cashflow back to the government for its investment.
Even since independence, a lot of the big industries have been privately held - ores and minerals (TATA, Birla), petrochemicals (Reliance) and so on.
Just because India has strong ties with Russia hardly makes it communist. Get your facts straight. And its even more appalling that you have been modded up.
Troll, -1.
Not to nitpick, but there's just about one sentence on kernel design in the interview. Misleading storyline
My mistake.
I wasn't too sure, because I live in another time
zone, and was unaware of the exact time of the disaster.
Strange co-incidence that all the above disasters, including this one, hover around the end of January - 27, 28, 30.
Timeline was *way* offbeat. If you are able to enter only parallel Universes, then the actions in those Universes should not affect this Universe.
However, things left in a parallel Universe (glasses) find their way to this Universe, and so on.
If you're saying something like a Multiverse, atleast make sure that you're consistent with what you claim. He himself sounded confused as to where the hell things are supposed to be.
And oh yes, that negative portrayal. The most brilliant physicist gets the boot, lands up in an era where he is subjected to the bubonic plague (or whatever crap it is) and dies. And all the good arts majors and non-techies lived happily ever after.
Duh.
Crichton shows no more command of English expression than your average freshman composition class.
I think your average Slashdotter would be more appropriate.
Agreed, but this quote comes to mind, albeit in a different context:
:-)
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."
- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
Mod parent up. Sometimes Slashdot story selections are funny to say the least.
:-/
Not to say the ridiculous titles
~metlin
There is only so much that you can optimize.
There are better and more optimized ways of representing your data.
Oh yeah? Wait until you have been approached by the management to have your data viz. output all jazzed up in XML.
Dude(ette?), it might be obvious, but I speak from unfortunate first hand experience.
Almost all the DBs that I've worked to export into XML have ended up having weird schemas. That is a fact. Take a look at most database schemas in real-life projects. Even by themselves, they are a big pain. Is your DB all normalised and all redundancies removed? Have fun!
Go try exporting any half-decent Natural Language or Gene Data. XML would not even budge. Kiss your data and app goodbye.
What I meant was that XML does not scale for most real-life data apps, which would almost always tend to have large, nested and complex hierarchies. It defeats its purpose, except for maybe in an academic environment or certain exceptional cases, or perhaps when your need far outweighs the payoff.
Excellent post. I completely agree. To a great extent, XML is nothing more than hype.
The worst thing is that, if you have a very large XML doc with deeply nested and complex hierarchies, its a killer on performance.
And try exporting large amounts of DB data into XML, and watch your server crash.
XML is all nice and sweet on paper, but all that it can do is handle relatively small amounts of data. And it looks good when you can tell the suits that you can do stuff in XML.
Not to flame, but I felt the following points relevant.
;-)
You do realise that you are talking from the perspective of someone from a developed country, where any school can afford to use a PIII/500?
You do realise that there are countries where all that a public school would have is probably ONE computer which all the students get to SEE and not work on?
A school isn't going to teach word processing on anything less than a 500 Mh PIII.
I think Office 97 did indeed run very happily on an 133 Mhz system? My dear friend, applied computer use does not necessiate the use of the latest bleeding edge graphical OS with the latest bloated word-processing app.
A school teaches applied computer use, not CS, so an account isn't much help.
Don't be too sure. Hell, I learnt Basic and Dbase in my 4th and 5th grade in school. That would again depend on your school.
let alone figure out how to install Linux on an old PC.
Here in India, the use of Linux is being spread in several small schools without enough funds.
What are the benefits? You have 8th grade kids who are familiar with the command line and 10th and 12th grade kids who can whip up Perl scripts. They have an environment to explore. And they are learning a technology that is here to stay.
A school isn't going to use a linux firewall.
Duh! And why not?
Is it because its too complex? If it helps, my high-school project for my final CS paper was an Parallel Operating System.
Is it because its not widespread? If you are talking about a school without resources, hell they'll take just about anything you give them.
In MANY schools that I know of with a single dial-up connection being shared by many computers, guess what OS runs the machine connecting to the Internet?
This still doesn't address the long term problem. What do we do with the old PCs in 5 more years (when all the schools have old PCs)?
Well, don't you know? We would have a BEOWULF CLUSTER of those!!!
Does anyone have the mirror of the actual paper?