does anyone know of any studies showing the effectiveness of computer games on learning?
Does anyone know of any studies showing the effectiveness of sitting in rows in a room with a teacher and blackboard at the front of the class on learning?
Hey, thats a hypothesis:)
I was a geek when I was a kid and did not know it, and my dad one day brought home a few of NASA Spinoff publications. They still exist, info here: http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/
I believe I had 1976-1979 or so. Its an annual publication, and I learned about the space shuttle before it was ever launched. I learned about the NASA "smart home" which was an experiment where a family lived for a year in an ultra-efficient home that used solar water heating and electricity, semi-recycled the "grey water" into the toilets and whatnot. Those are the only two things I remember from it, but I'm sure it had basic aeronautics and material science in there as well.
I guess the publication was not geared towards 9 or 10 year olds, but I liked sitting up at night reading it. The only downside was that it came out only annually.
So CS is back to people who want to do CS instead of those people along with gold-rushers, certification mill graduates, and other such people. Big loss.
It will be CS again one day. Google is starting to turn that tide with all the headway it's making.
But the reason CS enrollment is down is the bubble burst and the gold-rushers are gone.
I believe CS is overrated as a degree to get a job. I work with computers for a living, I'm an admin, and I've never had, nor care to take a CS class ever. Unless I'm completely disillusioned, but I've been in the field for almost 10 years now in academia and commercial offerings, and I've only known less than 5 people do computer science when they went to work. One works at ORNL, one works with me but does not do CS anymore, but he did when he worked at NASA 10+ years ago. I'm having difficulty thinking of other people that have ever done CS.
Most people from CS end up to be programmers, and I estimate that 95% of programming is just programming, and that is not really stressed in CS programs. Programming is not that difficult. I do it, and have worked with a number of programmers, and they do not do computer science. They solve real life problems. Problems like, "I need a program to balance the books and print paychecks". There is almost no computer science involved in that. qsort was created in the 60s, and I guess most all of the other sorting and other efficient algorithms have already been done. Computer scientists create these things. Programers don't need to create new algorithms, they need to know how and when to use them. They need to know how to understand an existing API and how to create, and document new ones, and that is done by experience with programming, not computer science.
I've worked with programming in crypto, ASN.1 parsing, SSL, client/server, parallel programming HPC stuff, lex/yacc, database programming, embedded programming, and none of that involved computer science at our level of using it. One of the best programmers I've ever met, if not the best, has an English degree from a college mill. He told me that programming is a craft, not an art or a science. He said its very much like woodworking, which is very popular with programmers as a hobby.
Woodworking creates tools like jigs and makeshift temporary templates and whatnot. Woodworkers do not create table saws or lathes.
I'm not a fan of using arguments via analogies, but I believe this is a good one, but I will be corrected shortly about how bad it is.
In woodworking, the computer scientists create the saws, chisels, and other tools. The programmer uses these tools, and creates "low tech" ones like jigs, templates, and temporary fixtures to hold pieces while they dry from the glue, or to make the application of varnish or paint easier without showing blemishes, and making it possible for the paint or varnish to get to all areas of the project easily, you know the front back, top, and sometimes bottom.
In working in the field, I have not noticed people coming out with CS degrees that know much about programming. The same goes for system administration. Programming involves much practice and technique. Debugging, documentation, unit testing, coding conventions like indentation and module organization, all of this stuff, and from what I understand, CS does not really teach these things.
For basic administration like at a Windows based shop, you go to one of these courses and get an MCSE. For UNIX and whatnot, I have no idea where you learn this stuff, aside from having a masochistic interest in it like I do.
To learn programming, buy a book and program. Thank god for open source software, because there are tons of working examples to play with. That is how I learned programming. Hmm, how do I have a program that reads the standard output from another program? There are tons of examples of that, that are proven an work. You duplicate file descriptors, do a fork, handle the dead child problem, etc. That is not computer science. I don't know what it is. But is that stuff taught in CS and I've just never met anybody that learned it?
5 p3s w/256mb each == 1 overloaded dual-opteron server at fairly I/O intensive tasks. Don't even want to think about power/heat issues.
Not to mention 5x+ the likelihood of a hardware failure because there are 5 of every part that can and will fail and that the machines are already old. Plus ease of use, and admin maintenance.
I think their idea is to counteract the concept that for the same amount of power, they could be running much more powerful hardware. If the electricity comes from coal, they're wasting energy, but if it comes from biodiesel they're... uh... wasting energy in a way that sounds good to hippies?
I'm a hippie. I don't know too much about biodiesel except from what I've heard and read. I'm not that terribly interested in it, but lets look at the differences in this wasted energy. Coal is pressed plants that takes a considerable amount of energy to dig up, and is essentially finite in quantity because it takes more than a few years for the earth to make it. Biodiesel is made from plants. Plants are completely renewable, and we can basically pick where they are grown. We have to go to the coal. Burning both coal and biodiesel creates emissions, sure. But new plants eat co2 and create oxygen. The coal plants have been dead for quite some time. Coal is dirty nasty stuff (kinda like a dirty hippie:) Mining it is not fun stuff for people. You breath unclean air, you're in the dark. Cave-ins, oxygen depletion, nasty stuff. Plants tend to like to grow in the sun, which people pay good money just to go somewhere and do nothing and lay in the sun.
Hydro electric power is pretty cool too. Wind is not as cool as it seems. Very variable and it disrupts weather patterns. Solar is OK, but not very efficient.
Hippie nonsense aside, I think that wasting energy via biodiesel and other direct plant to usable forms of energy is a damn good source of energy in my eye. Plus, you can't put coal in your gas tank. Coal's energy density and portability has not been used for mobile energy forms like cars, trains, and boats in a long time. And never in planes.
I mean, really. Sony has become the worst electronics company in the world because of their proprietary formats and the overall quality of their electronics has gone downhill, and even if they are able to sucker someone into buying or licensing their technology, its DRMed to hell so bad that you can't use it. Both companies are against open standards as much as possible, but MSFT is beginning to loose that battle, Sony keeps trying after 30+ years of failures in that department. I mean, besides the Xbox, the PS3 if it ever comes out, and some of the music and movies that I guess some people still listen to and watch, what do they have to offer customers? I can see it now, Sony and MSFT will be so big, DRMed to hell so bad, vendor locked so bad, that just their size alone would just make them their own customers:)
Kinda reminds me of masturbation. Everybody does it, but in reality, your just fucking yourself.
BTW, am I the only one who finds it odd that the Department of Defense attacks other countries (e.g. Iraq) while the Department of Homeland Security defends our country?
Nah, I find it odd that DHS attacks its citizens.
The US has no defense. Our borders are open. Sept 11, 2001 proved that our defense was a joke. The Commander in Chief thought that not scaring some children and reading a book about a goat was more important than even acknowledging the fact that an aid told him "The nation is under attack". NORAD, a cooperative adventure with Canada in defending our airspace did nothing. No military aircraft were ever deployed, in fact all civilian and military aircraft were told to land.
This does not affect my sleep at night, because I don't believe in the war in terror anymore than the war against the bad commies. However, even the war on terror, the best made up enemy to date, no identity, no borders, no government, no nothing, is fading with the average joe. Expect another installment soon...
I really don't know the concern about the privacy either. Is the people that only pretend to be rich or are in tons of debt and about to go publicly bankrupt in fear here? Or is it the ones that cheat on their taxes that are worried like this poor guy, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-11-28 -cunningham_x.htm
The fair tax would not work. It would be unfair against anyone that is not wealthy.
Bill Gates reportedly gives 1/3 of his earnings away -- after taxes.
Most of the income tax is paid by the wealthy people in the country. Yeah, they might pay a lower percentage, but wealthy people have staff (ie jobs) to maintain their houses, planes, yachts, etc. They create jobs. Also many wealthy people cannot spend all of it on toys and food like you and me, so they invest it, do venture capital, and whatnot. That under the sales tax are not "faire game". Also, many wealthy people just hoard their money, so no tax there either.
Plus implementing it would be impossible. Cars would jump from $20k a pop to $28k a pop or so. Being that most people cannot afford to buy a car, they finance it, so the banks would get tons of extra cash from interest. The $20k @ 6% interest would then go from costing the person $23k to $32k over a 5 year loan. Not to mention credit cards at much higher interest rates.
I'm not saying that taxes are screwed up. Its the most expensive thing I pay for in life. But a national sales tax would never, ever work.
If you get sales tax whored at US businesses, then don't shop in the US. The government will be forced to pound the hell out of anyone who enters the country with goods.
They already do that with duty checks and whatnot at the borders (paved ones anyway:) and its supposedly illegal to buy prescription drugs from foreign countries.
I can see the fanfare now. "Buy American!" Its more expensive, and hey the stuff is probably not made in the US anyway, or if it is its foreign owned.
I actually agree... the Linux/Unix file tree is confusing and gives the impression of being unorganized. I find it difficult to determine where things exist on my Linux machine as an advanced user, I can only imagine how it looks to a novice. A lot can be done to Linux to add usability for less advances users while keeping the options open for experts... I'd like to see even more strides made toward usability in future releases.
Maybe I'm just used to it, but it makes sense to me. Sure there are exceptions, but its not bad. I _LOVE_ the concept of/usr/local, because it makes things clear that things installed there are 3rd party or upgraded/different versions of system software. For example, I have/usr/local/bin/perl on Solaris systems, even though there is a/usr/bin/perl. Why? One is an Oracle server that is 64bit, and the Solaris perl will is 32bit and DBI will not work unless in 64bit mode. Also, Solaris perl is compiled with Sun's cc, and some 3rd party perl modules will not compile, or at least not as easily as using gcc. I also have/usr/local/bin/python on some systems because it is newer than the/usr/bin one. My beef with/usr/local is that so many distros and/or commercial UNIXes do not always put the/usr/local/bin in the path, and/or they do not do shared libraries out of the box correctly. The rise of/opt is completely redundant in my opinion.
To determine where something is, provided you know the name of it, locate is very helpful.
Someone suggested earlier that/dev and/proc and whatnot should be hidden from the users. Well, OS X does that via the finder. It does not show/usr,/opt/,/dev,/etc, etc. But they are there, and they work as expected from the command line. That stuff cannot move. Its there until the end of time, like it or not. They are just names, and if OS X was able to add an abstraction for simplicity for the average user, then I would guess that anybody could do that as well.
Regarding Linspire, the only thing I see that is unique about it is the click and run thing. They are the only UNIX/LInux whatever that I know of that seems to have a working or easy way to install applications. Supposedly, it even works! However, it will not work for anything besides the available stock Linspire applications. I've never used or seen Linspire in action, so I don't know the details, only what I've read. I would not recommend Linux to any "normal" person.
The feds--and many economists--have no problem with AT&T essentially reassembling itself because competition exists today that did not exist in the past.
That is untrue.
The only competition is in long distance and international calling. If someone wants basic phone service like I do, then there is no competition in price because 50% of my phone bill is taxes and FCC fees that cannot be adjusted, regardless of the carrier.
I simply do not understand why I can get a flat 24x7 unlimited access over the same wire for internet for $40/mo, but it costs $50+ to have a subset of that service for telephone service that goes across the same wires.
I do not understand why I have to pay a 911 fee on every phone if I don't want it. I have the option to have a phone, I have the option to call 911 if I want, but I do not have the option to pay for 911.
It is now three years since The SCO Group (then called Caldera) first initiated a baseless lawsuit against IBM. In that time, they have produced no credible evidence. They have, however, spread all kinds of lies aimed at damaging Linux in the marketplace, hiking their stock price and trying to press IBM into a settlement as cheaper than dealing with absurd discovery demands (mostly granted).
How can it be possible to put a corporation to tens of millions of dollars of direct legal costs and hard to estimate indirect damages without ever needing to demonstrate any evidence of a case to answer? Judge Kimball, himself, stated in his decision on summary judgment (over 18 months after the case was originally initiated) that it was "astonishing" that SCO had provided no evidence, in spite of all their public pronouncements, but then said it was premature to render a decision because SCO might still be able to find some evidence somewhere of some wrongdoing through the discovery process.
IBM is just as much to blame.
This thing is ridiculous, and if it were me being baselessly sued by SCO, I would ignore them, and go on with my business.
This whole thing is completely parallel to someone suing me for stealing a TV out of their unlocked house and returning it with nobody seeing me do it and no physical evidence I was ever in the house.
I'm being a conspiracy theorist here, but what if IBMs lawyers got together with SCOs lawyers before all this took place, and said, "Hey, wanna make some money doing nothing for a few years? Its big bucks we can play with. Wanna just see how long we can milk this? Hey, we can even put a gentleman's side bet on the thing. I bet we can stretch this out for 7 years."
As a defendant, their job is solely to disprove the other side's case.
Yeah, I love it on a TV court show when the prosecution goes on and on, finishes up, and the defendant's lawyer gets his turn, and just says, "The defense rests".
The best defense is not needing to defend yourself.
Hell, I did it one time when I was under investigation by the law. Serious nasty shit I did not do. They wanted me to come in and take a polygraph and chat and all that. I already told them honestly everything that happened, but they still wanted to play good cop/bad cop on me. I told them that polygraphs are bullshit and that they are merely machines to intimidate people. Anyway, I finally told the cop that if he wanted to talk anymore, talk to my lawyer. He then said, "Well, you know what this means the next time we talk, right?" (I would be under arrest.) I said sure.
He never asked who my lawyer was, and never heard from them again.
NEVER, EVER, put up with police BS. Get a lawyer and shut the hell up.
However, if you find yourself in Gitmo, no such luck with getting a lawyer. Your screwed.
Re:Dual boot? How about virtualization, too!
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Its the first time I've seen so many Macheads get so excited about running windows (or windows applications).
Yeah, dual booting any PC has not interested me in almost 10 years. Its a PITA, wastes time, etc. It might be of interest if I could put an OS to sleep and maintain its state, but starting fresh multiple times in one day is of no interest to me.
Am I the only one that found this line interesting? --
"Back in Windows, I got right down to business and installed a few games..."
1. Mr. Gates is getting old and sad (look at the picture).
Honestly, I think he looks good. Much better than the centerfold shot of him when he was young and lying on the desk.
2. He does not have much to say to us.
Yeah, I got that too.
It should have been titled "How I Work^H^H^H^HUse e-mail: Bill Gates".
It should have been titled "How I don't read my email".
He says that he has some kind of filtering where the people he _wants_ to correspond with goes into his inbox, but the complaints, etc gets summarized or whatever through some assistant. I can summarize those mails for him and us right now.
1) Get the OS secure
2) Get with a searching mechanism, which they are calling WinFS
I can't believe that they dumped WinFS for Vista. I don't see any other features in the new thing that warrants a new release.
MSDS stands for "Material Safety Data Sheet". Its something you have to have around when you have hazardous materials in a workplace. It tells stuff like LD50 values, fire control, etc.
The funny thing is that if you do not agree with Microsoft's license agreement, then the agreement that you did not agree to grants you the rights to a refund!?!? Or that is the theory.
I also thought that EULAs were deemed null and void in the first place. Especially the sneaky ones that don't tell you the EULA until after you open the box and then it tells you that you can't return it if you open the box.
I like Linux's EULA. I agree with that one 100%.
I've never read, nor cared about OS X's EULA. I like their stuff, and I'll buy it and use it. If they come knocking on my door because I click too hard on the keyboard or something, I'll deal with that when the time comes.
Slashdot Mirror
does anyone know of any studies showing the effectiveness of computer games on learning?
:)
Does anyone know of any studies showing the effectiveness of sitting in rows in a room with a teacher and blackboard at the front of the class on learning?
Hey, thats a hypothesis
I was a geek when I was a kid and did not know it, and my dad one day brought home a few of NASA Spinoff publications. They still exist, info here: http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/
I believe I had 1976-1979 or so. Its an annual publication, and I learned about the space shuttle before it was ever launched. I learned about the NASA "smart home" which was an experiment where a family lived for a year in an ultra-efficient home that used solar water heating and electricity, semi-recycled the "grey water" into the toilets and whatnot. Those are the only two things I remember from it, but I'm sure it had basic aeronautics and material science in there as well.
I guess the publication was not geared towards 9 or 10 year olds, but I liked sitting up at night reading it. The only downside was that it came out only annually.
Ah, the beginnings of a geek.
So CS is back to people who want to do CS instead of those people along with gold-rushers, certification mill graduates, and other such people. Big loss.
It will be CS again one day. Google is starting to turn that tide with all the headway it's making.
But the reason CS enrollment is down is the bubble burst and the gold-rushers are gone.
I believe CS is overrated as a degree to get a job. I work with computers for a living, I'm an admin, and I've never had, nor care to take a CS class ever. Unless I'm completely disillusioned, but I've been in the field for almost 10 years now in academia and commercial offerings, and I've only known less than 5 people do computer science when they went to work. One works at ORNL, one works with me but does not do CS anymore, but he did when he worked at NASA 10+ years ago. I'm having difficulty thinking of other people that have ever done CS.
Most people from CS end up to be programmers, and I estimate that 95% of programming is just programming, and that is not really stressed in CS programs. Programming is not that difficult. I do it, and have worked with a number of programmers, and they do not do computer science. They solve real life problems. Problems like, "I need a program to balance the books and print paychecks". There is almost no computer science involved in that. qsort was created in the 60s, and I guess most all of the other sorting and other efficient algorithms have already been done. Computer scientists create these things. Programers don't need to create new algorithms, they need to know how and when to use them. They need to know how to understand an existing API and how to create, and document new ones, and that is done by experience with programming, not computer science.
I've worked with programming in crypto, ASN.1 parsing, SSL, client/server, parallel programming HPC stuff, lex/yacc, database programming, embedded programming, and none of that involved computer science at our level of using it. One of the best programmers I've ever met, if not the best, has an English degree from a college mill. He told me that programming is a craft, not an art or a science. He said its very much like woodworking, which is very popular with programmers as a hobby.
Woodworking creates tools like jigs and makeshift temporary templates and whatnot. Woodworkers do not create table saws or lathes.
I'm not a fan of using arguments via analogies, but I believe this is a good one, but I will be corrected shortly about how bad it is.
In woodworking, the computer scientists create the saws, chisels, and other tools. The programmer uses these tools, and creates "low tech" ones like jigs, templates, and temporary fixtures to hold pieces while they dry from the glue, or to make the application of varnish or paint easier without showing blemishes, and making it possible for the paint or varnish to get to all areas of the project easily, you know the front back, top, and sometimes bottom.
In working in the field, I have not noticed people coming out with CS degrees that know much about programming. The same goes for system administration. Programming involves much practice and technique. Debugging, documentation, unit testing, coding conventions like indentation and module organization, all of this stuff, and from what I understand, CS does not really teach these things.
For basic administration like at a Windows based shop, you go to one of these courses and get an MCSE. For UNIX and whatnot, I have no idea where you learn this stuff, aside from having a masochistic interest in it like I do.
To learn programming, buy a book and program. Thank god for open source software, because there are tons of working examples to play with. That is how I learned programming. Hmm, how do I have a program that reads the standard output from another program? There are tons of examples of that, that are proven an work. You duplicate file descriptors, do a fork, handle the dead child problem, etc. That is not computer science. I don't know what it is. But is that stuff taught in CS and I've just never met anybody that learned it?
5 p3s w/256mb each == 1 overloaded dual-opteron server at fairly I/O intensive tasks. Don't even want to think about power/heat issues.
Not to mention 5x+ the likelihood of a hardware failure because there are 5 of every part that can and will fail and that the machines are already old. Plus ease of use, and admin maintenance.
Having an almost completely heterogeneous computer system is not something I would want to use or admin. I know a little about this stuff...
I think their idea is to counteract the concept that for the same amount of power, they could be running much more powerful hardware. If the electricity comes from coal, they're wasting energy, but if it comes from biodiesel they're... uh... wasting energy in a way that sounds good to hippies?
:) Mining it is not fun stuff for people. You breath unclean air, you're in the dark. Cave-ins, oxygen depletion, nasty stuff. Plants tend to like to grow in the sun, which people pay good money just to go somewhere and do nothing and lay in the sun.
I'm a hippie. I don't know too much about biodiesel except from what I've heard and read. I'm not that terribly interested in it, but lets look at the differences in this wasted energy. Coal is pressed plants that takes a considerable amount of energy to dig up, and is essentially finite in quantity because it takes more than a few years for the earth to make it. Biodiesel is made from plants. Plants are completely renewable, and we can basically pick where they are grown. We have to go to the coal. Burning both coal and biodiesel creates emissions, sure. But new plants eat co2 and create oxygen. The coal plants have been dead for quite some time. Coal is dirty nasty stuff (kinda like a dirty hippie
Hydro electric power is pretty cool too. Wind is not as cool as it seems. Very variable and it disrupts weather patterns. Solar is OK, but not very efficient.
Hippie nonsense aside, I think that wasting energy via biodiesel and other direct plant to usable forms of energy is a damn good source of energy in my eye. Plus, you can't put coal in your gas tank. Coal's energy density and portability has not been used for mobile energy forms like cars, trains, and boats in a long time. And never in planes.
I mean, really. Sony has become the worst electronics company in the world because of their proprietary formats and the overall quality of their electronics has gone downhill, and even if they are able to sucker someone into buying or licensing their technology, its DRMed to hell so bad that you can't use it. Both companies are against open standards as much as possible, but MSFT is beginning to loose that battle, Sony keeps trying after 30+ years of failures in that department. I mean, besides the Xbox, the PS3 if it ever comes out, and some of the music and movies that I guess some people still listen to and watch, what do they have to offer customers? I can see it now, Sony and MSFT will be so big, DRMed to hell so bad, vendor locked so bad, that just their size alone would just make them their own customers
Kinda reminds me of masturbation. Everybody does it, but in reality, your just fucking yourself.
This is the Internet. You can say "fuck" here.
:)
I'm glad you're the one making the rules here
Fuckety, fuck, fuck, fuck!
BTW, am I the only one who finds it odd that the Department of Defense attacks other countries (e.g. Iraq) while the Department of Homeland Security defends our country?
Nah, I find it odd that DHS attacks its citizens.
The US has no defense. Our borders are open. Sept 11, 2001 proved that our defense was a joke. The Commander in Chief thought that not scaring some children and reading a book about a goat was more important than even acknowledging the fact that an aid told him "The nation is under attack". NORAD, a cooperative adventure with Canada in defending our airspace did nothing. No military aircraft were ever deployed, in fact all civilian and military aircraft were told to land.
This does not affect my sleep at night, because I don't believe in the war in terror anymore than the war against the bad commies. However, even the war on terror, the best made up enemy to date, no identity, no borders, no government, no nothing, is fading with the average joe. Expect another installment soon...
I really don't know the concern about the privacy either. Is the people that only pretend to be rich or are in tons of debt and about to go publicly bankrupt in fear here? Or is it the ones that cheat on their taxes that are worried like this poor guy, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-11-2
Why can't people spell html?
The fair tax would not work. It would be unfair against anyone that is not wealthy.
Bill Gates reportedly gives 1/3 of his earnings away -- after taxes.
Most of the income tax is paid by the wealthy people in the country. Yeah, they might pay a lower percentage, but wealthy people have staff (ie jobs) to maintain their houses, planes, yachts, etc. They create jobs. Also many wealthy people cannot spend all of it on toys and food like you and me, so they invest it, do venture capital, and whatnot. That under the sales tax are not "faire game". Also, many wealthy people just hoard their money, so no tax there either.
Plus implementing it would be impossible. Cars would jump from $20k a pop to $28k a pop or so. Being that most people cannot afford to buy a car, they finance it, so the banks would get tons of extra cash from interest. The $20k @ 6% interest would then go from costing the person $23k to $32k over a 5 year loan. Not to mention credit cards at much higher interest rates.
I'm not saying that taxes are screwed up. Its the most expensive thing I pay for in life. But a national sales tax would never, ever work.
If you get sales tax whored at US businesses, then don't shop in the US. The government will be forced to pound the hell out of anyone who enters the country with goods.
They already do that with duty checks and whatnot at the borders (paved ones anyway:) and its supposedly illegal to buy prescription drugs from foreign countries.
I can see the fanfare now. "Buy American!" Its more expensive, and hey the stuff is probably not made in the US anyway, or if it is its foreign owned.
These scores appear to be self-reported. The department of Defense has realized that the best way to get more money is to give themselves a bad score.
I tried that in college, but it never increased my pay. Shit, they wouldn't even let me graduate.
I would say that root is a place that users never need to go into.
/root: Permission denied
ls:
Also, there is nothing typically interesting in there. I'm an admin and I don't even go in there much.
I actually agree... the Linux/Unix file tree is confusing and gives the impression of being unorganized. I find it difficult to determine where things exist on my Linux machine as an advanced user, I can only imagine how it looks to a novice. A lot can be done to Linux to add usability for less advances users while keeping the options open for experts... I'd like to see even more strides made toward usability in future releases.
/usr/local, because it makes things clear that things installed there are 3rd party or upgraded/different versions of system software. For example, I have /usr/local/bin/perl on Solaris systems, even though there is a /usr/bin/perl. Why? One is an Oracle server that is 64bit, and the Solaris perl will is 32bit and DBI will not work unless in 64bit mode. Also, Solaris perl is compiled with Sun's cc, and some 3rd party perl modules will not compile, or at least not as easily as using gcc. I also have /usr/local/bin/python on some systems because it is newer than the /usr/bin one. My beef with /usr/local is that so many distros and/or commercial UNIXes do not always put the /usr/local/bin in the path, and/or they do not do shared libraries out of the box correctly. The rise of /opt is completely redundant in my opinion.
/dev and /proc and whatnot should be hidden from the users. Well, OS X does that via the finder. It does not show /usr, /opt/, /dev, /etc, etc. But they are there, and they work as expected from the command line. That stuff cannot move. Its there until the end of time, like it or not. They are just names, and if OS X was able to add an abstraction for simplicity for the average user, then I would guess that anybody could do that as well.
Maybe I'm just used to it, but it makes sense to me. Sure there are exceptions, but its not bad. I _LOVE_ the concept of
To determine where something is, provided you know the name of it, locate is very helpful.
Someone suggested earlier that
Regarding Linspire, the only thing I see that is unique about it is the click and run thing. They are the only UNIX/LInux whatever that I know of that seems to have a working or easy way to install applications. Supposedly, it even works! However, it will not work for anything besides the available stock Linspire applications. I've never used or seen Linspire in action, so I don't know the details, only what I've read. I would not recommend Linux to any "normal" person.
The feds--and many economists--have no problem with AT&T essentially reassembling itself because competition exists today that did not exist in the past.
That is untrue.
The only competition is in long distance and international calling. If someone wants basic phone service like I do, then there is no competition in price because 50% of my phone bill is taxes and FCC fees that cannot be adjusted, regardless of the carrier.
I simply do not understand why I can get a flat 24x7 unlimited access over the same wire for internet for $40/mo, but it costs $50+ to have a subset of that service for telephone service that goes across the same wires.
I do not understand why I have to pay a 911 fee on every phone if I don't want it. I have the option to have a phone, I have the option to call 911 if I want, but I do not have the option to pay for 911.
It is now three years since The SCO Group (then called Caldera) first initiated a baseless lawsuit against IBM. In that time, they have produced no credible evidence. They have, however, spread all kinds of lies aimed at damaging Linux in the marketplace, hiking their stock price and trying to press IBM into a settlement as cheaper than dealing with absurd discovery demands (mostly granted).
How can it be possible to put a corporation to tens of millions of dollars of direct legal costs and hard to estimate indirect damages without ever needing to demonstrate any evidence of a case to answer? Judge Kimball, himself, stated in his decision on summary judgment (over 18 months after the case was originally initiated) that it was "astonishing" that SCO had provided no evidence, in spite of all their public pronouncements, but then said it was premature to render a decision because SCO might still be able to find some evidence somewhere of some wrongdoing through the discovery process.
IBM is just as much to blame.
This thing is ridiculous, and if it were me being baselessly sued by SCO, I would ignore them, and go on with my business.
This whole thing is completely parallel to someone suing me for stealing a TV out of their unlocked house and returning it with nobody seeing me do it and no physical evidence I was ever in the house.
I'm being a conspiracy theorist here, but what if IBMs lawyers got together with SCOs lawyers before all this took place, and said, "Hey, wanna make some money doing nothing for a few years? Its big bucks we can play with. Wanna just see how long we can milk this? Hey, we can even put a gentleman's side bet on the thing. I bet we can stretch this out for 7 years."
As a defendant, their job is solely to disprove the other side's case.
Yeah, I love it on a TV court show when the prosecution goes on and on, finishes up, and the defendant's lawyer gets his turn, and just says, "The defense rests".
The best defense is not needing to defend yourself.
Hell, I did it one time when I was under investigation by the law. Serious nasty shit I did not do. They wanted me to come in and take a polygraph and chat and all that. I already told them honestly everything that happened, but they still wanted to play good cop/bad cop on me. I told them that polygraphs are bullshit and that they are merely machines to intimidate people. Anyway, I finally told the cop that if he wanted to talk anymore, talk to my lawyer. He then said, "Well, you know what this means the next time we talk, right?" (I would be under arrest.) I said sure.
He never asked who my lawyer was, and never heard from them again.
NEVER, EVER, put up with police BS. Get a lawyer and shut the hell up.
However, if you find yourself in Gitmo, no such luck with getting a lawyer. Your screwed.
Its the first time I've seen so many Macheads get so excited about running windows (or windows applications).
Yeah, dual booting any PC has not interested me in almost 10 years. Its a PITA, wastes time, etc. It might be of interest if I could put an OS to sleep and maintain its state, but starting fresh multiple times in one day is of no interest to me.
Am I the only one that found this line interesting? --
"Back in Windows, I got right down to business and installed a few games..."
Just because you can afford to buy it, does not mean you have to buy it.
Don't push your modest European morals on us Americans.
The way we do it, you have to buy it regardless if you can afford it.
Second of all I wonder how much real direction Bill offers Microsoft nowadays.
What direction is MS going anyway?
The only new "feature" in Vista is an integrated pay service for virus updates.
Wow. An integrated bandaid to slow the bloodflow from a severed artery. Nice.
1. Mr. Gates is getting old and sad (look at the picture).
Honestly, I think he looks good. Much better than the centerfold shot of him when he was young and lying on the desk.
2. He does not have much to say to us.
Yeah, I got that too.
It should have been titled "How I Work^H^H^H^HUse e-mail: Bill Gates".
It should have been titled "How I don't read my email".
He says that he has some kind of filtering where the people he _wants_ to correspond with goes into his inbox, but the complaints, etc gets summarized or whatever through some assistant. I can summarize those mails for him and us right now.
1) Get the OS secure
2) Get with a searching mechanism, which they are calling WinFS
I can't believe that they dumped WinFS for Vista. I don't see any other features in the new thing that warrants a new release.
MSDS stands for "Material Safety Data Sheet". Its something you have to have around when you have hazardous materials in a workplace. It tells stuff like LD50 values, fire control, etc.
Excellent typo for MSDN!
The headline talks about buying, yet TFA is about selling.
That certainly changes things, and make it OK.
Thanks for the correction, sorry Microsoft, didn't mean to ruin your rep like that. Keep up the good work!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency."
-- Anonymous
I remember a few years ago there was some kind of talk about 'returning' windows licenses...does that work? did it ever?
n d.idg/
m l
Here are some URLs:
http://www.netcraft.com.au/geoffrey/toshiba.html
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9901/25/winrefu
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/01/18/1539214.sht
The funny thing is that if you do not agree with Microsoft's license agreement, then the agreement that you did not agree to grants you the rights to a refund!?!? Or that is the theory.
I also thought that EULAs were deemed null and void in the first place. Especially the sneaky ones that don't tell you the EULA until after you open the box and then it tells you that you can't return it if you open the box.
I like Linux's EULA. I agree with that one 100%.
I've never read, nor cared about OS X's EULA. I like their stuff, and I'll buy it and use it. If they come knocking on my door because I click too hard on the keyboard or something, I'll deal with that when the time comes.
EULAs are bad, mmmkay