From what I can see on SCTP (not too familiar with it... I'm a hard-core FC guy, not a TCP/IP guy), it uses an end-to-end flow control mechanism.
That imposes too much latency of FC/FCP (virtually all FC flow control is done on a port-to-port basis, not end-to-end) and it looks like it would impose substantial overhead and complexity on FC/FCP itself, which would have to be modified to accomodate it. FCoE is a drop-in replacement for layers 1 and 2 of the FC stack, and requires very little in modifications.
I also do not see a way to easily bridge between the FC and SCTP. One of the major strengths of FCoE is the relative simplicity of bridging between the two protocols.
Nope, the CSMA/CA part of Ethernet is gone also. Specs for a GigE hub exist in the standards, but nobody ever implemented them. (Switching got to be too cheap for anybody to bother.)
Obviously it didn't even get specc'd out with 10Gb Ethernet.
Oh, the frame format is still more-or-less the same from Classic Ethernet. Not identical, but still pretty close.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet has real promise, but these new requirements are a real stumbling block.
What many of the posters here may not realize is that storage traffic (and the "standard" SCSI it uses) is extremely intolerant of dropped frames. A link that in the TCP/IP world would be specatacular is wholly unsuited for block-level storage, which is too latency sensitive to have time to recover from dropped data.
Since the most common cause of dropped frames within a data center is congestion, FCoE requires your Ethernet to implement frame-based flow control, which prevents the congestion from occuring, along with the resulting frame loss.
As everyone should know, the IBM Model M is the One True Keyboard. Surely all of the steel plating inside that thing must be good for something! If all else fails, the relentless clicking while they listen to your bugged cube or house should drive them completely insane.
Even if it doesn't prevent snooping, you could still use the thing as a self-defense weapon when Mysterious Men From the Shadows come to capture you.
I work for one of those companies with a Class A address and we hand them out like candy internally. One of my previous jobs was doing network equipment support so my cube had a big 'ol stack of routers and switches that did nothing but talk to each other. Instead of me having to go through obtaining a new address every time I needed to add a new piece of equipment or test something, the powers-that-be just assigned me my own Class C.
Ah, the joys of more IP's than we knew what to do with...
The likelihood of any of those places giving up addresses (at least without some form of compensation) is probably pretty low.
Tip number seven talks about battery conservation in LiIon vs. NiCd batteries. Um, laptops haven't used NiCd's in years. Their predecessors, NiMH hasn't been used in laptops in quite a while either.
Can you even buy NiCd's anymore, for any device? I can't remember the last time I saw them in an electronics store.
While IBM certainly still does make enough servers to put it at the top of the quarterly lists of server vendors, they make even more selling software and services.
SirWired
Re:The reviewer confuses fuel efficiency with econ
on
Plane Simple Truth
·
· Score: 1
Efficiency and Economy are not the same thing.
SUV's are uneconomical. (As in, getting the vehicle from point A to point B requires a lot of gas.)
However, they are actually quite efficient. (As in, for the size, weight, and power of the vehicle, they burn very little gas, compared with an older engine.)
The original reviewer was talking about the great strides in efficiency made by planes and implied that cars have not done the same. This is not true.
A modern fighter jet making a transatlantic crossing is far less economical than the Spirit of St. Louis, but is far more efficient of an aircraft.
Same thing with cars. A modern 'Vette gets piss-poor economy compared with a mid-80's Geo Metro, but it is far more efficient.
SirWired
The reviewer confuses fuel efficiency with economy
on
Plane Simple Truth
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Fuel economy (MPG) on a modern land-yacht SUV is indeed atrocious.
However, fuel efficiency on a modern vehicle is simply astounding. A modern engine can extract far more motive power out of a given amount of fuel than an engine even ten years old.
The problem, as far as total consumption goes, is what the automakers have chosen to do with those efficiency gains. Instead of increasing fuel economy, they have chosen to increase the power of the engine, and put those engines in ever-heavier vehicles. This means that fuel economy has remained relatively static, even as efficiency has made huge strides.
It took you seven years to do all that remodeling. If you enjoyed it, and looked at it as a hobby, and an opportunity to do cool stuff, fine. But don't say that you saved money. How much money could you have earned in all that time you spent working on the house? Even with a low-paying job, probably more than enough to pay for somebody else to do all those repairs, and then some. I remember seeing somewhere that DIY-labor ends up being "worth" about minimum wage because of how much longer it takes them to do tasks vs. a professional. Watching a pro vs. a DIY paint can make you a believer quickly.
My wife and I recently moved out of a 24-year-old house in need of a decent amount of "refreshing". Pretty much all of of it was DIY-able work. (paint throughout, carpeting, laminate countertops, replacing rotten siding, refinishing cabinets, etc.), however, it would have taken us six months worth of weekends and had us hating the place by the time we were through. The $8-9k we paid in labor costs were more than worth it, and the work definitely paid off in what we got for the house when we sold it.
In addition, the professionals we hired certainly did a better job than I ever could have, without a lot of practice. (Most of the work was done by the world's most awesome (and unfortunately, pricey) handyman.)
Don't get me wrong, I like working on my house (I'm doing all the interior painting myself), but I'm under no illusion that I am really saving anything. Instead of paying actual money to a pro, I am paying the valuable currency of my free time. In the end, that is what you are buying from a professional.
Everyone has to make that decision, but the money you save is a distinctly secondary consideration.
"Grumbles from the Grave" is a (now out-of-print) posthumous collection of letters from Heinlein, mostly between himself, publishers, and other SF Authors. It contains many letters on dealing with Fan Mail, Fans themselves, critics, publishers, etc. Quite an interesting little book.
The IBM crypto processors had the module containing the key wrapped in wires (which, if broken, or changed in length, would erase the key) and internal to the module were thermal and x-ray sensors to prevent sniffing the contents of the module that way.
I am neither an NVidia or ATI fanboy (heck, my current GPU is an integrated Intel), but this article is a steaming pile of crap.
Somehow, he takes a report of a routine running change to the production process (a new kind of solder), and magically turns this into some wild tale of how NVidia is shipping thousands of defective parts that will remain in the field.
Completely lacking is how he corresponds the running change to some defect...
The "Safe Harbor" provisions of the DMCA only protect unmoderated public machines. If you were to give your users the ability to place whatever music files they wished on your computer, then you are protected.
You putting files on your computer and sharing them will not allow you to take advantage of the "Safe Harbor" provisions.
BookSurge is an Amazon-owned vanity press. Since when does anybody, including Slashdot, waste time reviewing self-published books? Even in the "Idle" section this is stupid.
Maybe this is a thinly veiled review by the author to get a few people to buy this thing to experience its awfulness.
Really, the cheapest solution is a simple power meter, some cable-cleaning swabs, and a nice long spool of pre-terminated spare cable.
There are full-fledged cable certification devices out there, and you cannot afford one, nor do you need one.
Yes, there are a lot of problems that can happen with a cable that won't be caught with a power meter, but those problems can be prevented by only using factory-terminated cables from a quality supplier.
One of the toughest problems when developing drugs for the brain is crossing the "blood-brain barrier". For instance, neurotransmitters will not cross the barrier, so we can only prescribe drugs that affect them, as opposed to prescribing doses of neurotransmitters themselves.
I am 100% sure this is patentable, it is not as if nobody knows about methylene blue; and possibly they have patented a way of getting the drug directly into the brain.
But yes, unpatentable drugs are a real big problem. One of the drugs used to effective treat depression, a Reverse Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor called Manerix is not available for sale in the U.S. because the company that bought the U.S. rights tried to use it to treat dementia, for which it does not work. By the time the trials failed, the patent was too close to running out to run the paperwork for using it to treat depression, for which it does work. Consequently, it is a safe, effective, drug, with nobody in the U.S. to sponsor it to get through the approval process.
I am absolutely amazed at the number of posters that have said something along the lines of "All we have to do to fix education is vouchers/charter schools/for-profit/abolish unions/vo-tech/more science/more pay/more accountability/less testing/enforced basics/more independent study etc." It goes without saying that many of these suggestions are contradictory.
You folks have been listening to politicians too much. Complex problems like "improving education" almost never have simple sound-bite answers.
Let's take vouchers, for starters. Sure, they can help some, but: 1) They almost never cover complete private school costs. (Cost > Tuition) 2) We already have a voucher system for higher education: it's called Subsidized loans and Pell grants. These programs have shown that fraud is quite common and difficult to prevent. 3) Delegating a function off of the govt. does not magically make incompetence, bureaucracy, and inefficiency disappear. Anybody that has ever worked for a large military contractor can tell you this.
Let's look at some base problems vs. many other countries that make our test scores look bad: 1) ESL students. Face it, when they can't read the test, they bring down the average test score, no matter how bright they are, or how well or quickly they are progressing in their English studies. 2) Disparate income levels. News Flash! Rich kids in the U.S. do better than poor ones. Poverty introduces all sorts of problems that are hard to fix in a school. 3) A resistance to teaching towards the test. A sure-fire way to improve test scores is to teach to the test completely through rote memorization (like many Eastern countries), but that produces morons with a good memory.
My own personal answer? Keep debating about it and trying new things. Realize that sound-bite solutions would probably make things worse.
Given what it has to work with, the U.S. public school system does a damn fine job. Is it perfect? No.
I do enterprise level tech support for a tech company you most certainly have heard of, supporting $M+ installations of computer storage. I've done this for just under a decade, and make pretty excellent money doing it. My salary right out of school was in line with the students that did take dev jobs.
Before graduating, my experience was identical to yours, doing PC work, a little bit of web work here and there, etc.
Except for a couple of scripts here and there, I have not written a line of "real" code since day one.
I was actually pretty decent at programming, but didn't enjoy it. (I was a CompE, not a CompSci.)
I am pretty concerned that it is July and you don't have a job yet. The "college hiring cycle" is kinda over... That means you may be stuck with true entry-level jobs, instead of the "college hire" jobs, which in my company anyway, are a bit different. (An entry-level support tech is going to be working the call center, while a college-hire tech is going to be working in Level 2 or 3, right off the bat (with a whole lot of OJT, of course.))
While there are few jobs within IT where your college education really feels useful (i.e. architecture jobs), for most of them, a college grad is either grossly overqualified because he/she paid attention in all those theoretical classes which have no bearing on corporate IT and is a geek that could have done most of the jobs without college, or grossly underqualified, because he/she took a CompSci/Eng program just for the money, and failed to pick up the necessary practical skills outside of class during their education.
I would go so far to say that if you want to work corporate IT, a 2yr program should be sufficient. If you want to work in the technology industry itself, creating or supporting lower level stuff than end-user apps, then a college education comes in handy. For those jobs, a formal education is real useful, and employers in the computer industry expect you to pick up most of your skills via OJT, so previous practical knowledge is actually less useful than with IT employers.
For me, my first job out of college with a freshly minted CompE degree was top-level support for a company making network routing equipment. Never mind I had never actually seen a router before in my life... It wasn't a problem, since the work was so low-level that pretty much nobody was expected to come into the job having the required protocol analysis skills. Having a well-rounded CompE education came in real handy for picking up that stuff in a hurry.
Most of the development work in Corporate IT is churning out one DB App after another. Most of the other work is sysadmin, DB admin or user support work. I just don't see the relevance of the broad theoretical knowledge provided by a college education there.
I can't imagine doing my job for a tech company well without my CompE degree, and I can't imagine what I would do with my degree at most of the customers I deal with.
A person who legitimizes violence for any purpose other than self defense is severely deranged Ah, so a police office who, from a safe distance away, shoots a man holding a family hostage is "severely deranged"? It's not "self defense", after all.
Was the instigation by the founding fathers of the American Revolution "nothing less than murder"? Certainly the vast majority of the Colonists were under no threat of death or violence by the British. Indeed I would go so far as to say that most Colonists were quite indifferent about the matter either way.
Saying that violence is only legitimized in self defense is a pretty broad statement... is it truly what you believe?
I ask you this: if you stuck a gun in the hand of the Governor of Texas, led him to a roomful of atheists (or Muslims), and told him that he was free to shoot whomever he wanted with no repercussions if he felt they deserved death for not yet being "saved", would he pull the trigger? I think not. He may be a fundamentalist, but I doubt he is a complete and total nutjob.
Ask the same person if it's alright to exercise violence that would kill the neighbors of "suspected" terrorists/infidels, as long as those suspected aren't near anyone he cares about, and he'll gleefully approve. Alternately, ask him the same question if he gets $10,000 per body as a reward for his violence.
Ah, now you have completely shifted the question. Asking if somebody would authorize the possibility of collateral damage for dubious political ends ("suspected terrorists") is a different subject entirely to if they would kill solely for dubious religious ends.
...that doesn't make them psychotic maniacs.
Yes, it does. They believe in something that by all observable measures does not exist.
Believing in something that does not observably exist, and being positive you are right, is merely irrational. It is going a bit far to call every religious person a psychotic maniac. Unless you are a total recluse I will bet that many of the people you know and get along with just fine attend church. Do you believe all those people are psychotic maniacs?
Nor do I think that the only religious nutjobs are Christian or Muslim. There just happen to be a lot more members of those religions than most others, and they have had plenty of time to get real pissed off...
The meek do not inherit the earth. The religions that advocate compliance or death do.
The term "Christian" covers Quakers (a completely 100% pacificst group) in addition to a Fire and Brimstone Nuke-all-them-ragheads-to-the-stone-age wacko.
To say that "Christians" or "Muslims" advocate "compliance or death" is a cruel, bigoted stereotype. As I said before, both traditions of faith have been around so long, and have so many members, that the practice of their beliefs is extremely diverse. Think a Bell Curve here... every bell curve has folks on each end that are very far away from the norm.
It's kind of funny that you mock the phrase, "the meek inherit the earth". I assume you know that that phrase comes from the Sermon on the Mount. It does not have the kind of literal meaning you attach to it. In the Sermon, Jesus is referring to his view that the meek will receive their just reward in time (presumably after they are dead), even if, through their meekness, they do not have much now.
The real problem is that it is somehow a negative thing to label them for their true nature. A person who legitimizes violence for any purpose other than self defense is severely deranged, and their leadership in aggressive military action should be considered nothing less than murder.
Who the heck is "them"? I agree that those that advocate death to those that do not share their unconformable beliefs are psychotic morons not entirely right in the head. I stated as such. To do so is certainly not a "negative" thing. However, your folly is lumping all those that would call themselves "fundamentalists" into the same category as Holy Warriors. The ultra-violent members of those religions are a tiny minority of even the most ultra-orthodox members.
You can take any arbitrary large group of people and within them, find violent psychopaths and complete pacifists. I am sure that even among all the atheists of the world you will find pacifists, and those that believe that all those that believe in God deserve death.
You may be well-served by taking a religious studies course, as your ignorance and bigotry about religious beliefs is astounding. The
He's a fundamentalist Christian. A Buddhist or Jewish fundamentalist doesn't care if you're a part of their religion. A Wiccan fundamentalist doesn't care if you believe he or she can perform magic.
A Christian or Muslim fundamentalist believes that human lives are expendable if extinguished in the name of God. They deserve neither respect nor even common courtesy. If not for their religion, they would be correctly labeled sociopaths and imprisoned for inciting and participating in violence and wars of aggression.
You are terribly misusing the word "fundamentalist", and in so doing, lumping those that simply believe strongly in their religion into the same basket as terrorists. There are plenty of Christians or Muslims that you, I, and themselves, would consider fundamentalist that are not, in fact, dedicated to Holy War. Certainly there are sects/factions of both religions that are, but it is a disservice to members of both religions to lump all of them into the same category of psychopathic terrorists.
I ask you this: if you stuck a gun in the hand of the Governor of Texas, led him to a roomful of atheists (or Muslims), and told him that he was free to shoot whomever he wanted with no repercussions if he felt they deserved death for not yet being "saved", would he pull the trigger? I think not. He may be a fundamentalist, but I doubt he is a complete and total nutjob.
I would consider a religious fundamentalist to be somebody to believes that their particular views on God/Deity/Force of choice have a monopoly on the truth, and that those that do not share those beliefs are damned to (or at least tending to) Hell/Unenlightment/Eternal Unpleasantness.
I think those that hold those views are loony, since they have of course have no way of confirming their views, but that doesn't make them psychotic maniacs.
Nor do I think that the only religious nutjobs are Christian or Muslim. There just happen to be a lot more members of those religions than most others, and they have had plenty of time to get real pissed off... There are violent Bhuddist monks, and I am sure that you can find a Wiccan or two, somewhere in the world, that thinks their beliefs are worth somebody else's life. There are certainly some Jews (extreme Zionists) that believe that the killing of others is justified in order to set up their version of an ideal holy land. By no means are these views shared by most (or even many) of the adherents of those traditions, but every group has some bad apples that get carried away.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I can see on SCTP (not too familiar with it... I'm a hard-core FC guy, not a TCP/IP guy), it uses an end-to-end flow control mechanism.
That imposes too much latency of FC/FCP (virtually all FC flow control is done on a port-to-port basis, not end-to-end) and it looks like it would impose substantial overhead and complexity on FC/FCP itself, which would have to be modified to accomodate it. FCoE is a drop-in replacement for layers 1 and 2 of the FC stack, and requires very little in modifications.
I also do not see a way to easily bridge between the FC and SCTP. One of the major strengths of FCoE is the relative simplicity of bridging between the two protocols.
SirWired
Nope, the CSMA/CA part of Ethernet is gone also. Specs for a GigE hub exist in the standards, but nobody ever implemented them. (Switching got to be too cheap for anybody to bother.)
Obviously it didn't even get specc'd out with 10Gb Ethernet.
Oh, the frame format is still more-or-less the same from Classic Ethernet. Not identical, but still pretty close.
SirWired
Fibre Channel over Ethernet has real promise, but these new requirements are a real stumbling block.
What many of the posters here may not realize is that storage traffic (and the "standard" SCSI it uses) is extremely intolerant of dropped frames. A link that in the TCP/IP world would be specatacular is wholly unsuited for block-level storage, which is too latency sensitive to have time to recover from dropped data.
Since the most common cause of dropped frames within a data center is congestion, FCoE requires your Ethernet to implement frame-based flow control, which prevents the congestion from occuring, along with the resulting frame loss.
SirWired
As everyone should know, the IBM Model M is the One True Keyboard. Surely all of the steel plating inside that thing must be good for something! If all else fails, the relentless clicking while they listen to your bugged cube or house should drive them completely insane.
Even if it doesn't prevent snooping, you could still use the thing as a self-defense weapon when Mysterious Men From the Shadows come to capture you.
SirWired
I work for one of those companies with a Class A address and we hand them out like candy internally. One of my previous jobs was doing network equipment support so my cube had a big 'ol stack of routers and switches that did nothing but talk to each other. Instead of me having to go through obtaining a new address every time I needed to add a new piece of equipment or test something, the powers-that-be just assigned me my own Class C.
Ah, the joys of more IP's than we knew what to do with...
The likelihood of any of those places giving up addresses (at least without some form of compensation) is probably pretty low.
SirWired
Tip number seven talks about battery conservation in LiIon vs. NiCd batteries. Um, laptops haven't used NiCd's in years. Their predecessors, NiMH hasn't been used in laptops in quite a while either.
Can you even buy NiCd's anymore, for any device? I can't remember the last time I saw them in an electronics store.
SirWired
8GB swap on a 120GB drive is 7%, not .07%. On a 200GB drive, it's 4%, not .04%, etc.
SirWired
While IBM certainly still does make enough servers to put it at the top of the quarterly lists of server vendors, they make even more selling software and services.
SirWired
Efficiency and Economy are not the same thing.
SUV's are uneconomical. (As in, getting the vehicle from point A to point B requires a lot of gas.)
However, they are actually quite efficient. (As in, for the size, weight, and power of the vehicle, they burn very little gas, compared with an older engine.)
The original reviewer was talking about the great strides in efficiency made by planes and implied that cars have not done the same. This is not true.
A modern fighter jet making a transatlantic crossing is far less economical than the Spirit of St. Louis, but is far more efficient of an aircraft.
Same thing with cars. A modern 'Vette gets piss-poor economy compared with a mid-80's Geo Metro, but it is far more efficient.
SirWired
Fuel economy (MPG) on a modern land-yacht SUV is indeed atrocious.
However, fuel efficiency on a modern vehicle is simply astounding. A modern engine can extract far more motive power out of a given amount of fuel than an engine even ten years old.
The problem, as far as total consumption goes, is what the automakers have chosen to do with those efficiency gains. Instead of increasing fuel economy, they have chosen to increase the power of the engine, and put those engines in ever-heavier vehicles. This means that fuel economy has remained relatively static, even as efficiency has made huge strides.
SirWired
It took you seven years to do all that remodeling. If you enjoyed it, and looked at it as a hobby, and an opportunity to do cool stuff, fine. But don't say that you saved money. How much money could you have earned in all that time you spent working on the house? Even with a low-paying job, probably more than enough to pay for somebody else to do all those repairs, and then some. I remember seeing somewhere that DIY-labor ends up being "worth" about minimum wage because of how much longer it takes them to do tasks vs. a professional. Watching a pro vs. a DIY paint can make you a believer quickly.
My wife and I recently moved out of a 24-year-old house in need of a decent amount of "refreshing". Pretty much all of of it was DIY-able work. (paint throughout, carpeting, laminate countertops, replacing rotten siding, refinishing cabinets, etc.), however, it would have taken us six months worth of weekends and had us hating the place by the time we were through. The $8-9k we paid in labor costs were more than worth it, and the work definitely paid off in what we got for the house when we sold it.
In addition, the professionals we hired certainly did a better job than I ever could have, without a lot of practice. (Most of the work was done by the world's most awesome (and unfortunately, pricey) handyman.)
Don't get me wrong, I like working on my house (I'm doing all the interior painting myself), but I'm under no illusion that I am really saving anything. Instead of paying actual money to a pro, I am paying the valuable currency of my free time. In the end, that is what you are buying from a professional.
Everyone has to make that decision, but the money you save is a distinctly secondary consideration.
SirWired
"Grumbles from the Grave" is a (now out-of-print) posthumous collection of letters from Heinlein, mostly between himself, publishers, and other SF Authors. It contains many letters on dealing with Fan Mail, Fans themselves, critics, publishers, etc. Quite an interesting little book.
SirWired
The IBM crypto processors had the module containing the key wrapped in wires (which, if broken, or changed in length, would erase the key) and internal to the module were thermal and x-ray sensors to prevent sniffing the contents of the module that way.
SirWired
I am neither an NVidia or ATI fanboy (heck, my current GPU is an integrated Intel), but this article is a steaming pile of crap.
Somehow, he takes a report of a routine running change to the production process (a new kind of solder), and magically turns this into some wild tale of how NVidia is shipping thousands of defective parts that will remain in the field.
Completely lacking is how he corresponds the running change to some defect...
SirWired
The "Safe Harbor" provisions of the DMCA only protect unmoderated public machines. If you were to give your users the ability to place whatever music files they wished on your computer, then you are protected.
You putting files on your computer and sharing them will not allow you to take advantage of the "Safe Harbor" provisions.
SirWired
BookSurge is an Amazon-owned vanity press. Since when does anybody, including Slashdot, waste time reviewing self-published books? Even in the "Idle" section this is stupid.
Maybe this is a thinly veiled review by the author to get a few people to buy this thing to experience its awfulness.
SirWired
Really, the cheapest solution is a simple power meter, some cable-cleaning swabs, and a nice long spool of pre-terminated spare cable.
There are full-fledged cable certification devices out there, and you cannot afford one, nor do you need one.
Yes, there are a lot of problems that can happen with a cable that won't be caught with a power meter, but those problems can be prevented by only using factory-terminated cables from a quality supplier.
SirWired
One of the toughest problems when developing drugs for the brain is crossing the "blood-brain barrier". For instance, neurotransmitters will not cross the barrier, so we can only prescribe drugs that affect them, as opposed to prescribing doses of neurotransmitters themselves.
I am 100% sure this is patentable, it is not as if nobody knows about methylene blue; and possibly they have patented a way of getting the drug directly into the brain.
But yes, unpatentable drugs are a real big problem. One of the drugs used to effective treat depression, a Reverse Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor called Manerix is not available for sale in the U.S. because the company that bought the U.S. rights tried to use it to treat dementia, for which it does not work. By the time the trials failed, the patent was too close to running out to run the paperwork for using it to treat depression, for which it does work. Consequently, it is a safe, effective, drug, with nobody in the U.S. to sponsor it to get through the approval process.
SirWired
I am absolutely amazed at the number of posters that have said something along the lines of "All we have to do to fix education is vouchers/charter schools/for-profit/abolish unions/vo-tech/more science/more pay/more accountability/less testing/enforced basics/more independent study etc." It goes without saying that many of these suggestions are contradictory.
You folks have been listening to politicians too much. Complex problems like "improving education" almost never have simple sound-bite answers.
Let's take vouchers, for starters. Sure, they can help some, but:
1) They almost never cover complete private school costs. (Cost > Tuition)
2) We already have a voucher system for higher education: it's called Subsidized loans and Pell grants. These programs have shown that fraud is quite common and difficult to prevent.
3) Delegating a function off of the govt. does not magically make incompetence, bureaucracy, and inefficiency disappear. Anybody that has ever worked for a large military contractor can tell you this.
Let's look at some base problems vs. many other countries that make our test scores look bad:
1) ESL students. Face it, when they can't read the test, they bring down the average test score, no matter how bright they are, or how well or quickly they are progressing in their English studies.
2) Disparate income levels. News Flash! Rich kids in the U.S. do better than poor ones. Poverty introduces all sorts of problems that are hard to fix in a school.
3) A resistance to teaching towards the test. A sure-fire way to improve test scores is to teach to the test completely through rote memorization (like many Eastern countries), but that produces morons with a good memory.
My own personal answer? Keep debating about it and trying new things. Realize that sound-bite solutions would probably make things worse.
Given what it has to work with, the U.S. public school system does a damn fine job. Is it perfect? No.
SirWired
Google doesn't get paid for ad views, only ad clicks.
SirWired
I do enterprise level tech support for a tech company you most certainly have heard of, supporting $M+ installations of computer storage. I've done this for just under a decade, and make pretty excellent money doing it. My salary right out of school was in line with the students that did take dev jobs.
Before graduating, my experience was identical to yours, doing PC work, a little bit of web work here and there, etc.
Except for a couple of scripts here and there, I have not written a line of "real" code since day one.
I was actually pretty decent at programming, but didn't enjoy it. (I was a CompE, not a CompSci.)
I am pretty concerned that it is July and you don't have a job yet. The "college hiring cycle" is kinda over... That means you may be stuck with true entry-level jobs, instead of the "college hire" jobs, which in my company anyway, are a bit different. (An entry-level support tech is going to be working the call center, while a college-hire tech is going to be working in Level 2 or 3, right off the bat (with a whole lot of OJT, of course.))
SirWired
While there are few jobs within IT where your college education really feels useful (i.e. architecture jobs), for most of them, a college grad is either grossly overqualified because he/she paid attention in all those theoretical classes which have no bearing on corporate IT and is a geek that could have done most of the jobs without college, or grossly underqualified, because he/she took a CompSci/Eng program just for the money, and failed to pick up the necessary practical skills outside of class during their education.
I would go so far to say that if you want to work corporate IT, a 2yr program should be sufficient. If you want to work in the technology industry itself, creating or supporting lower level stuff than end-user apps, then a college education comes in handy. For those jobs, a formal education is real useful, and employers in the computer industry expect you to pick up most of your skills via OJT, so previous practical knowledge is actually less useful than with IT employers.
For me, my first job out of college with a freshly minted CompE degree was top-level support for a company making network routing equipment. Never mind I had never actually seen a router before in my life... It wasn't a problem, since the work was so low-level that pretty much nobody was expected to come into the job having the required protocol analysis skills. Having a well-rounded CompE education came in real handy for picking up that stuff in a hurry.
Most of the development work in Corporate IT is churning out one DB App after another. Most of the other work is sysadmin, DB admin or user support work. I just don't see the relevance of the broad theoretical knowledge provided by a college education there.
I can't imagine doing my job for a tech company well without my CompE degree, and I can't imagine what I would do with my degree at most of the customers I deal with.
SirWired
Was the instigation by the founding fathers of the American Revolution "nothing less than murder"? Certainly the vast majority of the Colonists were under no threat of death or violence by the British. Indeed I would go so far as to say that most Colonists were quite indifferent about the matter either way.
Saying that violence is only legitimized in self defense is a pretty broad statement... is it truly what you believe?
SirWired
I ask you this: if you stuck a gun in the hand of the Governor of Texas, led him to a roomful of atheists (or Muslims), and told him that he was free to shoot whomever he wanted with no repercussions if he felt they deserved death for not yet being "saved", would he pull the trigger? I think not. He may be a fundamentalist, but I doubt he is a complete and total nutjob.
Ask the same person if it's alright to exercise violence that would kill the neighbors of "suspected" terrorists/infidels, as long as those suspected aren't near anyone he cares about, and he'll gleefully approve. Alternately, ask him the same question if he gets $10,000 per body as a reward for his violence.
Ah, now you have completely shifted the question. Asking if somebody would authorize the possibility of collateral damage for dubious political ends ("suspected terrorists") is a different subject entirely to if they would kill solely for dubious religious ends.
...that doesn't make them psychotic maniacs.
Yes, it does. They believe in something that by all observable measures does not exist.
Believing in something that does not observably exist, and being positive you are right, is merely irrational. It is going a bit far to call every religious person a psychotic maniac. Unless you are a total recluse I will bet that many of the people you know and get along with just fine attend church. Do you believe all those people are psychotic maniacs?
Nor do I think that the only religious nutjobs are Christian or Muslim. There just happen to be a lot more members of those religions than most others, and they have had plenty of time to get real pissed off...
The meek do not inherit the earth. The religions that advocate compliance or death do.
The term "Christian" covers Quakers (a completely 100% pacificst group) in addition to a Fire and Brimstone Nuke-all-them-ragheads-to-the-stone-age wacko.
To say that "Christians" or "Muslims" advocate "compliance or death" is a cruel, bigoted stereotype. As I said before, both traditions of faith have been around so long, and have so many members, that the practice of their beliefs is extremely diverse. Think a Bell Curve here... every bell curve has folks on each end that are very far away from the norm.
It's kind of funny that you mock the phrase, "the meek inherit the earth". I assume you know that that phrase comes from the Sermon on the Mount. It does not have the kind of literal meaning you attach to it. In the Sermon, Jesus is referring to his view that the meek will receive their just reward in time (presumably after they are dead), even if, through their meekness, they do not have much now.
The real problem is that it is somehow a negative thing to label them for their true nature. A person who legitimizes violence for any purpose other than self defense is severely deranged, and their leadership in aggressive military action should be considered nothing less than murder.
Who the heck is "them"? I agree that those that advocate death to those that do not share their unconformable beliefs are psychotic morons not entirely right in the head. I stated as such. To do so is certainly not a "negative" thing. However, your folly is lumping all those that would call themselves "fundamentalists" into the same category as Holy Warriors. The ultra-violent members of those religions are a tiny minority of even the most ultra-orthodox members.
You can take any arbitrary large group of people and within them, find violent psychopaths and complete pacifists. I am sure that even among all the atheists of the world you will find pacifists, and those that believe that all those that believe in God deserve death.
You may be well-served by taking a religious studies course, as your ignorance and bigotry about religious beliefs is astounding. The
He's a fundamentalist Christian. A Buddhist or Jewish fundamentalist doesn't care if you're a part of their religion. A Wiccan fundamentalist doesn't care if you believe he or she can perform magic.
A Christian or Muslim fundamentalist believes that human lives are expendable if extinguished in the name of God. They deserve neither respect nor even common courtesy. If not for their religion, they would be correctly labeled sociopaths and imprisoned for inciting and participating in violence and wars of aggression.
You are terribly misusing the word "fundamentalist", and in so doing, lumping those that simply believe strongly in their religion into the same basket as terrorists. There are plenty of Christians or Muslims that you, I, and themselves, would consider fundamentalist that are not, in fact, dedicated to Holy War. Certainly there are sects/factions of both religions that are, but it is a disservice to members of both religions to lump all of them into the same category of psychopathic terrorists.
I ask you this: if you stuck a gun in the hand of the Governor of Texas, led him to a roomful of atheists (or Muslims), and told him that he was free to shoot whomever he wanted with no repercussions if he felt they deserved death for not yet being "saved", would he pull the trigger? I think not. He may be a fundamentalist, but I doubt he is a complete and total nutjob.
I would consider a religious fundamentalist to be somebody to believes that their particular views on God/Deity/Force of choice have a monopoly on the truth, and that those that do not share those beliefs are damned to (or at least tending to) Hell/Unenlightment/Eternal Unpleasantness.
I think those that hold those views are loony, since they have of course have no way of confirming their views, but that doesn't make them psychotic maniacs.
Nor do I think that the only religious nutjobs are Christian or Muslim. There just happen to be a lot more members of those religions than most others, and they have had plenty of time to get real pissed off... There are violent Bhuddist monks, and I am sure that you can find a Wiccan or two, somewhere in the world, that thinks their beliefs are worth somebody else's life. There are certainly some Jews (extreme Zionists) that believe that the killing of others is justified in order to set up their version of an ideal holy land. By no means are these views shared by most (or even many) of the adherents of those traditions, but every group has some bad apples that get carried away.
SirWired