One argument for using MS software is that it will train students in skills they can use to get a job: MS usage is what employers want. Well there is no guarantee anymore that in 4 or 5 years when students get a job that MS software will still be in use, or if it is that it will be like what the students use today.
Considering that Microsoft likes to change their current software every 18-24 months it's unlikely that schools will be able to have the "latest and greatest" for that long without spending lots of money. Of course commercial companies are also reluctent to spend their hard earned cash on software as a fashion statement. It's entirely possible that someone could get a job which involves using an older version of software than that they used at school.
Using open software allows students to learn the inner workings of computers that MS will never allow. Hopefully they will learn from basics and could apply the skills to any system,
These arn't quite the same thing. Being able to learn the inner workings is like being able to become a motor mechanic. Learning the basics and able to apply to other systems is more like someone learning to drive any car as opposed to only a specific model of car.
The software or hardware you're using might be inadequate now, and change even more before you enter the workforce. That's not a problem. Basic & apple IIc's aren't used anymore but I still use skills I learned there.
That's the difference between "training" and "education".
We upgraded to MS-Office 2000 recently. Did I mention that it cost over $40,000 in licenses and required purchasing an additional $20,000 worth of RAM because some of the older PCs couldn't run it?
That's with educational prices on the software and quite probably a nice volume discount on the RAM.
I spent less time on that server in over two years AND it's replacement than I did just tonight trying to get MS Organizational Charts to work in MS-Office 2000 under Win-NT and Win-2000. (By the way, the fix is to give all your users change rights to the c:\WINNT directory and some of the files in it. yeah.. security by design.. sure.)
Is that information common knowlage? Would MS support know the solution, especially since it involves 3 different MS products in combination?
I don't see why schools are on the upgrade treadmill when the primary applications -- typing, web browsing, basic programming -- can be done perfectly well with old systems.
With "commodity" applications, such as web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, etc (as well as programming) being well supported by open source.
I recall being herded in there several times only to waste half of the class time learning completely useless software that barely demonstrated what we were supposed to learn.
This is at the core of the argument over specialist educational software. How often is it actually useful and how often is it being used more for political than educational reasons?
Who do you call when commercial software breaks? Unless you're paying additional monthly or annual maintenance fees, chances are the vendor isn't going to want to talk to you.
Even if they will talk to you they can say "don't know", "it's a feature not a bug", "your version is out of date", "networks, we never bother to test our products on networks", "dll conflict, what's a dll?" The vendor may not have actually written the software or have used some kind of "development kit" they don't fully understand.
Those average goes don't want to have to learn the extra stuff that comes with learining linux and the various open source packages. They need computers like tv's.
In which case Linux makes far more sense than Windows. Since there is a clear separation between user and administration tasks. Windows is a system where the end user is more or less forced into performing administration tasks. e.g. Windows update. If you try to separate the roles you have admins forced to use an interface intended for end users. Windows is like a car where all servicing is carried out from the driving seat, but can't tell if a driver or a mechanic is sitting in the seat.
the install is almost without any real options
"Appliances" do not have end user installs and major modifications.
This is a perfect analogy to computers; people don't know about Windows Update, auto-launching email viruses, how to clean up their start menu so that it's not a horrible mass of garbage, not having 80,000 programs running in the systray.
The problem with Windows is that it has as a design assumption that the end user should understand how to do these sorts of things. Even where the end user is a child or computer illiterate office worker. Even with the NT line of Windows you can easily run into situations of an administrator installing software which won't work for a regular user.
From a military perspective (and it is always about that in aviation), the payload to power ratio is impressive. I can't imagine it is fast though, or very easily maintained,
Easily maintained is likely to be an issue for a military aircraft, speed might not be, depending on the intended application. Wonder what its radar cross section is like though.
Re:Major downfall (no pun intended)
on
Fanwing Planes?
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· Score: 2
With no ability to glide after engine failure, I cannot see the military putting forth much effort (or $$) in an aircraft of this nature, but then again Helocoptors are the same way and we have thousands of those.
A helicoptor can auto-rotate it's main rotor. Which makes emergency landing (or even survivable crash landing) possible.
Besides, I think the military has enough aircraft in its arsenal as it is, we don't need another one to maintain.
Maybe they are interested in the design for drone usage, rather than manned aircraft.
Spectrum scarcity is not the problem I'd say. Cells can be placed quite densely to support many concurrent users, or they can be placed at large intervals to provide good coverage over a large, sparsely populated area. You'd need a lot of phone users to overload a network that uses the most densely possible cell placement.
Considering how small you can go you'd probably need to have people packed into a room like sardines juggling several phones each. You'd need quite a few of the smallest base stations to cover a large building though.
OK sorry, I got the numbers wrong. Still, compared to the population of eur or usa it's tiny. And you miss my point, I was using my phone out of town, not the desert, but rural areas with no towns near by. Even the beaches, way out of town, no other people around. Signal.
All you need to make a cell base station work is power and a connection into the telephone network. Either copper, fibre or microwave. The cables which connect urban areas to the power grid and telephone network need to take some route or other through rural areas.
Hong Kong is as dense as New York, yet we have coverage in all subway, throughout the harbor, and in every building and nearly every ELEVATOR in the buildings.
In the case buildings which block radio waves you need cellular base stations inside the buildings. Similarly for subways... Trying to use large cells, with powerful transmitters dosn't work very well at all.
Europe has a population of 384 Million. They have a land area of 3,191,120 square kilometers. The United States has a popular of 284 Million. We have a land area of 9,629,091 square kilometers. As you can see, US providers have a dramatically smaller population with a FAR larger land area to cover.
How do things compare if you use only urban areas and population. Huge parts of the US have effectivly zero people per square kilometre.
IIRC, the main GSM frequencies (800 and 1800 MHz) are reserved for the US military. You can either blame the US for wasting that spectrum, or the Europeans for being so bloody-minded as to use a chunk of spectrum that they knew wasn't going to be available in the US.
But do the US military actually use these frequences? Considering that they have bases all over the world you'd think that if there was a problem the US would be being bombared with complaints about US military facilities interfering with civilian communications. If that was the real reason most of the planet opposing a war with Iraq you'd expect the press to mention it.
More towers won't happen here in the US because you've got the NIMBY crowd. Mind you, these are are first people to bitch when they can't get cellular reception.
If there NIMBY basis is "radiation" then adding more spectrum makes this worst, since you have the same RF power on more frequences. Also in order to make this useful you have modify the entire network, both base stations and handsets. Having more (and smaller cells) means that both base stations and handsets are transmitting less RF energy. A low power base station is a physically smaller piece of kit, far easier to attach to an existing structure (and if need be hide).
The UK is much more densely populated than the US,
Parts of the US being sparsly populated might be part of the problem, but no real excuse for poor coverage in urban areas.
has much higher mobile phone usage per head and no more spectrum available for mobile phone use, but has generally excellent mobile phone service.
The whole point about a cellphone system is that you don't need huge amounts of spectrum. In an area of dense usage you simply have smaller cells with lower powered transcievers.
"Palestine" has never been a nation, and you know it. Calling it a nation is like calling a random selection of MP3 on a script kiddie's computer a cross-section of popular music. Palestine was a name given to a land reduced to desolation after the fall of the Roman Empire, and there has never been a nation of Palestinians. If you'd bothered to look it up, the West Bank and Jordan were all part of a British mandate called "Trans-Jordan".
Plenty of borders were made up by colonials, by drawing lines on a map. Yet somehow this is only a big issue with Palestine.
Palestinians are ARABS, they have always been ARABS and just because Arabs set up camp in a area and name themselves after it doesn't make it a nation.
But if a group of Europeans set up camp in an area then it suddenly becomes a nation? Sounds rather a racist position.
Chances are good that even your dog has been genetically modified.
It's called selective breeding, and has been around for quite a while.
Selective breeding of dogs involves using regular sexual reproduction and all the genes involved were in the dog species to start with.
However, with today's technology it is much less of a crap-shoot than it used to be. You can isolate and change a gene rather than stirring up a whole shitload of them and seeing what happens.
Actually it's even more of a crap-shoot, since you can't simply stick the gene you want into a dog's genome.
You stand a much better chance of getting a faster dog with genetic engineering, rather than a fast, stupid, blind dog as a result of too much inbreeding.
Making a fast dog probably involves many genes in the right combination. With all sorts of complex interactions with other genes. A much harder problem to solve with genetic engineering than simply making an organism produce one chemical.
Trypsin is a primary digestive enzyme in stomachs. I wonder what could possible go wrong with ingesting more trypsin, even if it was from another species.
Depends how much, if it's just a small amount the body can simply cut back on its own sythesis. But what happens if you exceed the stomach's ability to contain the enzyme?
Flag me as a troll, but I have the feeling that a lot of anger from 95% of the world towawrd USA is just because the good old USA are putting their "paw" in various country where they are not welcome or called for,
Or where the US has put their "paw" in sometime in fairly recent history. Examples here would be Iran and Chilie.
but qwhere they have economics or political interrest.
It's sometimes difficult to separate economic and political interests. e.g. removal of a left leaning nationalist government, under the banner of "removing communism". Which just happened to enable a US owned business to come in and exploit natural resources and/or labour.
Maybe you should give a shit by either dropping support for dictatorial or opressing regime, and TOTALLY retract from world interraction or TOTALLY use your power to correct all stuff with a bit of ethics. No an half way thru.
The former, which is effectivly a decolonialisation is likely to be the easier option. Colonial powers are rarely much good at cleaning up their own messes. Past US attempts at "nation building", e.g. Afganistan, don't give much cause for optimism.
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One argument for using MS software is that it will train students in skills they can use to get a job: MS usage is what employers want. Well there is no guarantee anymore that in 4 or 5 years when students get a job that MS software will still be in use, or if it is that it will be like what the students use today.
Considering that Microsoft likes to change their current software every 18-24 months it's unlikely that schools will be able to have the "latest and greatest" for that long without spending lots of money. Of course commercial companies are also reluctent to spend their hard earned cash on software as a fashion statement. It's entirely possible that someone could get a job which involves using an older version of software than that they used at school.
Using open software allows students to learn the inner workings of computers that MS will never allow. Hopefully they will learn from basics and could apply the skills to any system,
These arn't quite the same thing. Being able to learn the inner workings is like being able to become a motor mechanic. Learning the basics and able to apply to other systems is more like someone learning to drive any car as opposed to only a specific model of car.
The software or hardware you're using might be inadequate now, and change even more before you enter the workforce. That's not a problem. Basic & apple IIc's aren't used anymore but I still use skills I learned there.
That's the difference between "training" and "education".
We upgraded to MS-Office 2000 recently. Did I mention that it cost over $40,000 in licenses and required purchasing an additional $20,000 worth of RAM because some of the older PCs couldn't run it?
That's with educational prices on the software and quite probably a nice volume discount on the RAM.
I spent less time on that server in over two years AND it's replacement than I did just tonight trying to get MS Organizational Charts to work in MS-Office 2000 under Win-NT and Win-2000. (By the way, the fix is to give all your users change rights to the c:\WINNT directory and some of the files in it. yeah.. security by design.. sure.)
Is that information common knowlage? Would MS support know the solution, especially since it involves 3 different MS products in combination?
I don't see why schools are on the upgrade treadmill when the primary applications -- typing, web browsing, basic programming -- can be done perfectly well with old systems.
With "commodity" applications, such as web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, etc (as well as programming) being well supported by open source.
I recall being herded in there several times only to waste half of the class time learning completely useless software that barely demonstrated what we were supposed to learn.
This is at the core of the argument over specialist educational software. How often is it actually useful and how often is it being used more for political than educational reasons?
Who do you call when commercial software breaks? Unless you're paying additional monthly or annual maintenance fees, chances are the vendor isn't going to want to talk to you.
Even if they will talk to you they can say "don't know", "it's a feature not a bug", "your version is out of date", "networks, we never bother to test our products on networks", "dll conflict, what's a dll?"
The vendor may not have actually written the software or have used some kind of "development kit" they don't fully understand.
Commercial software support is professional
This is some strange meaning of "professional". Whilst some support for commercial software is good in other cases it can be a complete joke.
Those average goes don't want to have to learn the extra stuff that comes with learining linux and the various open source packages. They need computers like tv's.
In which case Linux makes far more sense than Windows. Since there is a clear separation between user and administration tasks. Windows is a system where the end user is more or less forced into performing administration tasks. e.g. Windows update. If you try to separate the roles you have admins forced to use an interface intended for end users. Windows is like a car where all servicing is carried out from the driving seat, but can't tell if a driver or a mechanic is sitting in the seat.
the install is almost without any real options
"Appliances" do not have end user installs and major modifications.
Windows doesn't need to be taught.
Actually it does, e.g. it's counter intuitive that you log off a Windows machine by going to a place called "start".
This is a perfect analogy to computers; people don't know about Windows Update, auto-launching email viruses, how to clean up their start menu so that it's not a horrible mass of garbage, not having 80,000 programs running in the systray.
The problem with Windows is that it has as a design assumption that the end user should understand how to do these sorts of things. Even where the end user is a child or computer illiterate office worker.
Even with the NT line of Windows you can easily run into situations of an administrator installing software which won't work for a regular user.
From a military perspective (and it is always about that in aviation), the payload to power ratio is impressive. I can't imagine it is fast though, or very easily maintained,
Easily maintained is likely to be an issue for a military aircraft, speed might not be, depending on the intended application. Wonder what its radar cross section is like though.
With no ability to glide after engine failure, I cannot see the military putting forth much effort (or $$) in an aircraft of this nature, but then again Helocoptors are the same way and we have thousands of those.
A helicoptor can auto-rotate it's main rotor. Which makes emergency landing (or even survivable crash landing) possible.
Besides, I think the military has enough aircraft in its arsenal as it is, we don't need another one to maintain.
Maybe they are interested in the design for drone usage, rather than manned aircraft.
Spectrum scarcity is not the problem I'd say. Cells can be placed quite densely to support many concurrent users, or they can be placed at large intervals to provide good coverage over a large, sparsely populated area. You'd need a lot of phone users to overload a network that uses the most densely possible cell placement.
Considering how small you can go you'd probably need to have people packed into a room like sardines juggling several phones each.
You'd need quite a few of the smallest base stations to cover a large building though.
OK sorry, I got the numbers wrong. Still, compared to the population of eur or usa it's tiny. And you miss my point, I was using my phone out of town, not the desert, but rural areas with no towns near by. Even the beaches, way out of town, no other people around. Signal.
All you need to make a cell base station work is power and a connection into the telephone network. Either copper, fibre or microwave.
The cables which connect urban areas to the power grid and telephone network need to take some route or other through rural areas.
Hong Kong is as dense as New York, yet we have coverage in all subway, throughout the harbor, and in every building and nearly every ELEVATOR in the buildings.
In the case buildings which block radio waves you need cellular base stations inside the buildings. Similarly for subways...
Trying to use large cells, with powerful transmitters dosn't work very well at all.
Europe has a population of 384 Million. They have a land area of 3,191,120 square kilometers. The United States has a popular of 284 Million. We have a land area of 9,629,091 square kilometers. As you can see, US providers have a dramatically smaller population with a FAR larger land area to cover.
How do things compare if you use only urban areas and population. Huge parts of the US have effectivly zero people per square kilometre.
IIRC, the main GSM frequencies (800 and 1800 MHz) are reserved for the US military. You can either blame the US for wasting that spectrum, or the Europeans for being so bloody-minded as to use a chunk of spectrum that they knew wasn't going to be available in the US.
But do the US military actually use these frequences? Considering that they have bases all over the world you'd think that if there was a problem the US would be being bombared with complaints about US military facilities interfering with civilian communications.
If that was the real reason most of the planet opposing a war with Iraq you'd expect the press to mention it.
More towers won't happen here in the US because you've got the NIMBY crowd. Mind you, these are are first people to bitch when they can't get cellular reception.
If there NIMBY basis is "radiation" then adding more spectrum makes this worst, since you have the same RF power on more frequences. Also in order to make this useful you have modify the entire network, both base stations and handsets.
Having more (and smaller cells) means that both base stations and handsets are transmitting less RF energy. A low power base station is a physically smaller piece of kit, far easier to attach to an existing structure (and if need be hide).
Rather than mandating one type of service *cough*GSM Europe*cough*, they're letting all the standards duke it out.
Actually "Europe" should read "rest of the planet".
AT&T is TDMA, Sprint and Verizon are CDMA (I Think), T-Mobile and Cingular are GSM.
Eventually, the best service will win out.
But if it were to be GSM then the US would be in turn with everywhere else, what next the US using EAN barcodes...
The UK is much more densely populated than the US,
Parts of the US being sparsly populated might be part of the problem, but no real excuse for poor coverage in urban areas.
has much higher mobile phone usage per head and no more spectrum available for mobile phone use, but has generally excellent mobile phone service.
The whole point about a cellphone system is that you don't need huge amounts of spectrum. In an area of dense usage you simply have smaller cells with lower powered transcievers.
"Palestine" has never been a nation, and you know it. Calling it a nation is like calling a random selection of MP3 on a script kiddie's computer a cross-section of popular music. Palestine was a name given to a land reduced to desolation after the fall of the Roman Empire, and there has never been a nation of Palestinians. If you'd bothered to look it up, the West Bank and Jordan were all part of a British mandate called "Trans-Jordan".
Plenty of borders were made up by colonials, by drawing lines on a map. Yet somehow this is only a big issue with Palestine.
Palestinians are ARABS, they have always been ARABS and just because Arabs set up camp in a area and name themselves after it doesn't make it a nation.
But if a group of Europeans set up camp in an area then it suddenly becomes a nation? Sounds rather a racist position.
Chances are good that even your dog has been genetically modified.
It's called selective breeding, and has been around for quite a while.
Selective breeding of dogs involves using regular sexual reproduction and all the genes involved were in the dog species to start with.
However, with today's technology it is much less of a crap-shoot than it used to be. You can isolate and change a gene rather than stirring up a whole shitload of them and seeing what happens.
Actually it's even more of a crap-shoot, since you can't simply stick the gene you want into a dog's genome.
You stand a much better chance of getting a faster dog with genetic engineering, rather than a fast, stupid, blind dog as a result of too much inbreeding.
Making a fast dog probably involves many genes in the right combination. With all sorts of complex interactions with other genes. A much harder problem to solve with genetic engineering than simply making an organism produce one chemical.
Trypsin is a primary digestive enzyme in stomachs. I wonder what could possible go wrong with ingesting more trypsin, even if it was from another species.
Depends how much, if it's just a small amount the body can simply cut back on its own sythesis. But what happens if you exceed the stomach's ability to contain the enzyme?
AFAIK, genes don't have the ability to do an inter-species jump like that...
Genes can make inter species jumps, the usual mechanism involves their being carried by a bacteria or virus.
Flag me as a troll, but I have the feeling that a lot of anger from 95% of the world towawrd USA is just because the good old USA are putting their "paw" in various country where they are not welcome or called for,
Or where the US has put their "paw" in sometime in fairly recent history. Examples here would be Iran and Chilie.
but qwhere they have economics or political interrest.
It's sometimes difficult to separate economic and political interests. e.g. removal of a left leaning nationalist government, under the banner of "removing communism". Which just happened to enable a US owned business to come in and exploit natural resources and/or labour.
Maybe you should give a shit by either dropping support for dictatorial or opressing regime, and TOTALLY retract from world interraction or TOTALLY use your power to correct all stuff with a bit of ethics. No an half way thru.
The former, which is effectivly a decolonialisation is likely to be the easier option. Colonial powers are rarely much good at cleaning up their own messes. Past US attempts at "nation building", e.g. Afganistan, don't give much cause for optimism.