I don't want to play it online, though; I just want to play it at a LAN party. You know, scenarios where 4 out or 6 of the players (or so) have legit copies, but the others are just pickign the game up for the first time.
Oh, you mean that won't be possible, either? They'll have to shell out the full amount just to play with us?
You can still run a multiple-year-old and barely-updated Linux distro on a public network and not fear being exploited. Sure, it can happen, but I'll be honest in saying the only times I've seen a Linux machine exploited was when it was horribly out of date (2.0 kernel in the early 2.6 kernel days) and was running samba... on a public network. That said, the exploit employed was over 6 months old at the time when the machine got exploited.
Unless you're running a PHP based CMS or the like, it's pretty uncommon for a Linux machine to get exploited. PHP = bad.
What we need is a decent EMR that isn't horribly expensive that small organizations can use. Unfortunately, unlike other industries where the scale of information in a monolythic application largely relates to the organization's size, this isn't true in healthcare: the 5-doctor clinic needs the same access to EMR as the 1,000 doctor hospital network.
Apparently you've never done IT work, because you demonstrate a severe lack of understanding of what's involved.
(Oh wait, you're a developer; everyone's job but your's is easy!)
Altering a couple toggles or switching a few bits is not the half of it. While a developer can release a bug fix at any time they so please (or not at all, as so fucking often appears to be the case) IT tends to suffer directly for a developers' shortsightedness. The people who use a developer's software rely on IT people to make it work and to remain that way. Due to poor development standards (no/poor QC/QA, amateur hour, etc.) this is usually not a terribly fun or easy process. There are often dozens if not hundreds of "gotchas" you won't find anywhere else.
If it were just a matter of HIPAA compliance, I'd agree. But it's never that simple. There is a significant skillset for healthcare IT that the average IT monkey will never touch. Setting aside the need to not only understand the users' work process, but someone at 1st or 2nd level support in healthcare needs to understand medical terms and the roles and obligations of almost everyone in the organization.
Oh, and we've got to deal with doctors and nurses. You thought Chatty Cathy (the man hater in HR who just plays solitaire all day and talks on the phone) was a pleasant phone call...
Yes, and it's a fucking stupid idea. Healthcare IT sallaries are already low compared to other industries. Unlike most for-profit business, hospitals and healthcare in general have yet to learn that IT assets, like any other physical asset, depreciates over time. They replace it when it breaks (or provide you with the funding to do so when it breaks), and the pay for an individual healthcare IT worker is similarly treated. Granted, there are more healthcare IT workers per capita than in most other industries, and most of them are useless sacks of busywork, but the few who actually get things done also get paid less.
Except one caveat: nobody in their right mind spends ~$60 on an AP that only supports G these days unless they have ulterior motives (ie running custom firmware on it). This group isn't likely to leave the default password.
That's a great idea. Sell games like the ones we find on the shelves today (ie uncompleted games) for $15-20, and charge an extra $5 or whatever if the user wants to play a single player game for more than 2-3 hours, or another $10-20 for functional multiplayer.
Wait, what? They plan to sell a fraction of the existing games for less, and the 'additional content' may add up to the existing games (which are, more often than not, incomplete/complete crap)?:-|
I'm using mostly SuperMicro boards (Intel everything, "recommended" FreeBSD hardware), but I have some other generic stuff in the shop.
The one FreeBSD ZFS machien I've got that has more than 4GB (it has 8), as well as the low-utility ones, are the only systems I've not had stability issues with. FreeBSD 7.2, 7.3, and 8.
Where is it that you see that you can use ZFS root only "for a long time now"? Are you one of those people who thinks "stable" is stable enough, even though it's strongly recommended against using it in production?
I'm fairly new (6 months) to FreeBSD, having been a linux administrator since '98, using many different filesystems. This includes XFS and Reiser 3 and 4 when independent kernel patching was still required. It isn't since those days that I've seen the stability issues I've seen with ZFS on FreeBSD.
Your idea of "supported" is apparently drastically different than mine, because I've yet to see information presenting these things as facts; are they only on the mailing lists? The ZFS documentation I've seen has been sparse, poorly written, or (essentially) provided by Sun (Oracle), with little FreeBSD specifics aside from "this should work, try it".
The way I'm currently doing ZFS is to use a USB key for initial boot. This was working well until 8.0 came out and broke the USB stack, making booting from USB... "unreliable", at best. (Having the keys randomly fall off the chain until they were physically unplugged was also fun).
Yet, btrfs still lacks the awesomeness that is ZFS: RAIDZ. That right there takes the cake. Many people forget, or fail to realize, that ZFS isn't just a filesystem: it's a filesystem with a volume manager, with integrated multidisk redundancy that surpasses both hardware and software RAID in terms of recovery and doesn't-fuck-up (at least by design).
No, Linux mdraid + LVM doesn't cut it. It still suffers from the "RAID write hole" problem, and it suffers significant performance issues due to LVM crappiness and RAID implementations. Really, it's not even close. I could completely do without the snapshots and clones in btrfs if I got more of the RAID-Z functionality of ZFS. (And no, the mirror functionality of btrfs isn't any better.)
Realistically I don't expect anything to catch up anytime soon - ZFS has been around for a while, and has a damn impressive feature list (shit, it's "shortcomings" list is highlighted by the lack of defragmentation ability and being unable to shrink a pool - irritating but by no means show stoppers).
Isn't a project fork still possible, though? "Here's your turd, we're starting our own project!" and so forth. Granted, they'd be stuck with the license, but at least things like Nexenta could continue - yes?
That, is a mistake. I strongly recommend you do some reading about the base requirements for ZFS on FreeBSD as well as its many shortcomings (at least compared to the OpenSolaris implementation).
Just a couple of the shortcomings I've hit against in the past couple months:
* stability issues. Even with the supposed "stable" 8 RELEASE and the 'required' ZFS tuning and hardware, I've had ZFS lock the system. It would appear the only significant difference between the 7.3 and 8 ZFS implementations is that in 8, they've removed the "EXPERIMENTAL!" warning on the opensolaris driver. * boot mechanisms. There is no 'official' way to boot off a ZFS zpool, and all the ways that exist to get around that shortcoming are poor compromises, won't work from one release to another, or require use of unstable code (USB boot device, grub2, etc.) * ZFS requires a *minimum* of 4GB of RAM for supposed stable operation. It will use that memory, even on an infrequently accessed file server. You will have stability issues with less, even with the recommended FreeBSD ZFS tweaking. * Compared to Linux or OpenSolaris, FreeBSD stability - largely related to device drivers - is pathetic and amateur. * A general "unprofessional asshole" attitude on the mailing lists. "I've discovered a bug, here it is" seems to result in things like "we're not going to fix that, we'll replace the system in the next release" or similar - if any response is made at all (admittedly, the only list I'm currently following is freebsd-usb). * ALong those lines, the inclusion of incomplete/dysfunctional systems (presumably) simply on the basis of superior design.
Zones, however, would probably be pretty well implemented via jails. Those are cool. But ZFS is, IMO, not a good choice for picking FreeBSD. FreeBSD does a subset of things very well (networking, documentation, infrastructure design and naming), but ZFS is, unfortunately, not one of them (yet).
I'm very concerned that Oracle is going to kill ZFS off. It is one of the coolest, most useful things to come to storage in a long, long time. Hopefully the Linux folks can pull their pants up quickly and come out with something feature comparable.
It's possible that the former is true without us realizing it, while the later is false due to how we're exposed.
It's possible that the products we consume have such high dioxin levels on account of the 'food chain' effect. We eat the cow, the cow eats grain (which is sprayed with xyz) and gets a bunch of shots, etc. increasing its levels.
I dunno - I didn't RTFA and I'm not really sure what the problem is with "dioxins" - but it's possible that these dreaded dioxins are fat soluble or some such thing and remain in the bodies. The cow might only get the safe level, but when we eat the cow we get the dangerous level.
Yep, loooong over due. If we need to, let's license the (incredibly stable and very efficient) Chinese pebble reactor design.
The biggest thing we could do to make nuke power is to change Carter-era laws which say what we do with the waste. Instead of burying it and selling it to France at rock-bottom prices, we need to use it in reactors. We're essentially giving away the more energy dense radioactive byproduct, which can still be used for (cheaper) energy production.
Without reducing the cost of nuke power, it's not going to catch on over coal and NG. Of course, if actually improving the situation were a political aim, this would have been done years ago... it's all about the gaming of others and the sequestering of power.
RIM doesn't have corporate email locked up. Apparently that's mainly a Midwest thing; people in traditional GSM markets have been using WinMo + Exchange for quite some time.
Not only that, but I seem to recall there were issues with plasma TVs. As in, many houses (pretty much anything made 30 years ago or more) didn't have the electrical system in the house to support it.
As for this so-called "analysis"... it's avoiding the crucial point of overall environmental impact, cost, and sustainability.
First off: why would I want an EV? Well, not having to buy gas (and generally lower cost, hopefully), quieter/smoother operation, and maybe environmental impact. Coolness would play in too, of course - anyone denying "coolness" (per their social group) in their choices is a fool.
Ignoring the aesthetic point, EVs only really win on no gas and quieter operation. They lose - big time - on ecological impact and sustainability.
(Hint: which do you think will run out first, lithium or petro-oil? Which is more easily supplanted or augmented through other means, using current technology? No relying on future-tech allowed - that's disingenuous.)
A kid can't leave a classroom no matter how much the teacher sucks, unless the parents are really well off.
So it's like prison, then, is it?
The whole idea of a uniform institutional system for the purposes of education should make anyone who's ever looked at a flower and admired its beauty, enjoyed drawing a picture, or enjoyed solving a difficult problem for the sake of solving a problem should abhor. There are no alternatives for people who, by their very nature, do not fit in that (very small) box. People learn in dozens, if not hundreds, of different ways - it's the result of us all being unique, thinking creatures (until such traits are robbed from us). It's only natural that there should be, at the bare minimum, a legal means of alternative without the (often, quite literally spoken) threat of having your children taken away.
Of course, once the state starts givign money to alternative education venues, the government will want control of those venues. And everyone knows that bureaucrats not only always know best but almost always get their way.
Forget your creationist strawman. That's hardly the big issue here.
The problem is that we've got such a "wealth" (glut is maybe a better word) of horrible teachers in America that the good ones are few and far between these days. The good teachers are being held down and pushed out by a bureaucratic system that is keen on top-down control. Top-down control mechanisms don't work so well; in fact, they scale very poorly, so they must exert what the controlling "educators" see as "best practices" upon the stupid, peon teachers.
Of course, these teachers are only stupid because of the system. While the pay for teachers is pretty poor these days (particularly compared to even 20 years ago) despite year after year of increased educational tax spending, this isn't the core issue. The core issue is that they have "set the standard so high" - ie, shoveled piles of bureaucratic shit on top of anyone wanting to become a teacher - that only the most insipid, functionally useless people actually make it through. You know the type: the dumb-as-rocks B-average student who spends their every night doing homework.
Aside from these toilet bowl gems, there are a scant few, noble souls who push through the mire to actually teach, whether for belief in the mission or the system itself. There aren't many of them, and they do their best, but their far in the minority. All the while, many who would teach are dissuaded from even attempting it by the reams of stupidity-masquerading-as-officialdom. The low pay is only icing on the cake (and a convenient, frequent excuse to ask for more funding to further bloat their bureaucracy without any accountability or results).
After we fix these existential issues, then you (and I) can start bitching about these smokescreen problems. Seriously: if children are educated well, they will be able to see the poorly clad arguments, misdirection, and outright avoidance of poorly conceived dogma. Basic logic (both linguistic and mathematic), critical thinking, and introspection should be the main things taught in early schooling - but they're not. If they were, this wouldn't be such a problem.
Note: I once thought, briefly, about becoming a high school teacher. I'm very good at it, and am able to make it entertaining in the process (yes, for all ages - I still have people comment on technical presentations I did 5 years ago). I didn't do it once I read about all the "soft words" (ie verging on doublespeak) teachers were required to learn and understand, and how foolish the training for teachers is. Do you realize how quickly I (or, probably, your average adult-and-fit-for-public slashdotter) would be kicked from a school due to internal "politics" alone? Thinking outside the box is a felony in today's schools.
Why is this modded funny? He's right - $200 isn't a "bargain price". I don't think I've paid that much for a video card ever - and if I have, it was back around 2001, and only once.
A "bargain" card is under $100, at most. To most people, that's what the cost of an upgrade (to pretty much anything) should cost. Most products try really, really hard to get in under that $100 mark on account of people trying to not spend more than that amount on a given item.
In my book, a "bargain" card is $50 or less. You know, the ones being discounted because they're being discontinued, which will serve as a good upgrade for an aging machine. These cards won't even work in most aging machines (whether due to bus or power requirements).
They must have my demographic setting wrong. Half my searches for naked women come back with women's undergarment stores.
Joking aside, when you've got multiple people of different genders (such as in your average multifamily dwelling) using the same computer, such demographic results won't work too well. I wonder if this might explain, in part, why my search results really are less pertinent when I'm not signed into my gmail account.
I agree - it does look like standardization is hurting creativity. If we look at the age of the most significantly impacted group - kindergarten through 6th - we might be able to draw a conclusion as to the cause: 6th graders are typically 11 or 12 years old. No Child Left Behind has been in place during the whole of their schooling 'career'.
I also wonder how much general societal attitudes in the last decade have impacted these kids, because the older kids in school right now (middle and high school) have been in No Child Left Behind type schooling for the past decade as well - why aren't they showing such a change?
Something to consider, I think, is the economic affluence of a society and its impact on intelligence. From the 1950s up through the 1990s, US affluence was on the increase; since then, it is generally considered to be on the decline. Might affluence, and associated attitudes, impact the creativity of the populace? This seems like a good theory to me, and likely on account of what we're seeing in current developing countries. (Consider: Japan, and now China and India, had cheap knock-off products for a long time - until they reached a general level of affluence. Then they started improving on the knock-offs until they surpassed what they imitated (at least with Japan - China is still getting there).
What isn't clear, at least in this article, is how intelligence is being impacted on a whole. I would personally also wonder how much impact
A big part of it is: how are they quantifying "data"?
We keep machine backups. They are each anywhere from 3GB up through 20Gb and averaging around 10GB, and each host has 2-3 copies (taken weekly). Then we've got database backups which, likewise, are taken multiple times a month. These databases aren't pure data, but are instead part of larger systems - transactional tables, but also the application's "we need this data to run" tables which, from what I've seen, rarely get used much at all. The subset of data within the database which is actually used is relatively small (though I can't offer a percentage).
We also archive all incoming and outgoing mail for compliance issues. This ends up taking a lot of storage - far, far more than the users' actual inbox.
Add to that the many, many desktop files (Word, Excel, etc.) which are created, used once or twice for a project, and never touched again - they get put in a project folder and archived. You've still got to store those files, but as the data is usually time-contextual, it's useless except for reference. And the likelihood of reference is negligible.
How long is your data retention plan? Weeks? Months? Years? I suspect that the larger the organization (and the more highly regulated) the longer the period of time is that you (have to) keep your data.
"Read once" data is certainly a very high percentage, though I suspect that it's probably higher than 90%, personally. Checking the ctime and atime on one of our backup systems, the percentage is actually pretty close to 100%.
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I don't want to play it online, though; I just want to play it at a LAN party. You know, scenarios where 4 out or 6 of the players (or so) have legit copies, but the others are just pickign the game up for the first time.
Oh, you mean that won't be possible, either? They'll have to shell out the full amount just to play with us?
Criticism, even if inaccurate?
You can still run a multiple-year-old and barely-updated Linux distro on a public network and not fear being exploited. Sure, it can happen, but I'll be honest in saying the only times I've seen a Linux machine exploited was when it was horribly out of date (2.0 kernel in the early 2.6 kernel days) and was running samba... on a public network. That said, the exploit employed was over 6 months old at the time when the machine got exploited.
Unless you're running a PHP based CMS or the like, it's pretty uncommon for a Linux machine to get exploited. PHP = bad.
We've got plenty of EMRs, thanks.
What we need is a decent EMR that isn't horribly expensive that small organizations can use. Unfortunately, unlike other industries where the scale of information in a monolythic application largely relates to the organization's size, this isn't true in healthcare: the 5-doctor clinic needs the same access to EMR as the 1,000 doctor hospital network.
Apparently you've never done IT work, because you demonstrate a severe lack of understanding of what's involved.
(Oh wait, you're a developer; everyone's job but your's is easy!)
Altering a couple toggles or switching a few bits is not the half of it. While a developer can release a bug fix at any time they so please (or not at all, as so fucking often appears to be the case) IT tends to suffer directly for a developers' shortsightedness. The people who use a developer's software rely on IT people to make it work and to remain that way. Due to poor development standards (no/poor QC/QA, amateur hour, etc.) this is usually not a terribly fun or easy process. There are often dozens if not hundreds of "gotchas" you won't find anywhere else.
If it were just a matter of HIPAA compliance, I'd agree. But it's never that simple. There is a significant skillset for healthcare IT that the average IT monkey will never touch. Setting aside the need to not only understand the users' work process, but someone at 1st or 2nd level support in healthcare needs to understand medical terms and the roles and obligations of almost everyone in the organization.
Oh, and we've got to deal with doctors and nurses. You thought Chatty Cathy (the man hater in HR who just plays solitaire all day and talks on the phone) was a pleasant phone call...
Yes, and it's a fucking stupid idea. Healthcare IT sallaries are already low compared to other industries. Unlike most for-profit business, hospitals and healthcare in general have yet to learn that IT assets, like any other physical asset, depreciates over time. They replace it when it breaks (or provide you with the funding to do so when it breaks), and the pay for an individual healthcare IT worker is similarly treated. Granted, there are more healthcare IT workers per capita than in most other industries, and most of them are useless sacks of busywork, but the few who actually get things done also get paid less.
Except one caveat: nobody in their right mind spends ~$60 on an AP that only supports G these days unless they have ulterior motives (ie running custom firmware on it). This group isn't likely to leave the default password.
That's a great idea. Sell games like the ones we find on the shelves today (ie uncompleted games) for $15-20, and charge an extra $5 or whatever if the user wants to play a single player game for more than 2-3 hours, or another $10-20 for functional multiplayer.
Wait, what? They plan to sell a fraction of the existing games for less, and the 'additional content' may add up to the existing games (which are, more often than not, incomplete/complete crap)? :-|
Apparently you haven't read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/zfs
Hell, even XFS is closer despite its lacking features, if only because it's stable and available. btrfs fits neither of those.
I'm using mostly SuperMicro boards (Intel everything, "recommended" FreeBSD hardware), but I have some other generic stuff in the shop.
The one FreeBSD ZFS machien I've got that has more than 4GB (it has 8), as well as the low-utility ones, are the only systems I've not had stability issues with. FreeBSD 7.2, 7.3, and 8.
Where is it that you see that you can use ZFS root only "for a long time now"? Are you one of those people who thinks "stable" is stable enough, even though it's strongly recommended against using it in production?
I'm fairly new (6 months) to FreeBSD, having been a linux administrator since '98, using many different filesystems. This includes XFS and Reiser 3 and 4 when independent kernel patching was still required. It isn't since those days that I've seen the stability issues I've seen with ZFS on FreeBSD.
Your idea of "supported" is apparently drastically different than mine, because I've yet to see information presenting these things as facts; are they only on the mailing lists? The ZFS documentation I've seen has been sparse, poorly written, or (essentially) provided by Sun (Oracle), with little FreeBSD specifics aside from "this should work, try it".
The way I'm currently doing ZFS is to use a USB key for initial boot. This was working well until 8.0 came out and broke the USB stack, making booting from USB... "unreliable", at best. (Having the keys randomly fall off the chain until they were physically unplugged was also fun).
Yet, btrfs still lacks the awesomeness that is ZFS: RAIDZ. That right there takes the cake. Many people forget, or fail to realize, that ZFS isn't just a filesystem: it's a filesystem with a volume manager, with integrated multidisk redundancy that surpasses both hardware and software RAID in terms of recovery and doesn't-fuck-up (at least by design).
No, Linux mdraid + LVM doesn't cut it. It still suffers from the "RAID write hole" problem, and it suffers significant performance issues due to LVM crappiness and RAID implementations. Really, it's not even close. I could completely do without the snapshots and clones in btrfs if I got more of the RAID-Z functionality of ZFS. (And no, the mirror functionality of btrfs isn't any better.)
Realistically I don't expect anything to catch up anytime soon - ZFS has been around for a while, and has a damn impressive feature list (shit, it's "shortcomings" list is highlighted by the lack of defragmentation ability and being unable to shrink a pool - irritating but by no means show stoppers).
Isn't a project fork still possible, though? "Here's your turd, we're starting our own project!" and so forth. Granted, they'd be stuck with the license, but at least things like Nexenta could continue - yes?
We're moving the OpenSolaris installs to FreeBSD
That, is a mistake. I strongly recommend you do some reading about the base requirements for ZFS on FreeBSD as well as its many shortcomings (at least compared to the OpenSolaris implementation).
Just a couple of the shortcomings I've hit against in the past couple months:
* stability issues. Even with the supposed "stable" 8 RELEASE and the 'required' ZFS tuning and hardware, I've had ZFS lock the system. It would appear the only significant difference between the 7.3 and 8 ZFS implementations is that in 8, they've removed the "EXPERIMENTAL!" warning on the opensolaris driver.
* boot mechanisms. There is no 'official' way to boot off a ZFS zpool, and all the ways that exist to get around that shortcoming are poor compromises, won't work from one release to another, or require use of unstable code (USB boot device, grub2, etc.)
* ZFS requires a *minimum* of 4GB of RAM for supposed stable operation. It will use that memory, even on an infrequently accessed file server. You will have stability issues with less, even with the recommended FreeBSD ZFS tweaking.
* Compared to Linux or OpenSolaris, FreeBSD stability - largely related to device drivers - is pathetic and amateur.
* A general "unprofessional asshole" attitude on the mailing lists. "I've discovered a bug, here it is" seems to result in things like "we're not going to fix that, we'll replace the system in the next release" or similar - if any response is made at all (admittedly, the only list I'm currently following is freebsd-usb).
* ALong those lines, the inclusion of incomplete/dysfunctional systems (presumably) simply on the basis of superior design.
Zones, however, would probably be pretty well implemented via jails. Those are cool. But ZFS is, IMO, not a good choice for picking FreeBSD. FreeBSD does a subset of things very well (networking, documentation, infrastructure design and naming), but ZFS is, unfortunately, not one of them (yet).
I'm very concerned that Oracle is going to kill ZFS off. It is one of the coolest, most useful things to come to storage in a long, long time. Hopefully the Linux folks can pull their pants up quickly and come out with something feature comparable.
It's possible that the former is true without us realizing it, while the later is false due to how we're exposed.
It's possible that the products we consume have such high dioxin levels on account of the 'food chain' effect. We eat the cow, the cow eats grain (which is sprayed with xyz) and gets a bunch of shots, etc. increasing its levels.
I dunno - I didn't RTFA and I'm not really sure what the problem is with "dioxins" - but it's possible that these dreaded dioxins are fat soluble or some such thing and remain in the bodies. The cow might only get the safe level, but when we eat the cow we get the dangerous level.
What is something most all of those countries have, and yet spend less (per capita) on than the US. hrm...
I know! Universal state-provided healthcare!
Wasn't that something Obama promised when he was campaigning (more or less) and just recently rammed down our throats? :|
Yep, loooong over due. If we need to, let's license the (incredibly stable and very efficient) Chinese pebble reactor design.
The biggest thing we could do to make nuke power is to change Carter-era laws which say what we do with the waste. Instead of burying it and selling it to France at rock-bottom prices, we need to use it in reactors. We're essentially giving away the more energy dense radioactive byproduct, which can still be used for (cheaper) energy production.
Without reducing the cost of nuke power, it's not going to catch on over coal and NG. Of course, if actually improving the situation were a political aim, this would have been done years ago... it's all about the gaming of others and the sequestering of power.
RIM doesn't have corporate email locked up. Apparently that's mainly a Midwest thing; people in traditional GSM markets have been using WinMo + Exchange for quite some time.
I was talking about high school students as described above, on account of that being the topic of the thread.
Not only that, but I seem to recall there were issues with plasma TVs. As in, many houses (pretty much anything made 30 years ago or more) didn't have the electrical system in the house to support it.
As for this so-called "analysis"... it's avoiding the crucial point of overall environmental impact, cost, and sustainability.
First off: why would I want an EV? Well, not having to buy gas (and generally lower cost, hopefully), quieter/smoother operation, and maybe environmental impact. Coolness would play in too, of course - anyone denying "coolness" (per their social group) in their choices is a fool.
Ignoring the aesthetic point, EVs only really win on no gas and quieter operation. They lose - big time - on ecological impact and sustainability.
(Hint: which do you think will run out first, lithium or petro-oil? Which is more easily supplanted or augmented through other means, using current technology? No relying on future-tech allowed - that's disingenuous.)
A kid can't leave a classroom no matter how much the teacher sucks, unless the parents are really well off.
So it's like prison, then, is it?
The whole idea of a uniform institutional system for the purposes of education should make anyone who's ever looked at a flower and admired its beauty, enjoyed drawing a picture, or enjoyed solving a difficult problem for the sake of solving a problem should abhor. There are no alternatives for people who, by their very nature, do not fit in that (very small) box. People learn in dozens, if not hundreds, of different ways - it's the result of us all being unique, thinking creatures (until such traits are robbed from us). It's only natural that there should be, at the bare minimum, a legal means of alternative without the (often, quite literally spoken) threat of having your children taken away.
Of course, once the state starts givign money to alternative education venues, the government will want control of those venues. And everyone knows that bureaucrats not only always know best but almost always get their way.
Forget your creationist strawman. That's hardly the big issue here.
The problem is that we've got such a "wealth" (glut is maybe a better word) of horrible teachers in America that the good ones are few and far between these days. The good teachers are being held down and pushed out by a bureaucratic system that is keen on top-down control. Top-down control mechanisms don't work so well; in fact, they scale very poorly, so they must exert what the controlling "educators" see as "best practices" upon the stupid, peon teachers.
Of course, these teachers are only stupid because of the system. While the pay for teachers is pretty poor these days (particularly compared to even 20 years ago) despite year after year of increased educational tax spending, this isn't the core issue. The core issue is that they have "set the standard so high" - ie, shoveled piles of bureaucratic shit on top of anyone wanting to become a teacher - that only the most insipid, functionally useless people actually make it through. You know the type: the dumb-as-rocks B-average student who spends their every night doing homework.
Aside from these toilet bowl gems, there are a scant few, noble souls who push through the mire to actually teach, whether for belief in the mission or the system itself. There aren't many of them, and they do their best, but their far in the minority. All the while, many who would teach are dissuaded from even attempting it by the reams of stupidity-masquerading-as-officialdom. The low pay is only icing on the cake (and a convenient, frequent excuse to ask for more funding to further bloat their bureaucracy without any accountability or results).
After we fix these existential issues, then you (and I) can start bitching about these smokescreen problems. Seriously: if children are educated well, they will be able to see the poorly clad arguments, misdirection, and outright avoidance of poorly conceived dogma. Basic logic (both linguistic and mathematic), critical thinking, and introspection should be the main things taught in early schooling - but they're not. If they were, this wouldn't be such a problem.
Note: I once thought, briefly, about becoming a high school teacher. I'm very good at it, and am able to make it entertaining in the process (yes, for all ages - I still have people comment on technical presentations I did 5 years ago). I didn't do it once I read about all the "soft words" (ie verging on doublespeak) teachers were required to learn and understand, and how foolish the training for teachers is. Do you realize how quickly I (or, probably, your average adult-and-fit-for-public slashdotter) would be kicked from a school due to internal "politics" alone? Thinking outside the box is a felony in today's schools.
Why is this modded funny? He's right - $200 isn't a "bargain price". I don't think I've paid that much for a video card ever - and if I have, it was back around 2001, and only once.
A "bargain" card is under $100, at most. To most people, that's what the cost of an upgrade (to pretty much anything) should cost. Most products try really, really hard to get in under that $100 mark on account of people trying to not spend more than that amount on a given item.
In my book, a "bargain" card is $50 or less. You know, the ones being discounted because they're being discontinued, which will serve as a good upgrade for an aging machine. These cards won't even work in most aging machines (whether due to bus or power requirements).
What you're basically asking for is Launchpad for Android.
Too bad Google went ahead and made their own proprietary Linux-based window manager instead of using something already established.
They must have my demographic setting wrong. Half my searches for naked women come back with women's undergarment stores.
Joking aside, when you've got multiple people of different genders (such as in your average multifamily dwelling) using the same computer, such demographic results won't work too well. I wonder if this might explain, in part, why my search results really are less pertinent when I'm not signed into my gmail account.
I agree - it does look like standardization is hurting creativity. If we look at the age of the most significantly impacted group - kindergarten through 6th - we might be able to draw a conclusion as to the cause: 6th graders are typically 11 or 12 years old. No Child Left Behind has been in place during the whole of their schooling 'career'.
I also wonder how much general societal attitudes in the last decade have impacted these kids, because the older kids in school right now (middle and high school) have been in No Child Left Behind type schooling for the past decade as well - why aren't they showing such a change?
Something to consider, I think, is the economic affluence of a society and its impact on intelligence. From the 1950s up through the 1990s, US affluence was on the increase; since then, it is generally considered to be on the decline. Might affluence, and associated attitudes, impact the creativity of the populace? This seems like a good theory to me, and likely on account of what we're seeing in current developing countries. (Consider: Japan, and now China and India, had cheap knock-off products for a long time - until they reached a general level of affluence. Then they started improving on the knock-offs until they surpassed what they imitated (at least with Japan - China is still getting there).
What isn't clear, at least in this article, is how intelligence is being impacted on a whole. I would personally also wonder how much impact
A big part of it is: how are they quantifying "data"?
We keep machine backups. They are each anywhere from 3GB up through 20Gb and averaging around 10GB, and each host has 2-3 copies (taken weekly). Then we've got database backups which, likewise, are taken multiple times a month. These databases aren't pure data, but are instead part of larger systems - transactional tables, but also the application's "we need this data to run" tables which, from what I've seen, rarely get used much at all. The subset of data within the database which is actually used is relatively small (though I can't offer a percentage).
We also archive all incoming and outgoing mail for compliance issues. This ends up taking a lot of storage - far, far more than the users' actual inbox.
Add to that the many, many desktop files (Word, Excel, etc.) which are created, used once or twice for a project, and never touched again - they get put in a project folder and archived. You've still got to store those files, but as the data is usually time-contextual, it's useless except for reference. And the likelihood of reference is negligible.
How long is your data retention plan? Weeks? Months? Years? I suspect that the larger the organization (and the more highly regulated) the longer the period of time is that you (have to) keep your data.
"Read once" data is certainly a very high percentage, though I suspect that it's probably higher than 90%, personally. Checking the ctime and atime on one of our backup systems, the percentage is actually pretty close to 100%.