Once u get to higher levels of education, exams aren't testing your 'knowledge' as much as your ability to solve problems.
I would have thought that the idea is to test *comprehension* in whatever field the exam is for. That seems to fit my comp sci courses, and I can't recall ever seeing a question on an English exam that starts out with "Solve the following:"
...it works out to a huge net waste to the economy that they can't get a hold of it. ('it' being Mathematica).
And that's surely what's important, whether the economy benefits, right? Maybe whether *people* benefit?
Market-economic analysis is best left in the classroom, IMO. By your argument, anything without a marginal cost should be given away for the most economic benefit. That's clearly true for *social* benefit, but (looking only at the product sales) nobody gets rich without any source of revenue (if only an IPO...heh).
Economists masquerade arguments for bloody self-interest or for social well-being in economic ones that are usually fallacious...might as well just get down to the point without worrying about whether "the economy" benefits as an entity.
I've worked with people who could listen to something and then tell me what the frequency response of the speaker cab was, to within a dB of the metered response. I guess these people wouldn't be listening to MP3 audio, for much the same reasons that some broadcast TV engineers I knew won't watch TV on domestic sets.
Which is exactly why it doesn't make a difference if some poor drunk engineering student types "bladeenc in.wav out.mp3", or some professional engineer types "bladeenc in.wav out.mp3".
In fact, it's right near the beginning, and kinda hard to miss! It's central to the whole show! HOW can you moderate something when you clearly haven't even seen the movie? Don't assume that JUST BECAUSE the work FUCK is in the post, that it's a troll!
I CAN'T WAIT to see this one in MetaModeration tomorrow.
Settle down, Beavis. Have a beer or two, turn off the computer and TV, go "talk" to someone. Have another beer or two, marvel at how the real world isn't all in/. green-and-grey, find a girl, think about something other than south park and moderation.
This guy is right on the money. The biggest problem that Linux faces is the arrogance of its users. (And before someone calls this a flame and moderates it to oblivion, let me point out that I have probably been using Linux since before you ever heard of it (1993)).
"Since before you ever heard about it?" LOL...what was that about arrogance?
While I agree that the rabid hordes email-bombing any online author critical of Linux is unfortunate, there're a couple of themes of this article that are a little disturbing:
It is not the job of the masses to adapt to your computer system.
By the same token, it's not the job of (most) free-software authors to adapt their products and systems to the masses. Perl is out there, but it's hard to read its syntax when one first uses it. Is that a defect that should be "adapted"? GCC is one big, complex package - I'll never be well versed in all aspects of it. Should the maintainers adapt to fit my standpoint?
When people buy a new computer, they often bring the box home from the computer store, and then let it sit on the bedroom floor for several days as they screw up their courage to open it....Consider focusing your immediate application efforts on the few key pieces of software that receive 90% of home and office use. Microsoft Word and America Online.
Without trying to sound elitist, are these the people who Linux is best suited for? It seems like there's an increasing tendency in the media to try to pound the round peg of Linux into the square hole of [home/business/grandma] computer users, and then grumble that they can't run Office, or AOL, or whatever. Maybe Windows or whatever is worth the extra $50 to a sizeable part of the computer user base, maybe not. It isn't the job of every programmer to make their application or system look like what people are most used to. Where's the innovation in that?
I triple-boot on this machine into OpenBSD, Linux, and Windows. But when my grandma wanted to e-mail people, I didn't set up an account and then wonder why WINE didn't make Linux (don't have it running on BSD:) a Windows workalike, and I didn't complain that the pine keybindings were hard for her to learn. I dug out my 11 year old Mac and she was working on it in ten minutes.
If the author does indeed think that Linux should be a workalike of some well-established operating system so that users don't have to learn a new one, he'll be very pleasantly suprised when he finds out how much it resembles Un*x. My Linux and BSD systems are so similar to the Solaris boxes at school that I haven't had to spend any time at all learning new applications!
I think Linux is a first-rate Unix; I wouldn't be using it if it were a second-rate Windows.
A profesionally engineered MP3 has got to be better than a dorm room rip any day
I don't see why...it's not like you need specialized hardware to encode an MP3, or horrible amounts of time. And the GPL'd encoders like LAME are getting pretty close to the Fraunhofer encoder etc, as well. So the difference between typing on a command line in a dorm room or in a studio shouldn't sound different...
I hate to tell you this, but you're flouting my authority (authori-tay) by writing that. And you know what the bible says about authority (authorit-tay).
I doubt if it reads the long filenames and then truncates them itself - Joliet and Rockridge are *extensions* to ISO9660, so I bet it's just using the filenames as they show up on the ISO9660 filesystem. No magic.
Hmm, ethanol's an alcohol, not oil. And cord needs to grow somewhere. Intensive monocropping, like we do with our corn and wheat fields, ends up draining the soil of all nutrients, and then we have to plug all sorts of inputs like fertilizers and pesticides and herbices into the land - it basically becomes a hydroponics operation. I farm in the summer, and I've seen both the sections of land that are ruined from overuse of chemicals, and the warnings on the herbicide boxes that report that the Horizon that goes on about 60% of the grain fields around here will kill birds and fish.
What we've been doing, and continue to do, can very easily be called destroying the environment. The desertification of sub-Sarahan Africa, deforestation of South America, cotton and tobacco farming in the USA, oil messes in Nigeria, and a million other things certainly aren't signs of "improvement". The environment is a buffer system, and we seem to be approaching the edge of the buffer rather quickly.
You're grossly uninformed about the WTO protests. There are peasant farming groups from India, the WTO Caravan from Canada, and representatives from hundreds of NGOs around the world. The organisation for the demonstrations has been underway for years - one of the first organizational meetings was in Geneva in late 1997 (my sister was there).
40 000 people felt strongly enough about the attacks on their sovereignty to travel to Seattle (at their expense, and rarely with wages on the scale of techies) and make their concerns known in the only way possible, since the WTO has no mechanism for external concerns. Do you really think that this can be collapsed to 'a hodge-podge mix of students and "labour union" supporters - union stiffs'? I disagree.
I think the cause for concern is more accurately people who are too apathic or disinterested to learn even the basic issues surrounding these events, but still feel qualified to pass judgement on those who are informed and feel passionate enough to protest for the protection of their rights.
Anybody else dislike the part about halfway down the page on "How Y2K Affects Women" about how, even if all computers you rely on directly or indirectly are fine, you should still worry because poor people on welfare will riot and attack you? "They've rioted over less, such as court decisions."
Shit, that didn't come out right....but I spent vacation pay from my crappy manual labour summer job buying a cd burner last summer, and I've used it quite lightly. Nonetheless, I've ended up with about 7 gigs of backup that I like to have accessible occasionally (such as one disk that's just a really really big hash table ) and another 10 gigs that is just for safekeeping, and I think I'd be pretty hard pressed to find a network connection to something that would store that much for me reliably.
It's unfortunate that esr wrote off anyone who criticizes his actions as either ideological "stalwarts" or testosterone-crazed Slashdot kiddies. Yeah, there are a lot of flames, but there are a lot of well-thought critiques on these online forums as well. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater isn't going to help.
And here's my "testosterone-crazed" opinion: Why does the community need to present a unified face to the world? esr's argument was that otherwise, the mainstream press and corporations would lose interest. But how important is that interest? For all the corporate interest in free/open-source software lately, relatively little code has been freed. There's practically as many lines of new licenses as of new code from various companies.
In my opinion, the individuals are more important than the corporations.
Wouldn't that invite people to inflate a few posts to get points to demote others? Maybe just a hard limit for the number of positive/negative moderations that one could do would work better - easier to code, too. Just set the limit for positive higher than that for negative to encourage moderators to promote rather than demote...
Slashdot Mirror
Once u get to higher levels of education, exams aren't testing your 'knowledge' as much as your ability to solve problems.
I would have thought that the idea is to test *comprehension* in whatever field the exam is for. That seems to fit my comp sci courses, and I can't recall ever seeing a question on an English exam that starts out with "Solve the following:"
Brian
Or is it really "I want stuff and I don't want to pay for it"?
maybe people think that knowledge and culture enlighten them, and they want enlightenment without it being tainted.
Brian
...it works out to a huge net waste to the economy that they can't get a hold of it. ('it' being Mathematica).
And that's surely what's important, whether the economy benefits, right? Maybe whether *people* benefit?
Market-economic analysis is best left in the classroom, IMO. By your argument, anything without a marginal cost should be given away for the most economic benefit. That's clearly true for *social* benefit, but (looking only at the product sales) nobody gets rich without any source of revenue (if only an IPO...heh).
Economists masquerade arguments for bloody self-interest or for social well-being in economic ones that are usually fallacious...might as well just get down to the point without worrying about whether "the economy" benefits as an entity.
Not to me. :)
I've worked with people who could listen to something and then tell me what the frequency response of the speaker cab was, to within a dB of the metered response. I guess these people wouldn't be listening to MP3 audio, for much the same reasons that some broadcast TV engineers I knew won't watch TV on domestic sets.
Which is exactly why it doesn't make a difference if some poor drunk engineering student types "bladeenc in.wav out.mp3", or some professional engineer types "bladeenc in.wav out.mp3".
LOL..."We"? I didn't have anything to do with it. Did you?
I CAN'T WAIT to see this one in MetaModeration tomorrow.
Settle down, Beavis. Have a beer or two, turn off the computer and TV, go "talk" to someone. Have another beer or two, marvel at how the real world isn't all in
It it when you say it like that, big guy. Just some of the synonyms from my thesaurus:
:)
proud contempt of others; lordliness; haughtiness; self-assumption; presumption.
But in any case, I agreed with the rest of your original comment, and I know that means a lot to you
Brian
"Since before you ever heard about it?" LOL...what was that about arrogance?
Brian
It is not the job of the masses to adapt to your computer system.
By the same token, it's not the job of (most) free-software authors to adapt their products and systems to the masses. Perl is out there, but it's hard to read its syntax when one first uses it. Is that a defect that should be "adapted"? GCC is one big, complex package - I'll never be well versed in all aspects of it. Should the maintainers adapt to fit my standpoint?
When people buy a new computer, they often bring the box home from the computer store, and then let it sit on the bedroom floor for several days as they screw up their courage to open it....Consider focusing your immediate application efforts on the few key pieces of software that receive 90% of home and office use. Microsoft Word and America Online.
Without trying to sound elitist, are these the people who Linux is best suited for? It seems like there's an increasing tendency in the media to try to pound the round peg of Linux into the square hole of [home/business/grandma] computer users, and then grumble that they can't run Office, or AOL, or whatever. Maybe Windows or whatever is worth the extra $50 to a sizeable part of the computer user base, maybe not. It isn't the job of every programmer to make their application or system look like what people are most used to. Where's the innovation in that?
I triple-boot on this machine into OpenBSD, Linux, and Windows. But when my grandma wanted to e-mail people, I didn't set up an account and then wonder why WINE didn't make Linux (don't have it running on BSD :) a Windows workalike, and I didn't complain that the pine keybindings were hard for her to learn. I dug out my 11 year old Mac and she was working on it in ten minutes.
If the author does indeed think that Linux should be a workalike of some well-established operating system so that users don't have to learn a new one, he'll be very pleasantly suprised when he finds out how much it resembles Un*x. My Linux and BSD systems are so similar to the Solaris boxes at school that I haven't had to spend any time at all learning new applications!
I think Linux is a first-rate Unix; I wouldn't be using it if it were a second-rate Windows.
A profesionally engineered MP3 has got to be better than a dorm room rip any day
I don't see why...it's not like you need specialized hardware to encode an MP3, or horrible amounts of time. And the GPL'd encoders like LAME are getting pretty close to the Fraunhofer encoder etc, as well. So the difference between typing on a command line in a dorm room or in a studio shouldn't sound different...
I hate to tell you this, but you're flouting my authority (authori-tay) by writing that. And you know what the bible says about authority (authorit-tay).
Corporations do not steal 40% of my paycheck.
I'll take a wild guess: corporations steal 60% of your paycheck, right?
Brian
I doubt if it reads the long filenames and then truncates them itself - Joliet and Rockridge are *extensions* to ISO9660, so I bet it's just using the filenames as they show up on the ISO9660 filesystem. No magic.
Hmm, ethanol's an alcohol, not oil. And cord needs to grow somewhere. Intensive monocropping, like we do with our corn and wheat fields, ends up draining the soil of all nutrients, and then we have to plug all sorts of inputs like fertilizers and pesticides and herbices into the land - it basically becomes a hydroponics operation. I farm in the summer, and I've seen both the sections of land that are ruined from overuse of chemicals, and the warnings on the herbicide boxes that report that the Horizon that goes on about 60% of the grain fields around here will kill birds and fish.
What we've been doing, and continue to do, can very easily be called destroying the environment. The desertification of sub-Sarahan Africa, deforestation of South America, cotton and tobacco farming in the USA, oil messes in Nigeria, and a million other things certainly aren't signs of "improvement". The environment is a buffer system, and we seem to be approaching the edge of the buffer rather quickly.
You're grossly uninformed about the WTO protests. There are peasant farming groups from India, the WTO Caravan from Canada, and representatives from hundreds of NGOs around the world. The organisation for the demonstrations has been underway for years - one of the first organizational meetings was in Geneva in late 1997 (my sister was there).
40 000 people felt strongly enough about the attacks on their sovereignty to travel to Seattle (at their expense, and rarely with wages on the scale of techies) and make their concerns known in the only way possible, since the WTO has no mechanism for external concerns. Do you really think that this can be collapsed to 'a hodge-podge mix of students and "labour union" supporters - union stiffs'? I disagree.
I think the cause for concern is more accurately people who are too apathic or disinterested to learn even the basic issues surrounding these events, but still feel qualified to pass judgement on those who are informed and feel passionate enough to protest for the protection of their rights.
And yours too.
But do you think that arbitrary precision math is a really important feature in a beginner's language?
Anybody else dislike the part about halfway down the page on "How Y2K Affects Women" about how, even if all computers you rely on directly or indirectly are fine, you should still worry because poor people on welfare will riot and attack you? "They've rioted over less, such as court decisions."
Good God.
Yeah, that could get a pile of fixed disk, but it's a lot scarier to mail a HD to someone compared to a $2 CD.
Shit, that didn't come out right....but I spent vacation pay from my crappy manual labour summer job buying a cd burner last summer, and I've used it quite lightly. Nonetheless, I've ended up with about 7 gigs of backup that I like to have accessible occasionally (such as one disk that's just a really really big hash table ) and another 10 gigs that is just for safekeeping, and I think I'd be pretty hard pressed to find a network connection to something that would store that much for me reliably.
Plus I end up with some boffo coasters.
-Brian
Thanks for the warnings, guys. They're out of my bookmarks now.
Brian
It's unfortunate that esr wrote off anyone who criticizes his actions as either ideological "stalwarts" or testosterone-crazed Slashdot kiddies. Yeah, there are a lot of flames, but there are a lot of well-thought critiques on these online forums as well. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater isn't going to help.
And here's my "testosterone-crazed" opinion: Why does the community need to present a unified face to the world? esr's argument was that otherwise, the mainstream press and corporations would lose interest. But how important is that interest? For all the corporate interest in free/open-source software lately, relatively little code has been freed. There's practically as many lines of new licenses as of new code from various companies.
In my opinion, the individuals are more important than the corporations.
Wouldn't that invite people to inflate a few posts to get points to demote others? Maybe just a hard limit for the number of positive/negative moderations that one could do would work better - easier to code, too. Just set the limit for positive higher than that for negative to encourage moderators to promote rather than demote...
Brian
I think your analysis is pretty much right on...ever try to work with RIFF/WAVE and it's 4,732 variant encoding schemes? Bleagh.
I have b asically a clone of an MS Ergo, by a company called Belkin...it was half the price ($45 Cdn) and has a better feel, IMO.
I got it because I was really starting to have troubles with my wrists and tendons. It seems to have helped a lot.
\Brian