The "do one thing" part of the UNIX philosophy is certainly a good point, but there's always room for argument as to what the 'one thing' of a project is.
I would argue that Pine's purpose is to send and receive mail -- so therefore, incorporating code to send and receive mail, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just doing its purpose.
Only if you narrow the purpose of a mail program to be only "read mail that's already been downloaded to the local system," does Pine overextend. But that's only one way of looking at mail. Breaking it into several different steps is one way to approach the problem ('downloading mail,' 'editing mail,' 'sending mail'), but treating it as one activity ('doing mail'), which should be solved with a single program, is another.
Plus, despite the advantages of the UNIX philosophy, the market has shown over and over, that users really don't like it. Users like integrated, monolithic, seamlessly integrated programs. Pine's integration of features is one of the reason it's managed to stay alive, despite having a ridiculously stupid license. The UNIX Way isn't the only way, and it's not even clear that it's always the best way in every situation.
I think the best solution currently available, is to include with each copy of your data (or on each backup volume) some source-code implementation of a document reader or parser, in a commonly understood and well-documented language, probably ANSI C (although Ada has all of its documentation in the public domain, so you could include it as well).
This wouldn't help you if you expect people to lose the ability to read the media that you're storing the data and source code on, but that's a much more complicated problem. At that point, you're really talking about stone tablets or metal engravings, rather than backup tapes or CDs.
In terms of practical solutions, ensuring that there are source-available readers, written without external dependencies (besides a compiler), for various document formats, is probably the best way to ensure that they'll be readable. Somewhere else in this thread, someone gives an example: storing a source copy of a GPLed RAW-file processor, on each CD containing RAW images. This seems like a very good idea: assuming that your eventual user can read the media, even if their machine architecture is different and readers don't exist, they have a solvable problem: either find a compiler for their architecture and build the program from the provided source, or use the source code as documentation, to build a compiler in a 'modern' language that can be compiled. The only weakness here is that the language might become a 'lost art,' but that's difficult to avoid. (You could provide documentation on the computer language in a natural/human language, but then you have the same problem of indecipherability of the human language; and ultimately I think a computer language is probably easier to puzzle out than a natural one is.)
I believe Ray Bradbury had something to say on this subject.
Perhaps more ironic -- it's a pretty good bet that whatever he wrote on the subject, it's not available online due to copyright restrictions imposed by his publisher or "estate."
Teaching 'recipies' is disempowering.
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Free Geek Robbed
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· Score: 4, Informative
Linux is not the easiest to learn, and once it is learned the skills are only applicable to less than 5 percent of all computers.
This is not true, but unfortunately it's a fairly common line of thinking. Although the parent comment was quickly modded "Troll" here on Slashdot, it would probably be taken quite seriously at a local PTA meeting. (Actually, come to think of it, pretty much everything that gets said in local town meetings ought to qualify for '-1 Flamebait'...but I digress.)
A whole lot -- practically all -- basic computer skills are platform-independent and interchangeable. If you're trying to teach someone who's never used a computer much before, and you're teaching skills that are very specific to one OS, you're doing something wrong. The basic concepts of computers today are widespread: the "desktop metaphor" with folders/documents arranged in hierarchies, use of the mouse to open/close/arrange windows, use of a browser to access the WWW, basic email concepts -- all of those things are the same, whether you're using a Mac, or Windows, or KDE, or Gnome (or even something more exotic). Heck, most mainstream OSes these days even have more similarities: a program-launcher bar at the bottom of the screen (in some form or another) is pretty common, as are the File and Edit menus, and Cut/Copy/Paste.
There really isn't much diversity anymore in computer operating systems, at least not in the major Linux GUIs, plus Mac and Windows. The differences are mostly either technical or trivial (mounted disks on desktop vs. in "My Computer," icons on left of screen or right, etc.). A person with a good set of basic skills, ought to be able to accomplish basic tasks on an already set-up system running either OS.
Teaching someone mindless procedural 'recipes' that allow them to do a task, without any conceptual understanding of what they're doing along the way, is really doing them a disservice. Telling someone "this is how you check email," and making them memorize some steps, which will stop working and leave them stranded with the next OS upgrade or interface change, is truly disempowering.
IMO, all basic computer classes, particularly those aimed at children, should be taught using computers that have a non-standard GUI and OS (which would follow conventionally accepted metaphors and design principles, but not be carbon copies of systems they might have already seen), to encourage critical thinking rather than mere procedural memorization and repetition.
again, we usually just ask for 20 hours of volunteer time as opposed to money
I don't know who you're selling these machines to, but 20 hours of volunteer time seems like a lot. Even low-balling the value of my free time, I could probably go out and buy a brand new system for that. If the work you're asking volunteers to do is in any way unpleasant (negative value), that's a very expensive computer. Though, if the work was fun, it might be a better deal. A lot of volunteer organizations that I've worked with, though, treat new people like crap and/or use them for whatever their "scut work" happens to be that day.
I'm not trying to act like a rich bastard here, because I'm not -- I'm your basic cube-slaving working stiff -- I just was startled by how high a bar that seems to be. (And perhaps I'm undervaluing these computers -- when I think of a 'used PC' I'm imagining something in the $100 "Craigslist" range.) I wouldn't mind working for a Saturday afternoon if there was a free computer in it (particularly if it was something interesting), but I just wonder how many people are willing to do 20 hours for something that would only require half that number of hours to buy outright in an average-wage job. Do you get a lot of takers?
You mean other than 300 years of experience with the free market? Other than the combined research of every economist since Adam Smith? Other than that, how about simple logic: if the US not trading freely with China makes the US better off, why wouldn't California not trading with, say, Massachusetts make California better off? Indeed, if trade didn't make you personally better off, you wouldn't go to work or shop, you would just stay home and make your own clothes.
Well, for starters, Massachusetts and California have basically a level playing field, as mandated by the Federal Government via minimum standards for things like wages and maximums on the working day, safety standards, etc. If only one state had these, and the other did not -- if California was perhaps more like China -- then I'm not sure it would be in the best interests of people in Massachusetts to trade freely with them, unless some sort of a tariff was imposed to make up for the inequality in end-product pricing as a result of poor working conditions. If Massachusetts did just have free trade with the "People's Republic of California" in this situation, I can't see how MA would avoid being forced to reduce its working conditions and wages in order to compete with the imported products -- something which people in Massachusetts would probably like to avoid.
The doctrine of mutual advantage makes some assumptions of basic standards: all the producers need to be playing by the same rules, or what seems like 'competitive advantage' is really just uncompensated negative externalities. (E.g., if you have two chemical companies, and one is located in a place without any environmental restrictions and the other in a place that requires cleanup, the products of the dirty company will probably be cheaper -- but that's not really an 'advantage,' like more efficient production would be, it's just creating costs that will have to be paid for by other people, later on.)
Free trade within a region that has some overarching government or authority to ensure that all firms play by the rules makes sense -- it means that everyone can buy goods from whoever does the most efficient job at making them. However, allowing firms who don't play by the same rules access to the market, without paying penalties, just puts legitimate firms at a disadvantage.
If there's some salient, convincing counterargument to this, I haven't heard it. Just saying "free markets are great!", without explaining how they're going to prevent the eventual demise of our economy due to trade/current-account deficits when we can't compete with other countries who place a lower value on human life than we do, isn't cutting it.
Adam Smith and the rest of the classical economic texts all look great on paper, but there seems to be a lot of faith required to just assume that because it appears to be a simple, elegant solution, that it will produce a society that's a nice place to live. I don't think I have that sort of faith. I'd like to know exactly how the free market is going to save us, and how we're going to maintain our standard of living into the future, by allowing everything except service industries to migrate to other countries, and importing hand-over-fist. I remain unconvinced that such a system is sustainable.
That's pretty much what I've heard the outcome was of forced integration arrangements that would force people living in wealthier suburban areas -- where they presumably live because of the good public schools -- to send their children to underfunded (possibly more dangerous) urban schools. It puts a lot of pressure on parents who have the ability, to find somewhere else to school their children, using whatever means are available.
All you do is trade "racial" inequality for socioeconomic inequality. Those that can get their kids out of integration arrangements do so -- and who can blame them? They're doing what is best for their children, using the resources they have available.
I lived in a community that experimented with forced busing for a while, (IIRC -- this was a while ago) using a lottery system. At the beginning of the year there was a sort of lottery, and some students were chosen to be bused to a more "urban" school. Basically what happened, was if your child's name came up on that list, the parents would immediately attempt to use connections / pull strings to get them put back, and failing that, the families that could afford to, pulled their kids out to private, parochial, or home-schools. The only suburban kids who ever ended up going to urban schools, were the ones whose families didn't have connections to avoid being put on the list, and couldn't afford any alternative education, or just didn't care or weren't involved. No parent in their right mind would let their kid get sent there if they had any alternative. So what happened? You ended up with racial 'diversity' on paper, but it was still the poorer kids that ended up at the crappy school. They real losers in the arrangement were basically working-class suburban families, who couldn't afford private schools. There was no "justice" there; it was all a farce.
I don't know how long that system lasted (didn't live there that long) but at least as I heard about it, it was an unmitigated disaster. You're not going to get true equality in education, because people have vastly unequal resources to expend on their children. All you can do is try to establish a minimum; people that can afford to do better, are always going to do so.
No need to do that. You could put up a mag-stripe reader in any public place, label it "Credit Card Cleaner -- Free!" and people would swipe their cards through. I think this was actually demonstrated on a TV news channel a few years ago.
It is the artificial imposition of borders and boundaries that you would like to have that impede such travel that hamper any kind of free market.
Reality is: tech-monkey skills are cheap and easy to acquire, as witnessed by a hundred million perfectly-qualified folks in China, Korea, India etc. IT skills in the US are vastly overpriced, if anything or otherwise the free market wouldn't be moving the demand for these skills away from the US.
So what's your point?
Do we have any hard evidence that having a free market, where Indian or Chinese programmers were favored over American ones -- however 'overpriced' the Americans might be -- helps America? We seem to be taking on premise that a completely free market helps the First World, but I'm not sure why this is. The WSJ crowd never seems to explain exactly the reasoning and evidence for this claim; it's treated as holy writ, beyond all question. And if there's one thing that I really dislike, it's claims that aren't allowed to be questioned.
So what if Americans are "overpriced" compared to workers in areas where basic working conditions aren't guaranteed? That's not a level playing field; it simply guarantees that if Americans want to compete, we have to drop to that level. Why should we allow this? If it doesn't help our economy, why are we implementing economic policies that help China and India, at our workers and our economy's expense?
Simply saying that 'so-and-so doesn't facilitate a free market,' doesn't automatically make it a bad thing. Maybe we don't want a completely free market, if it means we're going to have to compete directly with countries that treat their workers as disposable units. We need to think about the ultimate effects of our economic policies on our citizens, in the long term, and back it up with convincing evidence and research instead of just polemics.
I'm open to both arguments here but convinced of neither; there seem to be a shortage of factual arguments when it comes to foreign and domestic economic policy, and I don't think that helps anything.
I think it's interesting to note, just for other Americans reading this, that were the US National Anthem subject to the same restrictions as Happy Birthday, it would only have come out of Copyright in 1913 (Key died in 1843, plus 70 years). Or if he had written it "for hire," it wouldn't have come out until 1934.
Notwithstanding the ridiculousness of having a 'work for hire' last longer than a work by a natural person, that's a pretty long span of American history that it would have been more or less unavailable for public use, in many of the ways we currently think of it.
The fact is, there are a lot of things that happened in the past, which would either be illegal under todays laws, or simply would be prevented from occurring. In many cases, we've never even considered these things in making the laws.
Those willing to break the law, can enjoy tommorow's technology right now. Hell, I just bought my daughter for xmas a usb hard drive box that has HD out and will play H.264, divx,xvid vob,iso, most anything (it's based on mplayer from what I can tell) and with a 750Gig drive in it can hold every single anime dvd she owns as a ISO file and plays as if the dvd was inserted into a player (sans all the DRM and restriction crap) in a portable device that fits in her backpack.. 2 bookshelves full of DVD's only slightly recompressed fit in the thing. If we recompress to H264 or other format I can fit 2 book cases full in the thing. (she wants the dvd menus and extras, go figure.) It cost me $500.00 new from newegg.com with the hard drive.)
Any chance you can give a link to this product? Seems pretty neat. I'm looking for a STB that would play movies compressed to MP4 or some other high-quality format and also disc images and the usual media; I had figured that I would be rolling my own microATX box and basically building a HTPC. For $500 depending on what it contained, hardware-wise, that might be a good deal. For a DIY job, you'd probably pay almost that in parts I think, plus whatever you value your time at.
I think there is some confusion between how Europeans and Americans count the number of lanes in a "road." In the U.S., typically an "eight-lane highway" would have eight lanes total, in both directions -- so four on each side of the median. Three or four lanes in each direction, for six or eight lanes total, is pretty close to average for a suburban Interstate. In contrast, in Europe (at least English-speaking Europe), I've heard people talk about a "dual carriageway" as a road that has two lanes in each direction, or four lanes total. So this might be causing some confusion.
The number of roads in the U.S. that have more than six lanes in one direction are fairly small, relative to ones with that many total in both, and mostly occur only in large metropolitan areas (Atlanta and L.A. have some highways that are 7 or 8 lanes in each direction, I think -- and I'm sure there are others) or in interchanges. But if I heard someone say "six lane highway," I wouldn't immediately assume that they meant that many lanes in each direction. Six lanes would be a far more common configuration if it was referring to the combined lanes, so three lanes each.
huh? The squishy feeling is a good thing(tm) Its called a quiet keyboard. I very much dislike the spring keyboards, esp if yo use them for data entry. With quiet keyboards its much easier to press the keys.
Although ultimately it comes down to personal preference, I think that the 'clicky' buckling-spring keys are actually easier to use and less fatiguing. Because there is immediate tactile and audible feedback when the key-switch is actuated, you don't have to press it as far down. When I use a 'soft touch' keyboard, I find that I hit the keys further and harder, because there's not that feedback; I slam each key all the way down instead of (with practice) only pushing each key down as far as is necessary.
The noise of the original IBM Model M's is definitely a downside; if you have to work around other people, I can see how it wouldn't win you many friends. In my opinion, the Apple Extended Keyboard II with the Altus switches is the best of both worlds. It's softer both in terms of pressure and sound than the IBM, but it's not as 'mushy' as a soft-touch (silicone dome).
But that would be pretty obvious wouldn't it? I mean you think a user (even the dullest one) would notice a second machine plugged into their network drop, with their computer daisy chained off of it.
Actually, they probably wouldn't. Lots of VOIP handsets (Cisco ones, especially) are designed with integrated 2-port switches, so that you can use them on desks and in other situations where you only have one active Ethernet port in the wall. The phone gets plugged into the wall, and then the computer gets daisy-chained off of the phone.
So if you could compromise the phone, it might give you a way of conducting a MITM attack on the computer. This is particularly interesting, because I think some phones (most?) are capable of loading firmware from a remote source. If you could compromise the firmware image on the source server, you might be able to do nasty things to a whole office.
Not only can Xvid/ffmpeg allow you to take that whole box set of The West Wing on a 2.5" laptop hard drive, if you want, it could just as easily give you high definition movies-on-disc, using the DVD technology that we have around right now.
The studios want everyone to believe that to get HD, we have to mess around with an entirely new disc format, but that's bogus. Using the much better compression technologies available today, we could squeeze a highdef movie onto a dual-layer DVD.* Heck, with some DVD players, it would probably just require a firmware reflash to be able to play them. The entirely new disc and drive mechanism is there to purposely break forwards-compatibility.
But, because such a format wouldn't offer the studios total control over your living room, it's never going to happen as long as the movie studios have any say in the matter.
* Apple's page says H.264 can compress 1920x1080 down to around 8Mb/s, so given a DVD-9 capacity of around 6.8E10 bits, that's about 140 min of video. This is comparable to MPEG-2 SD video, which is allowed at up to 9.8Mb/s by the DVD Video specification.
You could do that right now with a small two-way radio and a GPS. It's not hard, and if you are planning on doing something like that, you're probably not going to be bothered by the fact that you're supposed to have an amateur radio license first.
They seem to be out of production right now, but there was a company that was making little integrated units consisting of a GPS receiver and Amateur radio transceiver, that fed into the APRS system. I think it was a combination of this transmitter and an equally small GPS. They were pretty slick, and have a lot of cool (legitimate) uses.
Bugging someone's car and following them around isn't very hard, and hasn't been for a while. Probably the hardest part of the whole procedure would be finding someplace on the car to put your GPS antenna where it wouldn't be noticeable, but would still receive the satellite signals.
Your comment got me thinking about something. I, too -- as well as most others here on Slashdot, I'd expect -- just "figured out" the internet, and most things about computers and technology in general.
However, I think that we had some motivation to. At least I did -- I was curious about the internet, and what information (insert porn joke here) I could find on it. So I figured out how to use it.
I suspect that a lot of people out there, have never really had any burning desire to use the internet to accomplish some task that wasn't trivial. Thus, they've never bothered to figure it out. I doubt they're completely incompetent, if they wanted to do it; they just don't care.
It reminds me of a (much) younger brother of mine, who was never much into computers. At about the same age that I started getting interested in technology, he found other hobbies. He knew where the power switch was on his iMac, but that was about it. When he wanted to look something up on the Internet, he'd usually just ask or call me, and I'd research it and send him back some results. When I started working and moved further away, it wasn't practical to do this anymore. The last time I went back and spent some time with him, he was significantly better at doing internet research. Not only that, but he had figured out how to install software, access technical forums and ask the right questions when it didn't work, and generally troubleshoot. He'd even bought and installed a new hard drive and RAM, and set up a WLAN and shared printer (by finding and following the right HOWTO-type articles). While it might seem trivial to the Slashdot crowd, this isn't bad for a casual computer user.
This was somebody who I had basically written off as so incompetent at anything electronic or mechanical, that he'd be a hazard to himself. (And in truth, later I found out that he had hosed his system more than once in the learning process.) But when there wasn't someone there to ask questions of, or do research for him, he had a reason to figure it out. And he did.
Sometimes you have to let people fail and learn on their own, if they're ever going to succeed at all.
Aren't most bankruptcies in the US caused by medical expenses, and involving people who do have insurance, no less?
I doubt it. I bet there are more bankruptcies as a result of credit card overextension, or poorly managed home loans, than as a result of medical expenses.
Nobody but actual scientists, that is, who realize that robotic missions are far more cost-effective and accomplish more than manned ones.
Too bad there aren't enough 'actual scientists' to have much of a vote. That's the pain in the ass of a democracy: it's not just the smart people who get to have a say in running things. If you can't convince the non-scientists of why you need money, you're not going to get it.
The irrational feelings of the masses affect science all the time. Look at stem-cell research; that's a whole field that's basically turned into a proxy battleground for anti-abortion groups. I think a lot of researchers there tried to just stay out of the mud-slinging, but in doing so they basically got run over: it wasn't until after the religious groups got their laws passed that any of the research organizations started doing their own PR. If they had been doing good PR work from the beginning, it might have never become a national issue.
Science doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not something that can just happen on some high academic plane, removed from the ugly realities of the political process. If you want money, you need to make average people -- people, in many cases, with a high school education and a crappy one at that -- understand or at least feel connected to what you're doing. And you need to do it constantly: not just when you've got a problem and need public support. You need to bring the public along from Day 1. I hope that these asteroid missions are NASA finally waking up and realizing that you can't ignore the public on one hand, and expect them to pay for your research on the other. It doesn't work that way.
Well, I suppose it would be worth checking again. The last time we compared what Cingular had versus her legacy AT&T promotional plan (which she got through her school, which apparently had a very cozy relationship with AT&T), Cingular was significantly more expensive for the same level of service. However, looking at Cingular's website, it does seem as though their prices have come down from what I remember them being.
They were definitely very eager to get her off of the legacy plan though; they basically refused to make any changes to the account at all (even change the billing address), without bumping her to a Cingular plan and re-contracting. So she told them where to stick it and just stayed with the old plan.
Since deciding not to mess with it, her whole family has gone through an handset-upgrade cycle, by just buying unlocked GSM phones. The prices weren't all that bad (a RAZR these days is only about $175, or $100ish used on eBay), and some of the unlocked phones are more capable than the branded ones you'd get from a provider normally. Case in point -- her unlocked European RAZR can do 30s video clips, while my TMobile branded one can't take more than 2-3 seconds. Why? No idea; I assume it's firmware. But if I had just gotten mine, I'd feel pretty shafted.
At any rate, I think anyone who's on a GSM plan should seriously consider just getting their own phones. It just gives you a lot more flexibility. If you don't like the plan or company you're with, you can leave, take your number, and switch to somebody else. (Granted, in the U.S. there are really only two options.) After being with Verizon (whose customer-service motto ought to be "say my name, bitch!") the ability to take my equipment and my number and switch companies if I choose seems really refreshing.
Actually, we as taxpayers should demand that all government programs be more entertaining for the masses. As it is now, all we have is an occasional space mission and perpetual war.
Well, up until the public realized it wasn't all fun and games, the war seemed to be performing its duties as World's Most Expensive Reality TV Show pretty well.
Actually, the military in general does a pretty good job of PR, in terms of making itself a focus of national pride. NASA could take some pointers from them.
Interesting, important != understandable to the average person.
Unfortunately, it's those "average people" who control the flow of cash to scientific research, and it's their basically ignorant, baseless opinions which determine what agencies get funded and which get redlined out of existence.
Democracy is sort of a bitch that way. If you can't make your case for funding to the masses, they're going to ignore you; once that happens, the politicians will smell money, and move in for the kill.
Politics is circus. And thus, anything that derives its funding from the political process, or has to otherwise interact with it, needs to get with the program.
Unless you have some brilliant ideas on how to make NASA totally self-funding, it's the "PR stunt" missions that are going to effectively pay for all the boring research ones, that Mr. and Mrs. America don't care about.
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The "do one thing" part of the UNIX philosophy is certainly a good point, but there's always room for argument as to what the 'one thing' of a project is.
I would argue that Pine's purpose is to send and receive mail -- so therefore, incorporating code to send and receive mail, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just doing its purpose.
Only if you narrow the purpose of a mail program to be only "read mail that's already been downloaded to the local system," does Pine overextend. But that's only one way of looking at mail. Breaking it into several different steps is one way to approach the problem ('downloading mail,' 'editing mail,' 'sending mail'), but treating it as one activity ('doing mail'), which should be solved with a single program, is another.
Plus, despite the advantages of the UNIX philosophy, the market has shown over and over, that users really don't like it. Users like integrated, monolithic, seamlessly integrated programs. Pine's integration of features is one of the reason it's managed to stay alive, despite having a ridiculously stupid license. The UNIX Way isn't the only way, and it's not even clear that it's always the best way in every situation.
So now one might have to wait for new revisions instead of patching an existing release.
That's kind of the issue...Pine seems to espouse a release strategy that makes Debian-stable look fast and furious.
I think the best solution currently available, is to include with each copy of your data (or on each backup volume) some source-code implementation of a document reader or parser, in a commonly understood and well-documented language, probably ANSI C (although Ada has all of its documentation in the public domain, so you could include it as well).
This wouldn't help you if you expect people to lose the ability to read the media that you're storing the data and source code on, but that's a much more complicated problem. At that point, you're really talking about stone tablets or metal engravings, rather than backup tapes or CDs.
In terms of practical solutions, ensuring that there are source-available readers, written without external dependencies (besides a compiler), for various document formats, is probably the best way to ensure that they'll be readable. Somewhere else in this thread, someone gives an example: storing a source copy of a GPLed RAW-file processor, on each CD containing RAW images. This seems like a very good idea: assuming that your eventual user can read the media, even if their machine architecture is different and readers don't exist, they have a solvable problem: either find a compiler for their architecture and build the program from the provided source, or use the source code as documentation, to build a compiler in a 'modern' language that can be compiled. The only weakness here is that the language might become a 'lost art,' but that's difficult to avoid. (You could provide documentation on the computer language in a natural/human language, but then you have the same problem of indecipherability of the human language; and ultimately I think a computer language is probably easier to puzzle out than a natural one is.)
I believe Ray Bradbury had something to say on this subject.
Perhaps more ironic -- it's a pretty good bet that whatever he wrote on the subject, it's not available online due to copyright restrictions imposed by his publisher or "estate."
Linux is not the easiest to learn, and once it is learned the skills are only applicable to less than 5 percent of all computers.
This is not true, but unfortunately it's a fairly common line of thinking. Although the parent comment was quickly modded "Troll" here on Slashdot, it would probably be taken quite seriously at a local PTA meeting. (Actually, come to think of it, pretty much everything that gets said in local town meetings ought to qualify for '-1 Flamebait'...but I digress.)
A whole lot -- practically all -- basic computer skills are platform-independent and interchangeable. If you're trying to teach someone who's never used a computer much before, and you're teaching skills that are very specific to one OS, you're doing something wrong. The basic concepts of computers today are widespread: the "desktop metaphor" with folders/documents arranged in hierarchies, use of the mouse to open/close/arrange windows, use of a browser to access the WWW, basic email concepts -- all of those things are the same, whether you're using a Mac, or Windows, or KDE, or Gnome (or even something more exotic). Heck, most mainstream OSes these days even have more similarities: a program-launcher bar at the bottom of the screen (in some form or another) is pretty common, as are the File and Edit menus, and Cut/Copy/Paste.
There really isn't much diversity anymore in computer operating systems, at least not in the major Linux GUIs, plus Mac and Windows. The differences are mostly either technical or trivial (mounted disks on desktop vs. in "My Computer," icons on left of screen or right, etc.). A person with a good set of basic skills, ought to be able to accomplish basic tasks on an already set-up system running either OS.
Teaching someone mindless procedural 'recipes' that allow them to do a task, without any conceptual understanding of what they're doing along the way, is really doing them a disservice. Telling someone "this is how you check email," and making them memorize some steps, which will stop working and leave them stranded with the next OS upgrade or interface change, is truly disempowering.
IMO, all basic computer classes, particularly those aimed at children, should be taught using computers that have a non-standard GUI and OS (which would follow conventionally accepted metaphors and design principles, but not be carbon copies of systems they might have already seen), to encourage critical thinking rather than mere procedural memorization and repetition.
again, we usually just ask for 20 hours of volunteer time as opposed to money
I don't know who you're selling these machines to, but 20 hours of volunteer time seems like a lot. Even low-balling the value of my free time, I could probably go out and buy a brand new system for that. If the work you're asking volunteers to do is in any way unpleasant (negative value), that's a very expensive computer. Though, if the work was fun, it might be a better deal. A lot of volunteer organizations that I've worked with, though, treat new people like crap and/or use them for whatever their "scut work" happens to be that day.
I'm not trying to act like a rich bastard here, because I'm not -- I'm your basic cube-slaving working stiff -- I just was startled by how high a bar that seems to be. (And perhaps I'm undervaluing these computers -- when I think of a 'used PC' I'm imagining something in the $100 "Craigslist" range.) I wouldn't mind working for a Saturday afternoon if there was a free computer in it (particularly if it was something interesting), but I just wonder how many people are willing to do 20 hours for something that would only require half that number of hours to buy outright in an average-wage job. Do you get a lot of takers?
The doctrine of mutual advantage makes some assumptions of basic standards: all the producers need to be playing by the same rules, or what seems like 'competitive advantage' is really just uncompensated negative externalities. (E.g., if you have two chemical companies, and one is located in a place without any environmental restrictions and the other in a place that requires cleanup, the products of the dirty company will probably be cheaper -- but that's not really an 'advantage,' like more efficient production would be, it's just creating costs that will have to be paid for by other people, later on.)
Free trade within a region that has some overarching government or authority to ensure that all firms play by the rules makes sense -- it means that everyone can buy goods from whoever does the most efficient job at making them. However, allowing firms who don't play by the same rules access to the market, without paying penalties, just puts legitimate firms at a disadvantage.
If there's some salient, convincing counterargument to this, I haven't heard it. Just saying "free markets are great!", without explaining how they're going to prevent the eventual demise of our economy due to trade/current-account deficits when we can't compete with other countries who place a lower value on human life than we do, isn't cutting it.
Adam Smith and the rest of the classical economic texts all look great on paper, but there seems to be a lot of faith required to just assume that because it appears to be a simple, elegant solution, that it will produce a society that's a nice place to live. I don't think I have that sort of faith. I'd like to know exactly how the free market is going to save us, and how we're going to maintain our standard of living into the future, by allowing everything except service industries to migrate to other countries, and importing hand-over-fist. I remain unconvinced that such a system is sustainable.
That's pretty much what I've heard the outcome was of forced integration arrangements that would force people living in wealthier suburban areas -- where they presumably live because of the good public schools -- to send their children to underfunded (possibly more dangerous) urban schools. It puts a lot of pressure on parents who have the ability, to find somewhere else to school their children, using whatever means are available.
All you do is trade "racial" inequality for socioeconomic inequality. Those that can get their kids out of integration arrangements do so -- and who can blame them? They're doing what is best for their children, using the resources they have available.
I lived in a community that experimented with forced busing for a while, (IIRC -- this was a while ago) using a lottery system. At the beginning of the year there was a sort of lottery, and some students were chosen to be bused to a more "urban" school. Basically what happened, was if your child's name came up on that list, the parents would immediately attempt to use connections / pull strings to get them put back, and failing that, the families that could afford to, pulled their kids out to private, parochial, or home-schools. The only suburban kids who ever ended up going to urban schools, were the ones whose families didn't have connections to avoid being put on the list, and couldn't afford any alternative education, or just didn't care or weren't involved. No parent in their right mind would let their kid get sent there if they had any alternative. So what happened? You ended up with racial 'diversity' on paper, but it was still the poorer kids that ended up at the crappy school. They real losers in the arrangement were basically working-class suburban families, who couldn't afford private schools. There was no "justice" there; it was all a farce.
I don't know how long that system lasted (didn't live there that long) but at least as I heard about it, it was an unmitigated disaster. You're not going to get true equality in education, because people have vastly unequal resources to expend on their children. All you can do is try to establish a minimum; people that can afford to do better, are always going to do so.
No need to do that. You could put up a mag-stripe reader in any public place, label it "Credit Card Cleaner -- Free!" and people would swipe their cards through. I think this was actually demonstrated on a TV news channel a few years ago.
Exactly. I think the creators of Progress Quest would be available as "security consultants" to help them fix this glaring security hole.
Gold farming would also be taken care of, just in case they needed another reason.
i don't mind it, as long a people remember that its really just a glorified chat program with scripts, ie irc with a gui /fish
In that same vein, I would mind this WWW thing a lot less, if people remember that it's really just a glorified Gopher program with scripts...
Do we have any hard evidence that having a free market, where Indian or Chinese programmers were favored over American ones -- however 'overpriced' the Americans might be -- helps America? We seem to be taking on premise that a completely free market helps the First World, but I'm not sure why this is. The WSJ crowd never seems to explain exactly the reasoning and evidence for this claim; it's treated as holy writ, beyond all question. And if there's one thing that I really dislike, it's claims that aren't allowed to be questioned.
So what if Americans are "overpriced" compared to workers in areas where basic working conditions aren't guaranteed? That's not a level playing field; it simply guarantees that if Americans want to compete, we have to drop to that level. Why should we allow this? If it doesn't help our economy, why are we implementing economic policies that help China and India, at our workers and our economy's expense?
Simply saying that 'so-and-so doesn't facilitate a free market,' doesn't automatically make it a bad thing. Maybe we don't want a completely free market, if it means we're going to have to compete directly with countries that treat their workers as disposable units. We need to think about the ultimate effects of our economic policies on our citizens, in the long term, and back it up with convincing evidence and research instead of just polemics.
I'm open to both arguments here but convinced of neither; there seem to be a shortage of factual arguments when it comes to foreign and domestic economic policy, and I don't think that helps anything.
I think it's interesting to note, just for other Americans reading this, that were the US National Anthem subject to the same restrictions as Happy Birthday, it would only have come out of Copyright in 1913 (Key died in 1843, plus 70 years). Or if he had written it "for hire," it wouldn't have come out until 1934.
Notwithstanding the ridiculousness of having a 'work for hire' last longer than a work by a natural person, that's a pretty long span of American history that it would have been more or less unavailable for public use, in many of the ways we currently think of it.
The fact is, there are a lot of things that happened in the past, which would either be illegal under todays laws, or simply would be prevented from occurring. In many cases, we've never even considered these things in making the laws.
I think there is some confusion between how Europeans and Americans count the number of lanes in a "road." In the U.S., typically an "eight-lane highway" would have eight lanes total, in both directions -- so four on each side of the median. Three or four lanes in each direction, for six or eight lanes total, is pretty close to average for a suburban Interstate. In contrast, in Europe (at least English-speaking Europe), I've heard people talk about a "dual carriageway" as a road that has two lanes in each direction, or four lanes total. So this might be causing some confusion.
The number of roads in the U.S. that have more than six lanes in one direction are fairly small, relative to ones with that many total in both, and mostly occur only in large metropolitan areas (Atlanta and L.A. have some highways that are 7 or 8 lanes in each direction, I think -- and I'm sure there are others) or in interchanges. But if I heard someone say "six lane highway," I wouldn't immediately assume that they meant that many lanes in each direction. Six lanes would be a far more common configuration if it was referring to the combined lanes, so three lanes each.
huh? The squishy feeling is a good thing(tm) Its called a quiet keyboard. I very much dislike the spring keyboards, esp if yo use them for data entry. With quiet keyboards its much easier to press the keys.
Although ultimately it comes down to personal preference, I think that the 'clicky' buckling-spring keys are actually easier to use and less fatiguing. Because there is immediate tactile and audible feedback when the key-switch is actuated, you don't have to press it as far down. When I use a 'soft touch' keyboard, I find that I hit the keys further and harder, because there's not that feedback; I slam each key all the way down instead of (with practice) only pushing each key down as far as is necessary.
The noise of the original IBM Model M's is definitely a downside; if you have to work around other people, I can see how it wouldn't win you many friends. In my opinion, the Apple Extended Keyboard II with the Altus switches is the best of both worlds. It's softer both in terms of pressure and sound than the IBM, but it's not as 'mushy' as a soft-touch (silicone dome).
So if you could compromise the phone, it might give you a way of conducting a MITM attack on the computer. This is particularly interesting, because I think some phones (most?) are capable of loading firmware from a remote source. If you could compromise the firmware image on the source server, you might be able to do nasty things to a whole office.
Not only can Xvid/ffmpeg allow you to take that whole box set of The West Wing on a 2.5" laptop hard drive, if you want, it could just as easily give you high definition movies-on-disc, using the DVD technology that we have around right now.
The studios want everyone to believe that to get HD, we have to mess around with an entirely new disc format, but that's bogus. Using the much better compression technologies available today, we could squeeze a highdef movie onto a dual-layer DVD.* Heck, with some DVD players, it would probably just require a firmware reflash to be able to play them. The entirely new disc and drive mechanism is there to purposely break forwards-compatibility.
But, because such a format wouldn't offer the studios total control over your living room, it's never going to happen as long as the movie studios have any say in the matter.
* Apple's page says H.264 can compress 1920x1080 down to around 8Mb/s, so given a DVD-9 capacity of around 6.8E10 bits, that's about 140 min of video. This is comparable to MPEG-2 SD video, which is allowed at up to 9.8Mb/s by the DVD Video specification.
You could do that right now with a small two-way radio and a GPS. It's not hard, and if you are planning on doing something like that, you're probably not going to be bothered by the fact that you're supposed to have an amateur radio license first.
They seem to be out of production right now, but there was a company that was making little integrated units consisting of a GPS receiver and Amateur radio transceiver, that fed into the APRS system. I think it was a combination of this transmitter and an equally small GPS. They were pretty slick, and have a lot of cool (legitimate) uses.
Bugging someone's car and following them around isn't very hard, and hasn't been for a while. Probably the hardest part of the whole procedure would be finding someplace on the car to put your GPS antenna where it wouldn't be noticeable, but would still receive the satellite signals.
Your comment got me thinking about something. I, too -- as well as most others here on Slashdot, I'd expect -- just "figured out" the internet, and most things about computers and technology in general.
However, I think that we had some motivation to. At least I did -- I was curious about the internet, and what information (insert porn joke here) I could find on it. So I figured out how to use it.
I suspect that a lot of people out there, have never really had any burning desire to use the internet to accomplish some task that wasn't trivial. Thus, they've never bothered to figure it out. I doubt they're completely incompetent, if they wanted to do it; they just don't care.
It reminds me of a (much) younger brother of mine, who was never much into computers. At about the same age that I started getting interested in technology, he found other hobbies. He knew where the power switch was on his iMac, but that was about it. When he wanted to look something up on the Internet, he'd usually just ask or call me, and I'd research it and send him back some results. When I started working and moved further away, it wasn't practical to do this anymore. The last time I went back and spent some time with him, he was significantly better at doing internet research. Not only that, but he had figured out how to install software, access technical forums and ask the right questions when it didn't work, and generally troubleshoot. He'd even bought and installed a new hard drive and RAM, and set up a WLAN and shared printer (by finding and following the right HOWTO-type articles). While it might seem trivial to the Slashdot crowd, this isn't bad for a casual computer user.
This was somebody who I had basically written off as so incompetent at anything electronic or mechanical, that he'd be a hazard to himself. (And in truth, later I found out that he had hosed his system more than once in the learning process.) But when there wasn't someone there to ask questions of, or do research for him, he had a reason to figure it out. And he did.
Sometimes you have to let people fail and learn on their own, if they're ever going to succeed at all.
Aren't most bankruptcies in the US caused by medical expenses, and involving people who do have insurance, no less?
I doubt it. I bet there are more bankruptcies as a result of credit card overextension, or poorly managed home loans, than as a result of medical expenses.
The irrational feelings of the masses affect science all the time. Look at stem-cell research; that's a whole field that's basically turned into a proxy battleground for anti-abortion groups. I think a lot of researchers there tried to just stay out of the mud-slinging, but in doing so they basically got run over: it wasn't until after the religious groups got their laws passed that any of the research organizations started doing their own PR. If they had been doing good PR work from the beginning, it might have never become a national issue.
Science doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not something that can just happen on some high academic plane, removed from the ugly realities of the political process. If you want money, you need to make average people -- people, in many cases, with a high school education and a crappy one at that -- understand or at least feel connected to what you're doing. And you need to do it constantly: not just when you've got a problem and need public support. You need to bring the public along from Day 1. I hope that these asteroid missions are NASA finally waking up and realizing that you can't ignore the public on one hand, and expect them to pay for your research on the other. It doesn't work that way.
Well, I suppose it would be worth checking again. The last time we compared what Cingular had versus her legacy AT&T promotional plan (which she got through her school, which apparently had a very cozy relationship with AT&T), Cingular was significantly more expensive for the same level of service. However, looking at Cingular's website, it does seem as though their prices have come down from what I remember them being.
They were definitely very eager to get her off of the legacy plan though; they basically refused to make any changes to the account at all (even change the billing address), without bumping her to a Cingular plan and re-contracting. So she told them where to stick it and just stayed with the old plan.
Since deciding not to mess with it, her whole family has gone through an handset-upgrade cycle, by just buying unlocked GSM phones. The prices weren't all that bad (a RAZR these days is only about $175, or $100ish used on eBay), and some of the unlocked phones are more capable than the branded ones you'd get from a provider normally. Case in point -- her unlocked European RAZR can do 30s video clips, while my TMobile branded one can't take more than 2-3 seconds. Why? No idea; I assume it's firmware. But if I had just gotten mine, I'd feel pretty shafted.
At any rate, I think anyone who's on a GSM plan should seriously consider just getting their own phones. It just gives you a lot more flexibility. If you don't like the plan or company you're with, you can leave, take your number, and switch to somebody else. (Granted, in the U.S. there are really only two options.) After being with Verizon (whose customer-service motto ought to be "say my name, bitch!") the ability to take my equipment and my number and switch companies if I choose seems really refreshing.
Actually, we as taxpayers should demand that all government programs be more entertaining for the masses. As it is now, all we have is an occasional space mission and perpetual war.
Well, up until the public realized it wasn't all fun and games, the war seemed to be performing its duties as World's Most Expensive Reality TV Show pretty well.
Actually, the military in general does a pretty good job of PR, in terms of making itself a focus of national pride. NASA could take some pointers from them.
Democracy is sort of a bitch that way. If you can't make your case for funding to the masses, they're going to ignore you; once that happens, the politicians will smell money, and move in for the kill.
Politics is circus. And thus, anything that derives its funding from the political process, or has to otherwise interact with it, needs to get with the program.
Unless you have some brilliant ideas on how to make NASA totally self-funding, it's the "PR stunt" missions that are going to effectively pay for all the boring research ones, that Mr. and Mrs. America don't care about.