Well, that's my point precisely. You can't base your decision on the number of offerings alone. You have to figure out what's in the boxes, *THEN* choose.
Microsoft has two lines of operating system: dos-95 line and NT line.
Within either line, there is no clear choice of the "best" OS. Some people
(me included), still use 95 because it's stabler and faster on our
hardware. Some prefer ME over 98, others 98 over ME. Same for the NT line.
The only big difference is marketing: MS touts XP and ME as _the_ OSes
to get. However, they're an interested party - they want to sell their
latest and greatest, and more importantly, push their technologies like.NET, and so forth.
Now, with the linux, you got 4 "big" distros. RH, Mandrake, Debian and
SUSE. I think in some expo SUSE or MDK was voted as the most popular, but
RH is the oldest commercial offering.
Here's a little round-up:
RedHat - oldest commercial offering with most ties with traditional
companies and I think a certification problem. I heard, though, that dir
structure is a bit messy and new releases are sometimes rushed and hence
are quite buggy. Usually a default newbie distro.
SUSE - big in europe, getting in US too lately. At least as
user-friendly as RH. Don't know much more about it. I think it uses RPM,
like redhat.
Mandrake - used to be based entirely on RH with a few minor tweaks but
then branched into a separate distro. At least as user-friendly as RH,
uses the same RPM system, a bit less buggy?
Debian - "techies" distro. Less eye candy, more stability and security
than other big 3. Apt-get package management is supposedly better and
easier to use than RPM. It's not a commercial distro, it follows the same
development pattern as Linux kernel itself. It does less hand-holding than
other big 3 distros, so it can be intimidating to a new user. I think it
also has more binary packages than any other distro.
One thing that you're missing is that separate distros often share the
development effort between each other, for instance they all use the same
kernel, 3 out of 4 use the same package management scheme, most of the
core things are the same, and so forth. Contrast this with MS and MacOS,
who obviously can't share their internals.
I think this scattering of distros is a very healthy thing. They
compete, try to outdo each other, learn from each others mistakes, etc.
Debian pitches to a distinctly different user base, just like with
win95/NT lines.
I must also say that I don't understand your logic. Your decision
should be based on whichever OS is best. If it's windows, let it be
windows, if it's debian, use it, if RH, use that. Uniqueness of said OS
should not figure in your decision at all.
Let me illustrate: let's say two guys come up to you and say "you must
choose one box out of our offerings." One of them has one box, and the
other has 10. If you choose to take the first guy's box, your pick is
easier, if you take the 2nd's box, you have to choose out of ten. However,
you have no idea what's in the boxes, the second guy's 10 boxes may each
be filled with 100 dollar bills, while the other guy's one box might have
horse manure in it or something. But here's what you're doing: you're
picking the guy with one box just because he has one. That's plain silly.
By the way, I don't claim to be very accurate in my roundup of distros.
Read reviews or just pick one or two and try 'em. I don't think distro
reviews like the one in the story are very useful, though - each distro is
a very complex system with thousands of elements interacting, it may work
great on one system with one user great but still be lousy on your system
with your usage patterns.
So, try one of them or not, but don't make up silly excuses like "There
is only one", it's operating systems, not Highlander epos.
The article you link to is sounds highly unprofessional. He misses the idea that if you use the same environment every day for a few years, you memorize shortcuts perfectly, that is, it takes absolutely no thinking to hit those buttons. With a mouse, you're solving a different problem each and every time you use it - you have to move it from wherever it is to the needed place on screen. You have to concentrate on the pointer, and follow it with your eyes to see that it ends up in the right place. That's an action that takes more effort because you have to supervise it. The simple fact is that mouse is best for new users, and keyboard is best once you cross a certain threshold beyond which it's advantage begins to increase. If you use photoshop once in a few weeks for 5 minutes to crop your family's photos, it's best to forego the effort of memorizing shortcuts - you'll keep forgetting them, anyway. If, however, your job is to do some photoshop manipulations for 5-6 hours every day, for years, you'll win a
lot by memorizing the hot keys. It's not even a matter of saving half a second on each action, but rather a matter of staying more focused on your task. Mouse can distract you, unlike the keyboard.
If you're still not convinced, consider this situation: you have a window on your screen that has 102 buttons displayed on it, each representing a key. You can type by moving your mouse over each key and clicking it. I hope it's obvious that typing in this manner would be far slower and more awkward than using your keyboard. Now ask yourself, what's the difference between "button keyboard vs. real keyboard" and "button bars vs. shortcut keys". The difference is that button bars often offer you some mnemonical hints, like X window closing button. There's no doubt that they're easier to learn. However, once you learn the keyboard shortcuts, they will give you the same level of speed advantage as real keyboard vs. virtual button keyboard.
This is a good example, but it doesn't testify against digital cameras, it testifies against the policy of deleting images. Digital storage is getting cheaper and more reliable. Think 10 years ahead (or 20): you have your 10 terabyte drive or, let's say if you worry about hd crashes, you have 2, in different locations that are automatically mirrored. Are you really going to worry about space taken up by a 5mb (and I'm being generous here) image? Right now the fact is that most cameras have fairly limited storage capacity on-hand. An olympus c-700 that costs about $500 comes with only ~8mb? So you have the pressure to delete that shot to free up space for another shot. Once they have a tiny cd-r with 800mbs storage, and a 10-pack of spare ones in your pocket, you'll just keep all shots, just in case (well, unless you forgot to take the lens cap off).
Let's look the other way through the looking glass, too - the ability to delete and preview images immediately means you don't pause to think about "wasiting" it, you just make a shot and who knows, maybe it'll come out really great, and you're more open for experimentation, etc etc. You can adjust immediately if you make a mistake - on film you may ruin some great shots because you didnt' realize the angle wasn't good for lighting or something like that..
Um, don't say it's easy till you do it. I think these guys know better what's easy to change in their game and what's not. Secondly, this shouldn't matter at all because hex grid simply doesn't add any significant amount of realism.. and, by the way, I think it is quite a bit more complex, because with a square grid, you can simply have a 2-dimensional array.
Grid is one of those basic things that is used extensively in all parts of the game, if it's changed, much of the code in the game has to be changed, too.
Let's say you have a deadline, you need the money, but you just couldn't find any new and interesting (or at least original) material. What DO you do? It's quite simple - you make up a title that doesn't make any sense and therefore sounds original.
n 1: (economics) a market in which there are many buyers but only
one seller; "a monopoly on silver"; "when you have a
monopoly you can ask any price you like"
2: exclusive control or possession of something; "They have no
monopoly on intelligence"
OS, as we all know here, dictates precisely the opposite - it creates more sellers, and it does away with exclusive control. They could have just as well called it "Closed Open Source" or "Many One Seller" or "Non-exclusive exclusive control". Of course, they didn't go to college for nothing, they know to pick a name that doesn't make them sound like imbeciles to people who don't know what they're talking about - it only makes them sound like imbeciles to people who *do* know what the article is about. Oh, and I won't do the traditional "WHY is it posted here?". I know why it's posted here.
re: one flew over cockoo's nest
on
Review: K-PAX
·
· Score: 1
Where the hell does that movie say that normal people are more fucked up then crazy people?
I'm not at all convinced that this will be better than say civ2. They're adding more stuff on top of the game that was already too hard to be "solved". IOW, it's like adding more squares to a chess board - sure, there's much more combination and the game is, literally, "harder", but it doesn't matter at all because the traditional chess is hard enough and very well balanced. I've seen this happen re homm2 -> homm3: addic^Wveteran players got shortchanged 'cause campaigns were much easier. Not to imply that civ3 is likely to be easier than civ2, but merely demonstrating that a sequel of a great game may be disappointing.
The reason is that it's simpler. Vast majority of people, I imagine, don't mind square map at all. I would certainly prefer developers to spend more time tuning the strategy, eliminating the long boring stretches of gameplay that civ sometimes has, instead of spending their time to add a tiny bit of realism where almost nobody wants realism. It's far less realistic that you can say "i want gunpowder invented". Invention don't work like that. And there's a million other things that are also unrealistic, and could be improved with far more tangible effect on quality of gameplay, rather than trivial squares/hexagens thing..
Adolph was extremely popular in germany, so I don't know what are you trying to prove with that example. I can't make any parallel at all. Oh, if you think that letting someone else protect you is evil, why don't you lobby for dismissing police force? Good luck on that one, too.
Sorry for a late comment.. Um.. Yay for privacy, but also Yay for safe streets. If you're on a street you're not in privacy, that's the way things are. There's not a single argument against cameras I've heard except for vague "bad for privacy" thing. Note how this article tried to put a bit of substance behind its anit-camera message: that *punks* can be singled out using cameras. Also note how the article doesn't elaborate on how exactly it's supposed to happen - and I think I know why - he has not the faintest idea. My privacy ends when I step outside my appartment, and if someone can decrease already-absent privacy of a street while increasing it's safety, I say, let's get them cameras on every street, if they prove to be effective (possibly higher resolution cameras with maybe some AIs that can spot suspicious behaviour, like someone pointing a gun or a knife, or snatching a purse..). You people read too much sci-fi. There's plenty of throats slit every day, and I'm sorry, it takes precedence over some
paranoidal 1984 fantasies. There are far more real horrors to be concerned about - Nazist germany didn't need cameras to control their populace, only allies with guns and airplanes kicked them out, USSR didn't need no cameras, it rotted from the top. Fortunately, slashdot freedom fighters do not make decisions in this world. UK people looked at the situation and made a wise choice. US will likely follow suit after more efficient and cheaper cameras are widely available. Yay for practicality!
I made an media player that plays mp3s, mods and oggs using python. It follows different philosophy than other mp3 players I know - instead of selecting files for playlist by hand, you load up all files in a dir (recursing subdirs), save it into a playlist and then it monitors your listening habits and rates songs accordingly. Eventually you end up with a playlist where songs you like best have higher scores, and others have lower scores (from 0 to 100). At that point you can set a threshold that creates a playlist on the fly that only includes the songs you like most, above a specified score. I considered playing around with id3 fields, but I decided against it 'cause many mp3s don't have id3s and manually adding genre etc is boring with a large collection.. And the playlist in cymbaline is not the flat type that 'normal' players have, but is hierarchical - you have a list of albums, and in each album, you have a list of songs. Albums are determined not by id3s, for the reasons I mention above, but by
directories. So, if you want to listen to a song in the same album, you simply go to the next or previous song.. if you want to listen to an album by the same band, you go the the next/previous album. I think it makes more sense to use directory structure for this sort of thing instead of id3s. For some strange reason most mp3 players ignore directory structure - is this because a lot of people dump all their files in one big dir? If that's the case, I think it's still easier to make a meaningful dir structure then insure that all files have good tags.
Cymbaline has many other neat things, mainly features that rely on these two unique things - album-centered and weighted playlists. It's a console player that only works on unix currently, using mpg123 etc as backends. The URL is in the sig.
Well, there's just too many dumb wrong things with moz.. I personaly don't see any reason to work on it: konq is smaller and stabler, I hear, and moz misses the most obvious things: they work on it for ages and "esc" key doesn't stop animations in linux. This leads me to think that either people working on it don't have a clue, don't care about linux, the code's too large and complex to fix, or something along these lines. Oh, and at the same time they do have irc and mail and skins.. so what does this tell me? That my priorities have nothing in common with moz priorities, hence if I wanted to hack on an open source browser, konq or something else would come before moz. As things are, I'm fairly happy with the combination of lynx and old netscape, and I'm working on other open source things that I feel are more interesting to me.
The trouble with opera is that it's unstable on linux. I'm using debian and dynamic opera didn't show images at all (gifs, anyway), and when someone told me I should use static, I did so and images work but sometimes opera locks up X completely. As in, I have to go to console, kill opera and then X totally goes down. So, I'm stuck using netscape for image navigation/jscript and lynx for everything else (~95%). Actually, bad choice of wording here: I'm not stuck, this is very comfortable and useable.. oh, and moz doesn't stop gif animation with Esc. Nor does it have reasonable keyboard shortcuts like opera. Oh, and one more thing: opera don't have vi-like mode like lynx does, which is imho the best part about keyboard shortcuts. See, the whole thing is that I want ot be completely free from mouse - I do a lot of typing between browsing, I may switch to vim and work on a program or a website, and then go to links and browse here and there, so switching one hand to mouse is a major slow-down. IOW, opera went
in the right direction but stopped short of reaching the nirvana of input interface: pure keyboard input. You get this quantum leap feeling when you absolutely don't have to use mouse. Lynx has 2 features that accomplish that leap: numbered links and vi-like navigation. If opera had that and didnt' crash X now and then, It'd be perfect and I'd pay for it, even. And when i get a job and don't worry about the money, I'd even pay some extra on top for any browser that did that. And to the "mouse is just as good" croud: I think the difference is that mouse gives ya instant gratification, 10 seconds and you're quick as a fox. But you don't get much faster as time goes by.. with keyboard navigation, it's awkward at first, useable after a few hours, and then it gets faster and faster as you use it, for years. At the end, it's faster and easier, and well worth it if you use computer for a few hours every day on average. Just imho of course.
Ball and chain are uncomfortable (try to jog or exercise with one!), but cameras are perfectly comfortable and don't bother me the least bit. In fact, they make me feel safer.
As for WTC.. well, that's the thing, some of these folks were on file, if there were cameras everywhere that could id them, they would perhaps be caught. In fact they *were* cought on some waldbaums cams and atm cams, the only problem is that the cams weren't set up to compare faces to a database. If they were, who knows. But an armed chap in the cabin can't harm, either.
Well, placing them in homes of convicted felons is useless because they tend to break the law outside their homes. As for gov't housing project, you might be on to something, I bet many inhabitants will appreciate that, with crime rates that high. They are the most vulnerable to crime, imho - if a middle-class guy is mugged by a street punk, the police will always believe the victim, if it's two low-lives, it may not be that easy.. in fact, crime may never be reported due to the victim's distrust of the law. Now if the crime is caught live, this is not a problem. As for people who oppose CCTV.. I'd imagine most of them act from misguided love for freedom rather than from having something to hide, so I'd advise against tapping their homes - which would be pointless even if they indeed were up to some crimes, as they would just take the criminal activity outside their homes.
I'm apologize for the misspellings in the post, my old ibm 'click' keyboard broke down and I have to use cheap mushy "membrane" one before I get more ibm ones in mail. I'm sorry.
There is this unhealthy system or mechanism, whatever you may call it
known as "education system". It's obsessed with categorizing students,
teachers and schools in classes, from the worst to the best. What do you
need to do that? You need grades and tests. Teacher whose students get
best grades is better. Schools with best grades is higher on the ladder.
*That's* the name of the game.
What's the #1 lesson, the unspoken rule in every school? Get most with
the least effort - that is, highest grades with the least effort. The
smarter students actually learn less than the dim ones - they are better
at getting A with least knowledge.
Another important and closely related skill is forgetting the formulas
10 minutes after the test - short-spam memory.
Why is a reference book forbidden on a test? What do you see in NASA
engineering rooms - do you see the supervisor shouting "What the hell is
*THAT*? - and pulling out a math book from under the table paper. "Oh,
I'm sorry" - says the shuttle engineer - "I just forgot one formula
there." The answer is quite simple - it's easier on teachers. If reference
was allowed, you'd have to create a new problem for each exam, you'd
perhaps have to create exam questions that have some relation to the real
world - and that's tough. You can't seriously expect that on $20k salary,
can you?
The art of solving real-life problems is live above all, and education
system is dead as fossils in the british museum. It's hard to trace even
the subtlest relation between the two.
If you want drones, if you want robots - keep your tests and grades. If
you want Da Vinci's and Einsteins, throw them out. This is not a pipe
dream, there's a school in england that is free of any compulsion and it's
running for decades now and it works just fine. John Gotti, a teacher of
the year from NY, US has said that there's no hope for the education
system as it is right now and the only way out he sees is home education.
I think he is working in a some new independant school in Ohio or
somewhere now (anyone have more info on this?).
Oh, there's a good word that's the root of all evil in the education
system - compulsion. You cannot beat a kid with sticks into an
intelligent, resourceful, capable professional. Whenever it does happen,
it happens *despite* the whole system of education. It fails somewhere,
and you get your Torvalds or whoever.
An ideal learning environment IMHO would be a school where a bunch of
kids are free to make any sort of research or a project they want.
Teachers would be there to help and guide them when help is requested. If
they don't want to do anything, if they want to play nintendo, they go
home and play nintendo (or don't come to school at all). Okay, so 40% or
80% won't come there at all - so school overcrowding is solved, future gas
station clerks will practice their moves in tekken or watch friends
reruns, and future shuttle engineers or teachers or programmers are
learning in an environment that's actually, you know, is perfect for
learning. Pipe dream indeed.
But that don't matter. Education is an industry, and if 80% of kids
don't go through it, the industry, the machine is mortally wounded. We
want kids in schools, not on the streets, even if they turn schools into
a combination of a concentration camp on one hand and a street/gang place
on the other. It's like Bush said "opponents say that we have 'test'
mentality - but let's put that logic to the test (notice pun) - if kids
are tested for arithmetics, guess what, that's what they're going to know
- arithmetics". Great logic. 10s of thousands in Yale education are paying
off, that is, if he wrote this himself.
What can we do? Nothing, really. If there's going to be a change, it's
going to be incremental, and will take decades if not centuries. It's
going to be small private schools, home education, john gottis that act
from inside the concentration camps that will eventually lead to the big
change.
I'm sorry if this post is incidental to the story, I think it's
important enough to compensate for that.
Sorry, I can't find the Gotti page anywhere.. I read about it on K5 but
apparently they don't archive all old stories. Can anyone post link in a
reply?
Also, I don't want to offend any teachers. They have to follow the
rules or they'll be fired. They have to work on low wages with students
who don't want to learn whatever the program says they should on that day.
It's a miracle they get *anything* done at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's my point precisely. You can't base your decision on the number of offerings alone. You have to figure out what's in the boxes, *THEN* choose.
The only big difference is marketing: MS touts XP and ME as _the_ OSes to get. However, they're an interested party - they want to sell their latest and greatest, and more importantly, push their technologies like .NET, and so forth.
Now, with the linux, you got 4 "big" distros. RH, Mandrake, Debian and SUSE. I think in some expo SUSE or MDK was voted as the most popular, but RH is the oldest commercial offering.
Here's a little round-up:
RedHat - oldest commercial offering with most ties with traditional companies and I think a certification problem. I heard, though, that dir structure is a bit messy and new releases are sometimes rushed and hence are quite buggy. Usually a default newbie distro.
SUSE - big in europe, getting in US too lately. At least as user-friendly as RH. Don't know much more about it. I think it uses RPM, like redhat.
Mandrake - used to be based entirely on RH with a few minor tweaks but then branched into a separate distro. At least as user-friendly as RH, uses the same RPM system, a bit less buggy?
Debian - "techies" distro. Less eye candy, more stability and security than other big 3. Apt-get package management is supposedly better and easier to use than RPM. It's not a commercial distro, it follows the same development pattern as Linux kernel itself. It does less hand-holding than other big 3 distros, so it can be intimidating to a new user. I think it also has more binary packages than any other distro.
One thing that you're missing is that separate distros often share the development effort between each other, for instance they all use the same kernel, 3 out of 4 use the same package management scheme, most of the core things are the same, and so forth. Contrast this with MS and MacOS, who obviously can't share their internals.
I think this scattering of distros is a very healthy thing. They compete, try to outdo each other, learn from each others mistakes, etc. Debian pitches to a distinctly different user base, just like with win95/NT lines.
I must also say that I don't understand your logic. Your decision should be based on whichever OS is best. If it's windows, let it be windows, if it's debian, use it, if RH, use that. Uniqueness of said OS should not figure in your decision at all.
Let me illustrate: let's say two guys come up to you and say "you must choose one box out of our offerings." One of them has one box, and the other has 10. If you choose to take the first guy's box, your pick is easier, if you take the 2nd's box, you have to choose out of ten. However, you have no idea what's in the boxes, the second guy's 10 boxes may each be filled with 100 dollar bills, while the other guy's one box might have horse manure in it or something. But here's what you're doing: you're picking the guy with one box just because he has one. That's plain silly.
By the way, I don't claim to be very accurate in my roundup of distros. Read reviews or just pick one or two and try 'em. I don't think distro reviews like the one in the story are very useful, though - each distro is a very complex system with thousands of elements interacting, it may work great on one system with one user great but still be lousy on your system with your usage patterns.
So, try one of them or not, but don't make up silly excuses like "There is only one", it's operating systems, not Highlander epos.
I don't even think it was the least bit funny. I figure, if you're being rude, at least be funny, you know?
If you're still not convinced, consider this situation: you have a window on your screen that has 102 buttons displayed on it, each representing a key. You can type by moving your mouse over each key and clicking it. I hope it's obvious that typing in this manner would be far slower and more awkward than using your keyboard. Now ask yourself, what's the difference between "button keyboard vs. real keyboard" and "button bars vs. shortcut keys". The difference is that button bars often offer you some mnemonical hints, like X window closing button. There's no doubt that they're easier to learn. However, once you learn the keyboard shortcuts, they will give you the same level of speed advantage as real keyboard vs. virtual button keyboard.
Let's look the other way through the looking glass, too - the ability to delete and preview images immediately means you don't pause to think about "wasiting" it, you just make a shot and who knows, maybe it'll come out really great, and you're more open for experimentation, etc etc. You can adjust immediately if you make a mistake - on film you may ruin some great shots because you didnt' realize the angle wasn't good for lighting or something like that..
The paper says that ice comet would have evaporated much higher in the atmosphere.
I think it's afficionutos, isn't it?
Um, don't say it's easy till you do it. I think these guys know better what's easy to change in their game and what's not. Secondly, this shouldn't matter at all because hex grid simply doesn't add any significant amount of realism.. and, by the way, I think it is quite a bit more complex, because with a square grid, you can simply have a 2-dimensional array. Grid is one of those basic things that is used extensively in all parts of the game, if it's changed, much of the code in the game has to be changed, too.
Let's say you have a deadline, you need the money, but you just couldn't find any new and interesting (or at least original) material. What DO you do? It's quite simple - you make up a title that doesn't make any sense and therefore sounds original. n 1: (economics) a market in which there are many buyers but only one seller; "a monopoly on silver"; "when you have a monopoly you can ask any price you like" 2: exclusive control or possession of something; "They have no monopoly on intelligence" OS, as we all know here, dictates precisely the opposite - it creates more sellers, and it does away with exclusive control. They could have just as well called it "Closed Open Source" or "Many One Seller" or "Non-exclusive exclusive control". Of course, they didn't go to college for nothing, they know to pick a name that doesn't make them sound like imbeciles to people who don't know what they're talking about - it only makes them sound like imbeciles to people who *do* know what the article is about. Oh, and I won't do the traditional "WHY is it posted here?". I know why it's posted here.
Where the hell does that movie say that normal people are more fucked up then crazy people?
I'm not at all convinced that this will be better than say civ2. They're adding more stuff on top of the game that was already too hard to be "solved". IOW, it's like adding more squares to a chess board - sure, there's much more combination and the game is, literally, "harder", but it doesn't matter at all because the traditional chess is hard enough and very well balanced. I've seen this happen re homm2 -> homm3: addic^Wveteran players got shortchanged 'cause campaigns were much easier. Not to imply that civ3 is likely to be easier than civ2, but merely demonstrating that a sequel of a great game may be disappointing.
Maybe she had a very dark skin, you don't know! See, if you nitpick, someone will nitpick your nitpick. Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes, eh?
The reason is that it's simpler. Vast majority of people, I imagine, don't mind square map at all. I would certainly prefer developers to spend more time tuning the strategy, eliminating the long boring stretches of gameplay that civ sometimes has, instead of spending their time to add a tiny bit of realism where almost nobody wants realism. It's far less realistic that you can say "i want gunpowder invented". Invention don't work like that. And there's a million other things that are also unrealistic, and could be improved with far more tangible effect on quality of gameplay, rather than trivial squares/hexagens thing..
Adolph was extremely popular in germany, so I don't know what are you trying to prove with that example. I can't make any parallel at all. Oh, if you think that letting someone else protect you is evil, why don't you lobby for dismissing police force? Good luck on that one, too.
Sorry for a late comment.. Um.. Yay for privacy, but also Yay for safe streets. If you're on a street you're not in privacy, that's the way things are. There's not a single argument against cameras I've heard except for vague "bad for privacy" thing. Note how this article tried to put a bit of substance behind its anit-camera message: that *punks* can be singled out using cameras. Also note how the article doesn't elaborate on how exactly it's supposed to happen - and I think I know why - he has not the faintest idea. My privacy ends when I step outside my appartment, and if someone can decrease already-absent privacy of a street while increasing it's safety, I say, let's get them cameras on every street, if they prove to be effective (possibly higher resolution cameras with maybe some AIs that can spot suspicious behaviour, like someone pointing a gun or a knife, or snatching a purse..). You people read too much sci-fi. There's plenty of throats slit every day, and I'm sorry, it takes precedence over some paranoidal 1984 fantasies. There are far more real horrors to be concerned about - Nazist germany didn't need cameras to control their populace, only allies with guns and airplanes kicked them out, USSR didn't need no cameras, it rotted from the top. Fortunately, slashdot freedom fighters do not make decisions in this world. UK people looked at the situation and made a wise choice. US will likely follow suit after more efficient and cheaper cameras are widely available. Yay for practicality!
That's of course true if you encode all your mp3s, but it's my impression that most people get at least some of their mp3s online.
Cymbaline has many other neat things, mainly features that rely on these two unique things - album-centered and weighted playlists. It's a console player that only works on unix currently, using mpg123 etc as backends. The URL is in the sig.
Well, there's just too many dumb wrong things with moz.. I personaly don't see any reason to work on it: konq is smaller and stabler, I hear, and moz misses the most obvious things: they work on it for ages and "esc" key doesn't stop animations in linux. This leads me to think that either people working on it don't have a clue, don't care about linux, the code's too large and complex to fix, or something along these lines. Oh, and at the same time they do have irc and mail and skins.. so what does this tell me? That my priorities have nothing in common with moz priorities, hence if I wanted to hack on an open source browser, konq or something else would come before moz. As things are, I'm fairly happy with the combination of lynx and old netscape, and I'm working on other open source things that I feel are more interesting to me.
The trouble with opera is that it's unstable on linux. I'm using debian and dynamic opera didn't show images at all (gifs, anyway), and when someone told me I should use static, I did so and images work but sometimes opera locks up X completely. As in, I have to go to console, kill opera and then X totally goes down. So, I'm stuck using netscape for image navigation/jscript and lynx for everything else (~95%). Actually, bad choice of wording here: I'm not stuck, this is very comfortable and useable.. oh, and moz doesn't stop gif animation with Esc. Nor does it have reasonable keyboard shortcuts like opera. Oh, and one more thing: opera don't have vi-like mode like lynx does, which is imho the best part about keyboard shortcuts. See, the whole thing is that I want ot be completely free from mouse - I do a lot of typing between browsing, I may switch to vim and work on a program or a website, and then go to links and browse here and there, so switching one hand to mouse is a major slow-down. IOW, opera went in the right direction but stopped short of reaching the nirvana of input interface: pure keyboard input. You get this quantum leap feeling when you absolutely don't have to use mouse. Lynx has 2 features that accomplish that leap: numbered links and vi-like navigation. If opera had that and didnt' crash X now and then, It'd be perfect and I'd pay for it, even. And when i get a job and don't worry about the money, I'd even pay some extra on top for any browser that did that. And to the "mouse is just as good" croud: I think the difference is that mouse gives ya instant gratification, 10 seconds and you're quick as a fox. But you don't get much faster as time goes by.. with keyboard navigation, it's awkward at first, useable after a few hours, and then it gets faster and faster as you use it, for years. At the end, it's faster and easier, and well worth it if you use computer for a few hours every day on average. Just imho of course.
Ball and chain are uncomfortable (try to jog or exercise with one!), but cameras are perfectly comfortable and don't bother me the least bit. In fact, they make me feel safer. As for WTC.. well, that's the thing, some of these folks were on file, if there were cameras everywhere that could id them, they would perhaps be caught. In fact they *were* cought on some waldbaums cams and atm cams, the only problem is that the cams weren't set up to compare faces to a database. If they were, who knows. But an armed chap in the cabin can't harm, either.
Well, placing them in homes of convicted felons is useless because they tend to break the law outside their homes. As for gov't housing project, you might be on to something, I bet many inhabitants will appreciate that, with crime rates that high. They are the most vulnerable to crime, imho - if a middle-class guy is mugged by a street punk, the police will always believe the victim, if it's two low-lives, it may not be that easy.. in fact, crime may never be reported due to the victim's distrust of the law. Now if the crime is caught live, this is not a problem. As for people who oppose CCTV.. I'd imagine most of them act from misguided love for freedom rather than from having something to hide, so I'd advise against tapping their homes - which would be pointless even if they indeed were up to some crimes, as they would just take the criminal activity outside their homes.
Ummm.. That's the whole point - it helps investigation after the fact, and thus discourages the criminal.
There is this unhealthy system or mechanism, whatever you may call it known as "education system". It's obsessed with categorizing students, teachers and schools in classes, from the worst to the best. What do you need to do that? You need grades and tests. Teacher whose students get best grades is better. Schools with best grades is higher on the ladder. *That's* the name of the game.
What's the #1 lesson, the unspoken rule in every school? Get most with the least effort - that is, highest grades with the least effort. The smarter students actually learn less than the dim ones - they are better at getting A with least knowledge.
Another important and closely related skill is forgetting the formulas 10 minutes after the test - short-spam memory.
Why is a reference book forbidden on a test? What do you see in NASA engineering rooms - do you see the supervisor shouting "What the hell is *THAT*? - and pulling out a math book from under the table paper. "Oh, I'm sorry" - says the shuttle engineer - "I just forgot one formula there." The answer is quite simple - it's easier on teachers. If reference was allowed, you'd have to create a new problem for each exam, you'd perhaps have to create exam questions that have some relation to the real world - and that's tough. You can't seriously expect that on $20k salary, can you?
The art of solving real-life problems is live above all, and education system is dead as fossils in the british museum. It's hard to trace even the subtlest relation between the two.
If you want drones, if you want robots - keep your tests and grades. If you want Da Vinci's and Einsteins, throw them out. This is not a pipe dream, there's a school in england that is free of any compulsion and it's running for decades now and it works just fine. John Gotti, a teacher of the year from NY, US has said that there's no hope for the education system as it is right now and the only way out he sees is home education. I think he is working in a some new independant school in Ohio or somewhere now (anyone have more info on this?).
Oh, there's a good word that's the root of all evil in the education system - compulsion. You cannot beat a kid with sticks into an intelligent, resourceful, capable professional. Whenever it does happen, it happens *despite* the whole system of education. It fails somewhere, and you get your Torvalds or whoever.
An ideal learning environment IMHO would be a school where a bunch of kids are free to make any sort of research or a project they want. Teachers would be there to help and guide them when help is requested. If they don't want to do anything, if they want to play nintendo, they go home and play nintendo (or don't come to school at all). Okay, so 40% or 80% won't come there at all - so school overcrowding is solved, future gas station clerks will practice their moves in tekken or watch friends reruns, and future shuttle engineers or teachers or programmers are learning in an environment that's actually, you know, is perfect for learning. Pipe dream indeed.
But that don't matter. Education is an industry, and if 80% of kids don't go through it, the industry, the machine is mortally wounded. We want kids in schools, not on the streets, even if they turn schools into a combination of a concentration camp on one hand and a street/gang place on the other. It's like Bush said "opponents say that we have 'test' mentality - but let's put that logic to the test (notice pun) - if kids are tested for arithmetics, guess what, that's what they're going to know - arithmetics". Great logic. 10s of thousands in Yale education are paying off, that is, if he wrote this himself.
What can we do? Nothing, really. If there's going to be a change, it's going to be incremental, and will take decades if not centuries. It's going to be small private schools, home education, john gottis that act from inside the concentration camps that will eventually lead to the big change.
I'm sorry if this post is incidental to the story, I think it's important enough to compensate for that.
Here's some links:
Summerhill freedom school
Sorry, I can't find the Gotti page anywhere.. I read about it on K5 but apparently they don't archive all old stories. Can anyone post link in a reply?
Also, I don't want to offend any teachers. They have to follow the rules or they'll be fired. They have to work on low wages with students who don't want to learn whatever the program says they should on that day. It's a miracle they get *anything* done at all.