Re:Emphasis on the light, please.
on
Vertical Farming
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· Score: 1
It's my understanding that the wind is much stronger higher off the ground. So 10 windmills on 20' towers are going to harvest a lot less wind energy than 1 windmill on a 100' tower.
If I wanted to see harsh reality I'd put the book down, turn off the TV, or stop playing the video game.
I have nothing against people who enjoy tragedy. To each their own. But to me, happy endings in entertainment will never be cliche. No matter how many hundred shiny happy people appear on screen, you can see billions of tragic endings in real life.
In a business environment, it's not the end user's job to RTFM. It's the end user's job to DHFW (Do His/Her Fucking Work). The technical staff should have set up the user workstation so that everything they need is easy to accessible and anything they could possibly do to fuck it up is locked down and disabled.
For a home hobbyist, telling him RTFM is fine (especially if you include helpful hints, like telling him to lookup 'du' for directory size or 'man -k' to find commands, or refer him to the Linux documentation project for helpful HOWTO documents). But if you're a system administrator and one of your users is having printer problems, it is your problem, not his.
The original article is about technical training for support staff. If someone calls on the phone with a problem, and the technician says, "Give me a few hours, I have to go RTFM for a solution" it will not go over well.
Formal training won't teach you everything, but it can help you troubleshoot common problems and give you a framework for approaching other ones. One of the most difficult problems I had while learning Linux was getting a feel for which combination of search terms (inside a manual or on the web) would lead me to the section I needed.
The only way anyone will ever truly be able to do "what they love" is by first being a "money whore" (or being born rich).
So true. I went into Computer Science because I didn't want my family to face the same financial hardships my parents faced while raising me and my siblings. I'm not trying to abuse the system, or slack off, or produce anything but the best possible designs with thorough testing and superb documentation. But there are dozens of fields of knowledge that interest me, and I picked this one because I researched the matter and thought it was something I could stand that would also pay the bills.
I do enjoy my job, but not nearly so much that I enjoy arriving at work more than arriving at home after work.
I disagree. We had anonymous reviews for our college professors, and all it led to was tenure for people who didn't make the students actually do any work.
I don't believe in busy work and rote work for its own sake, especially not in college. But I learned the most from the two professors who pushed me the hardest and gave me high loads of challenging work. Both got tenure years before the university instituted an anonymous review policy.
Free-market style review and promotion policies don't apply well to a school. The Supply is an education, but the Demand from kids is as little work as possible.
Can a quantum computer create prime numbers so large that another quantum computer could not factor the composite?
I believe the trick with quantum computers is that they can attempt all combinations simultaneously. If that's the case, then the size of the target number is only significant if it exceeds the memory capacity of the quantum computer attempting the crack.
This book: http://www.simonsingh.net/The_Code_Book.html makes a reasonably good attempt at explaining the basic concepts of quantum computing and RSA to the average person (which includes me).
Funny, the crossover Outlook and Acadia are EPA rated at mileage 18/26 (front wheel drive), which gives them similar or better fuel economy than every minivan on the market except for the uplevel Honda Odyssey's with cylinder deactivation.
What did people do 20+ years ago before this truck and SUV thing happened? Did people just not pull trailers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fue l_Economy
The United State's CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) restricts the average fuel economy each automaker's lineup of cars and light trucks must meet, and the requirements for light trucks is lower than the requirement for cars. Huge pickups, SUVs, and vans are exempt from the requirements entirely, originally to protect farmers and contractors who require heavy equipment.
The rules were obviously implemented with a noble intention - reducing fuel usage. But as an unintended result, automakers could more easily obey CAFE guidelines by making a midsize SUV than a large sedan or wagon. The best known abuse of the rules is the Hummer H2, which was purposely engineered to be porkishly overweight so it be considered a heavy vehicle and not factor into General Motor's CAFE ratings.
CAFE is a large factor, perhaps the largest factor, in the American SUV boom of the past 15 years and the corresponding decrease in the number of large sedans and especially large wagons.
Now, to be fair to the automakers, we still have outrageously cheap gas in comparison to Europe and Japan. I'm sure if we had been paying $4 or $5 per gallon for the past 20 years, no amount of marketing would have sold a massive volume of big SUVs and pickups on the American market. (Then again, if we had been paying $4 or $5 per gallon of fuel for the past 20 years, CAFE would probably have been unnecessary.)
And I could show you inefficiencies and poorly-formed code and design patterns in projects that do use Struts/Shale/WebWork.
In my experience (I admit I'm no software development guru), the frameworks make for clean code in most cases. The exceptions are uses that are not planned for in the framework, or features that are poorly documented. Then you have a hugely kluged workaround or hack to the framework code itself to permit something that might otherwise be straightforward to implement.
And of course, there's the learning curve. It took me about two weeks to move from C++ to Java. JSP EL, Taglibs, Struts, XDoclet, Ant, and Hibernate collectively required more than a year of working and researching before I could call myself modestly competent. I had foolishly hoped that moving from C++ app development to Java web work would be easy - only to find that over half my work is adding or changing XML configuration files, writing JSP code and JSP expression language code, and changing Java comment annotations, and not working with Java directly.
The problem with that in the setting is that the Fourth Age is the age of man. The elder elves head across the sea. The wizards are gone (although if you read the Silmarillion, some of the other wizards are still out there somewhere). The rings of power that survived are powerless.
Tolkien's books have the really cool events in the ancient past, the moderately cool events in the distant past, the last little footnotes to the story happen in [i]The Hobbit[/i] and [i]The Lord of the Rings[/i], and everything gets really boring afterwards.
I think anyone writing a Middle Earth MMORPG should toss that out the window - invent lieutenants of Melkior and new species that remained hidden. Invent new rules for regular humans to master the magic of Gandalf or Saruman. Basically Dungeons and Dragons'ify Middle Earth for the sake of making the game interesting. But I bet millions of diehard fans would call it blasphemy.
My wife and I use XP at home. It's been five years, it only crashed when I had driver problems with a wireless card.
At work, we have laptops and workstations running 2000 service pack 4 and XP. Likewise, they only ever fail with hardware problems.
But the servers? 2000 Server and 2003 Server - hit them hard enough with constant loads, and down they go. Or they're technically still up, but they stop responding to pings and keyboard input until you get tired of waiting (10 minutes, half an hour, 24 hours) and reboot.
You can run the CPU of Linux servers at 100% all day for days at a time, and user interface responsiveness is noticeably slow but they'll keep right on trucking.
A good support license from Microsoft costs a fortune. So you're left to hire Windows technicians and hope they know what they're doing... which is no different from in the Linux world.
Now, if you have a big company with a large existing Microsoft infrastructure, you need one hell of a business case to transition everything to Linux. But for a small company, or a new site for a large company, Red Hat is worth considering.
Suburban living is not completely to blame for the obesity issues in the U.S. today. I don't know where you live, but when I was a kid I and dozens of other classmates walked to and from home from school. A mile and a half each way is nice exercise, especially for an elementary school student. Assuming conditions permit it, kids should walk to learn to walk to if only for a short time school.
There are no sidewalks in my suburban neighborhood, curvy roads, and a 45 mph speed limit which is frequently exceeded by local drivers. Forgive me for being overprotective, but I'm not letting my kids walk in that.
Obviously if you really want to save money, it's price shopping. But a frozen pizza that can feed 3 hungry people for $5 isn't bad. You can do better on money with health food, but the healthier food takes longer to prepare.
Willpower isn't the whole problem in a vacuum. If 30% more of the US population is obese today than it was 70 years ago, 90 million people didn't all collectively decide to stop eating right and start eating wrong. (Of course, 70 years ago the US population was smaller than 300 million. But you get the point.) Immigrants that move to the US have a higher chance of becoming obese and people moving from the US to other countries with different lifestyles have a higher chance of becoming thin. Willpower is the solution on an individual level, but it's not the entire problem or the solution for the whole culture. You aren't going to convince even half of the growing population of obese in the world to just eat less and move more.
Again I am not sure which measures of efficiency are being spoken of here, but even a couple of percent reduction of fuel burnt would mean astronomical savings in money, easing of political pressure and of course conserving the resource itself.
Long term, that's what it means. Short term, it means (from the article) a $1000-$1500 increase in engine production costs, plus additional expenses in safety measures, safety testing, and the development of maintenance manuals and training for mechanics.
Automakers are in business to make a profit. This tech will take years of work to go into production, and a few more years before it is profitable. I predict it never makes it to production, because there is an environmental case but not an economic one.
Obesity among children is a very new and concerning issue. (How concerning is debatable given our ultra-healthy yet exercise deprived lifestyles. I also say among children because cases of excessive obesity can be very easily found among the rich in the early 1900's (robber barons anyone?))
Before I begin, I am not trying to pass the buck on this. I accept full responsibility for my mistakes.
There are tremendous cultural and economic differences between today and the past. In the 1900s, obesity was a sign of wealth, so it was less socially frowned upon versus today. Today is the opposite.
When our grandchildren grew up in the US, lifestyles were dramatically different. If you grew up in a rural area, you probably worked on the family farm. If you grew up in a small town or large city, you played in the neighborhood. The suburbs as we know them almost didn't exist. You most likely had a stay-at-home mother, who probably sent you outside to play between meals to keep you out of her hair. Most of your meals were probably home cooked.
Thanks to our stupid massive shift to suburban living, life is dramatically different. You have to drive to get a bottle of milk or go to the post office. You have to drive to get to work. You have to drive to get to school. The parents are out of the house longer each day and less energetic by the time they get home. Both parents probably work, so neither has as much time or energy for making a home-cooked meal.
The powers that be have decided one way for American school to compete with Europe and Japan is ever increasing volumes of homework, which is one more parasite on children's free time and playtime. People like to say "back in my day"... but my youngest brothers and cousins have a lot more homework than I did in the same grade 15 years back.
And last but not least, thanks to the diligent efforts of the media we're all terrified that our children might be injured by stray animals or prowling pedophiles. Even 20 years ago most of the kids in my small town played out on the streets during the day. Now, a good portion of kids stay at home and watch TV or play playstations because Moms and Dads are terrified for their safety. (I don't mean to be callous about the awful things that happen to children periodically. But these concerned parents put their children on a guaranteed track to obesity and diabetes in response to the comparatively insignificant risk of rabid animals or sexual predators.)
Last, we have a huge selection of food items that are cheap and easy to prepare. You can go to a farmer's market and get a week's worth of food for just a few dollars. But you can buy Ramen Noodles, Chef Boyardee pasta, and frozen pizza for a week for just a few dollars more and cut your meal preparation time down to less than a minute.
I'm not saying we are individually blameless. Ultimately the responsibility lies with us. But the social and economic framework we live in makes bad eating and inactivity much easier and more tempting today than it was in the past.
I'm pretty sure that they would support DirectX 10 if they can get everything else in the pipeline working. If you look around the ReactOS site and read the forums, I think there are posts to the effect.
Of course, if you pardon my pessimism I think the chances that a volunteer project will cleanly reverse engineer even the vast majority of Windows 2000 is rather small. I wish them the best, but they're tackling an enormous task.
Millions of people install and use Windows everyday. I guess it's only FUD when it refers to real linux problems as opposed to made up M$ ones...
That's right, millions of people install and use Windows every day, and Microsoft has multi-billion dollar annual profits.
I don't give a damn about their monopolistic tendencies, I don't care about their past history, and I certainly don't have a personal vendetta against Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates. But I'm astonished and enraged that so many major bugs in Vista have come to light - problems with iTunes being the most visible. I work in software development, I appreciate how hard it is to capture all the bugs. However, I believe that someone with billions of dollars at their disposal for development can do better than this.
And don't get me started on performance. Windows NT ran fine on 128 MB of RAM. There's no excuse for Vista premium to recommend 1 GB as a bare minimum for good performance. Microsoft has enough money to hire 10,000 people for the sole purpose of optimizing every piece of Vista code and then testing it to death and beyond to make sure the optimization is stable. (I'm usually not one for conspiracy theories, but I honestly wonder whether Microsoft and the major PC vendors really do have an arrangement where Microsoft produces inefficient software to drive new hardware sales.)
Conversely, Linux and all of the software that comes with it in the freely downloadable distributions is free. You can burn it to disks, give it to friends, modify it yourself for personal use, modify it yourself and distribute the modifications (with source code, of course), and install a single copy on 15,000 computers.
If I have problems with Linux, I admit it's a pain in the butt - but since me and 95% of the computer-owning US populace didn't pay the vendor about $100 in software license costs every few years for the past decade, I'm willing to give Linux a lot more slack. That's especially true since it is a lot more free. I have it running on my home PC, I have it running on older boxes as routers and network storage, I use liveCDs as recovery disks when my other PCs (both Windows and Linux) have problems, and it only cost me about $2.00 in CD-R disks.
Warning: anecdotal evidence is presented in the following argument.
In my experience, most grade school teachers do not like mathematics. Students first encounter teachers genuinely enthusiastic about mathematics and logical puzzles in high school. By that point, the majority have already acquired the same distaste for math that their previous teachers possessed.
I don't see an easy solution. As much as I love math, if I was to start teaching I would find it difficult to be excited about teaching addition and substraction to elementary school students.
Nothing stops you from using plain SQL in hibernate. I use the Hibernate Query Language or Query By Criteria for anything that involves one or two tables, but for queries that involve more than that I use named SQL queries and stored procedures.
On the other hand, the learning curve is really steep. I don't have experience with any other ORM for comparison, but it took me almost a year of occasional use to get really comfortable with it.
As opposed to windows, when IE, Word, and Outlook crash or you just plain get the blue screen. Or, you can have a virus wipe out your hard drive, change your name to "Gigli", and email your porn to Grandma.
But that's okay, it's been labelled 'final' by Microsoft.
They've also put in *mandatory* training every month that teachers have to do on their own time, training that is a complete waste of time (think "self-improvement seminar" type crap).
I'm sure the original idea behind all that "continuing education" requirements was to make sure that teachers kept learning and improving. I can understand the ideas behind it, but for the teachers who don't care it won't help, and for those who know what they're doing (or for that matter, believe they know what they're doing and don't want to change) it's just a burden. So mostly it's a waste of time and money.
What's the answer, though? If you let administrators hire and fire based upon loose criteria, abuse of the power (nepotism and eliminating senior teachers to save money) becomes rampant. If you set up some sort of review system, students will undoubtedly play favorites and mistreat skilled but uncharismatic teachers.
Aside from the general recommendation to get involved and do your own part, I don't see any general method of improving the system as a whole.
You have papers, quizzes, tests, and homework to grade outside of class, and for high school it's common to assign homework a few days per week. That will eat countless hours of time, and you won't be able to tackle most of it during your school day down time. If you're teaching any science other than mathematics, you'll also have to set up and clean up labs.
I've also heard horror stories about mountains of bureaucratic paperwork and nonsense that teachers must wade through. I can't speak for how accurate that is, though.
Regardless, most teachers I know love the summers but really do work long hours during the school year.
No, jackass. They raised my taxes, built a new stadium for the football team, gave the administrator a raise so he can drive a $90,000 Mercedes instead of a $60,000 Lexus, and laid off some part time teachers.
That's the fucking problem.
(And for the record, I have nothing against sports. Kids should be encouraged to participate in team sports and mandated to get actual demanding exercise in gym class. But don't prioritize extracurricular sports over education fundamentals.)
Oh, I see your point. For someone trying to play Xbox360 games and install Linux too, the message is "Skip Linux, just buy more games! Make us rich!" For someone intent only on installing Linux, "fuck off and die" is basically right.
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It's my understanding that the wind is much stronger higher off the ground. So 10 windmills on 20' towers are going to harvest a lot less wind energy than 1 windmill on a 100' tower.
If I wanted to see harsh reality I'd put the book down, turn off the TV, or stop playing the video game.
I have nothing against people who enjoy tragedy. To each their own. But to me, happy endings in entertainment will never be cliche. No matter how many hundred shiny happy people appear on screen, you can see billions of tragic endings in real life.
What?
In a business environment, it's not the end user's job to RTFM. It's the end user's job to DHFW (Do His/Her Fucking Work). The technical staff should have set up the user workstation so that everything they need is easy to accessible and anything they could possibly do to fuck it up is locked down and disabled.
For a home hobbyist, telling him RTFM is fine (especially if you include helpful hints, like telling him to lookup 'du' for directory size or 'man -k' to find commands, or refer him to the Linux documentation project for helpful HOWTO documents). But if you're a system administrator and one of your users is having printer problems, it is your problem, not his.
The original article is about technical training for support staff. If someone calls on the phone with a problem, and the technician says, "Give me a few hours, I have to go RTFM for a solution" it will not go over well.
Formal training won't teach you everything, but it can help you troubleshoot common problems and give you a framework for approaching other ones. One of the most difficult problems I had while learning Linux was getting a feel for which combination of search terms (inside a manual or on the web) would lead me to the section I needed.
The only way anyone will ever truly be able to do "what they love" is by first being a "money whore" (or being born rich).
So true. I went into Computer Science because I didn't want my family to face the same financial hardships my parents faced while raising me and my siblings. I'm not trying to abuse the system, or slack off, or produce anything but the best possible designs with thorough testing and superb documentation. But there are dozens of fields of knowledge that interest me, and I picked this one because I researched the matter and thought it was something I could stand that would also pay the bills.
I do enjoy my job, but not nearly so much that I enjoy arriving at work more than arriving at home after work.
I disagree. We had anonymous reviews for our college professors, and all it led to was tenure for people who didn't make the students actually do any work.
I don't believe in busy work and rote work for its own sake, especially not in college. But I learned the most from the two professors who pushed me the hardest and gave me high loads of challenging work. Both got tenure years before the university instituted an anonymous review policy.
Free-market style review and promotion policies don't apply well to a school. The Supply is an education, but the Demand from kids is as little work as possible.
Can a quantum computer create prime numbers so large that another quantum computer could not factor the composite?
I believe the trick with quantum computers is that they can attempt all combinations simultaneously. If that's the case, then the size of the target number is only significant if it exceeds the memory capacity of the quantum computer attempting the crack.
This book: http://www.simonsingh.net/The_Code_Book.html makes a reasonably good attempt at explaining the basic concepts of quantum computing and RSA to the average person (which includes me).
Funny, the crossover Outlook and Acadia are EPA rated at mileage 18/26 (front wheel drive), which gives them similar or better fuel economy than every minivan on the market except for the uplevel Honda Odyssey's with cylinder deactivation.
What did people do 20+ years ago before this truck and SUV thing happened? Did people just not pull trailers?
e l_Economy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fu
The United State's CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) restricts the average fuel economy each automaker's lineup of cars and light trucks must meet, and the requirements for light trucks is lower than the requirement for cars. Huge pickups, SUVs, and vans are exempt from the requirements entirely, originally to protect farmers and contractors who require heavy equipment.
The rules were obviously implemented with a noble intention - reducing fuel usage. But as an unintended result, automakers could more easily obey CAFE guidelines by making a midsize SUV than a large sedan or wagon. The best known abuse of the rules is the Hummer H2, which was purposely engineered to be porkishly overweight so it be considered a heavy vehicle and not factor into General Motor's CAFE ratings.
CAFE is a large factor, perhaps the largest factor, in the American SUV boom of the past 15 years and the corresponding decrease in the number of large sedans and especially large wagons.
Now, to be fair to the automakers, we still have outrageously cheap gas in comparison to Europe and Japan. I'm sure if we had been paying $4 or $5 per gallon for the past 20 years, no amount of marketing would have sold a massive volume of big SUVs and pickups on the American market. (Then again, if we had been paying $4 or $5 per gallon of fuel for the past 20 years, CAFE would probably have been unnecessary.)
And I could show you inefficiencies and poorly-formed code and design patterns in projects that do use Struts/Shale/WebWork.
In my experience (I admit I'm no software development guru), the frameworks make for clean code in most cases. The exceptions are uses that are not planned for in the framework, or features that are poorly documented. Then you have a hugely kluged workaround or hack to the framework code itself to permit something that might otherwise be straightforward to implement.
And of course, there's the learning curve. It took me about two weeks to move from C++ to Java. JSP EL, Taglibs, Struts, XDoclet, Ant, and Hibernate collectively required more than a year of working and researching before I could call myself modestly competent. I had foolishly hoped that moving from C++ app development to Java web work would be easy - only to find that over half my work is adding or changing XML configuration files, writing JSP code and JSP expression language code, and changing Java comment annotations, and not working with Java directly.
The problem with that in the setting is that the Fourth Age is the age of man. The elder elves head across the sea. The wizards are gone (although if you read the Silmarillion, some of the other wizards are still out there somewhere). The rings of power that survived are powerless.
Tolkien's books have the really cool events in the ancient past, the moderately cool events in the distant past, the last little footnotes to the story happen in [i]The Hobbit[/i] and [i]The Lord of the Rings[/i], and everything gets really boring afterwards.
I think anyone writing a Middle Earth MMORPG should toss that out the window - invent lieutenants of Melkior and new species that remained hidden. Invent new rules for regular humans to master the magic of Gandalf or Saruman. Basically Dungeons and Dragons'ify Middle Earth for the sake of making the game interesting. But I bet millions of diehard fans would call it blasphemy.
Sorry, kiddo.
My wife and I use XP at home. It's been five years, it only crashed when I had driver problems with a wireless card.
At work, we have laptops and workstations running 2000 service pack 4 and XP. Likewise, they only ever fail with hardware problems.
But the servers? 2000 Server and 2003 Server - hit them hard enough with constant loads, and down they go. Or they're technically still up, but they stop responding to pings and keyboard input until you get tired of waiting (10 minutes, half an hour, 24 hours) and reboot.
You can run the CPU of Linux servers at 100% all day for days at a time, and user interface responsiveness is noticeably slow but they'll keep right on trucking.
A good support license from Microsoft costs a fortune. So you're left to hire Windows technicians and hope they know what they're doing... which is no different from in the Linux world.
Now, if you have a big company with a large existing Microsoft infrastructure, you need one hell of a business case to transition everything to Linux. But for a small company, or a new site for a large company, Red Hat is worth considering.
Suburban living is not completely to blame for the obesity issues in the U.S. today. I don't know where you live, but when I was a kid I and dozens of other classmates walked to and from home from school. A mile and a half each way is nice exercise, especially for an elementary school student. Assuming conditions permit it, kids should walk to learn to walk to if only for a short time school.
1 376208,00.html (Of course there are lies, damn lies, and statistics) In a 1984 survey of 2900 kids, homework time was up 51% since 1981.
There are no sidewalks in my suburban neighborhood, curvy roads, and a 45 mph speed limit which is frequently exceeded by local drivers. Forgive me for being overprotective, but I'm not letting my kids walk in that.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,
Obviously if you really want to save money, it's price shopping. But a frozen pizza that can feed 3 hungry people for $5 isn't bad. You can do better on money with health food, but the healthier food takes longer to prepare.
Willpower isn't the whole problem in a vacuum. If 30% more of the US population is obese today than it was 70 years ago, 90 million people didn't all collectively decide to stop eating right and start eating wrong. (Of course, 70 years ago the US population was smaller than 300 million. But you get the point.) Immigrants that move to the US have a higher chance of becoming obese and people moving from the US to other countries with different lifestyles have a higher chance of becoming thin. Willpower is the solution on an individual level, but it's not the entire problem or the solution for the whole culture. You aren't going to convince even half of the growing population of obese in the world to just eat less and move more.
Again I am not sure which measures of efficiency are being spoken of here, but even a couple of percent reduction of fuel burnt would mean astronomical savings in money, easing of political pressure and of course conserving the resource itself.
Long term, that's what it means. Short term, it means (from the article) a $1000-$1500 increase in engine production costs, plus additional expenses in safety measures, safety testing, and the development of maintenance manuals and training for mechanics.
Automakers are in business to make a profit. This tech will take years of work to go into production, and a few more years before it is profitable. I predict it never makes it to production, because there is an environmental case but not an economic one.
Obesity among children is a very new and concerning issue. (How concerning is debatable given our ultra-healthy yet exercise deprived lifestyles. I also say among children because cases of excessive obesity can be very easily found among the rich in the early 1900's (robber barons anyone?))
Before I begin, I am not trying to pass the buck on this. I accept full responsibility for my mistakes.
There are tremendous cultural and economic differences between today and the past. In the 1900s, obesity was a sign of wealth, so it was less socially frowned upon versus today. Today is the opposite.
When our grandchildren grew up in the US, lifestyles were dramatically different. If you grew up in a rural area, you probably worked on the family farm. If you grew up in a small town or large city, you played in the neighborhood. The suburbs as we know them almost didn't exist. You most likely had a stay-at-home mother, who probably sent you outside to play between meals to keep you out of her hair. Most of your meals were probably home cooked.
Thanks to our stupid massive shift to suburban living, life is dramatically different. You have to drive to get a bottle of milk or go to the post office. You have to drive to get to work. You have to drive to get to school. The parents are out of the house longer each day and less energetic by the time they get home. Both parents probably work, so neither has as much time or energy for making a home-cooked meal.
The powers that be have decided one way for American school to compete with Europe and Japan is ever increasing volumes of homework, which is one more parasite on children's free time and playtime. People like to say "back in my day"... but my youngest brothers and cousins have a lot more homework than I did in the same grade 15 years back.
And last but not least, thanks to the diligent efforts of the media we're all terrified that our children might be injured by stray animals or prowling pedophiles. Even 20 years ago most of the kids in my small town played out on the streets during the day. Now, a good portion of kids stay at home and watch TV or play playstations because Moms and Dads are terrified for their safety. (I don't mean to be callous about the awful things that happen to children periodically. But these concerned parents put their children on a guaranteed track to obesity and diabetes in response to the comparatively insignificant risk of rabid animals or sexual predators.)
Last, we have a huge selection of food items that are cheap and easy to prepare. You can go to a farmer's market and get a week's worth of food for just a few dollars. But you can buy Ramen Noodles, Chef Boyardee pasta, and frozen pizza for a week for just a few dollars more and cut your meal preparation time down to less than a minute.
I'm not saying we are individually blameless. Ultimately the responsibility lies with us. But the social and economic framework we live in makes bad eating and inactivity much easier and more tempting today than it was in the past.
I'm pretty sure that they would support DirectX 10 if they can get everything else in the pipeline working. If you look around the ReactOS site and read the forums, I think there are posts to the effect.
Of course, if you pardon my pessimism I think the chances that a volunteer project will cleanly reverse engineer even the vast majority of Windows 2000 is rather small. I wish them the best, but they're tackling an enormous task.
Millions of people install and use Windows everyday. I guess it's only FUD when it refers to real linux problems as opposed to made up M$ ones...
That's right, millions of people install and use Windows every day, and Microsoft has multi-billion dollar annual profits.
I don't give a damn about their monopolistic tendencies, I don't care about their past history, and I certainly don't have a personal vendetta against Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates. But I'm astonished and enraged that so many major bugs in Vista have come to light - problems with iTunes being the most visible. I work in software development, I appreciate how hard it is to capture all the bugs. However, I believe that someone with billions of dollars at their disposal for development can do better than this.
And don't get me started on performance. Windows NT ran fine on 128 MB of RAM. There's no excuse for Vista premium to recommend 1 GB as a bare minimum for good performance. Microsoft has enough money to hire 10,000 people for the sole purpose of optimizing every piece of Vista code and then testing it to death and beyond to make sure the optimization is stable. (I'm usually not one for conspiracy theories, but I honestly wonder whether Microsoft and the major PC vendors really do have an arrangement where Microsoft produces inefficient software to drive new hardware sales.)
Conversely, Linux and all of the software that comes with it in the freely downloadable distributions is free. You can burn it to disks, give it to friends, modify it yourself for personal use, modify it yourself and distribute the modifications (with source code, of course), and install a single copy on 15,000 computers.
If I have problems with Linux, I admit it's a pain in the butt - but since me and 95% of the computer-owning US populace didn't pay the vendor about $100 in software license costs every few years for the past decade, I'm willing to give Linux a lot more slack. That's especially true since it is a lot more free. I have it running on my home PC, I have it running on older boxes as routers and network storage, I use liveCDs as recovery disks when my other PCs (both Windows and Linux) have problems, and it only cost me about $2.00 in CD-R disks.
Warning: anecdotal evidence is presented in the following argument.
In my experience, most grade school teachers do not like mathematics. Students first encounter teachers genuinely enthusiastic about mathematics and logical puzzles in high school. By that point, the majority have already acquired the same distaste for math that their previous teachers possessed.
I don't see an easy solution. As much as I love math, if I was to start teaching I would find it difficult to be excited about teaching addition and substraction to elementary school students.
Nothing stops you from using plain SQL in hibernate. I use the Hibernate Query Language or Query By Criteria for anything that involves one or two tables, but for queries that involve more than that I use named SQL queries and stored procedures.
On the other hand, the learning curve is really steep. I don't have experience with any other ORM for comparison, but it took me almost a year of occasional use to get really comfortable with it.
As opposed to windows, when IE, Word, and Outlook crash or you just plain get the blue screen. Or, you can have a virus wipe out your hard drive, change your name to "Gigli", and email your porn to Grandma.
But that's okay, it's been labelled 'final' by Microsoft.
They've also put in *mandatory* training every month that teachers have to do on their own time, training that is a complete waste of time (think "self-improvement seminar" type crap).
I'm sure the original idea behind all that "continuing education" requirements was to make sure that teachers kept learning and improving. I can understand the ideas behind it, but for the teachers who don't care it won't help, and for those who know what they're doing (or for that matter, believe they know what they're doing and don't want to change) it's just a burden. So mostly it's a waste of time and money.
What's the answer, though? If you let administrators hire and fire based upon loose criteria, abuse of the power (nepotism and eliminating senior teachers to save money) becomes rampant. If you set up some sort of review system, students will undoubtedly play favorites and mistreat skilled but uncharismatic teachers.
Aside from the general recommendation to get involved and do your own part, I don't see any general method of improving the system as a whole.
You have papers, quizzes, tests, and homework to grade outside of class, and for high school it's common to assign homework a few days per week. That will eat countless hours of time, and you won't be able to tackle most of it during your school day down time. If you're teaching any science other than mathematics, you'll also have to set up and clean up labs.
I've also heard horror stories about mountains of bureaucratic paperwork and nonsense that teachers must wade through. I can't speak for how accurate that is, though.
Regardless, most teachers I know love the summers but really do work long hours during the school year.
No, jackass. They raised my taxes, built a new stadium for the football team, gave the administrator a raise so he can drive a $90,000 Mercedes instead of a $60,000 Lexus, and laid off some part time teachers.
That's the fucking problem.
(And for the record, I have nothing against sports. Kids should be encouraged to participate in team sports and mandated to get actual demanding exercise in gym class. But don't prioritize extracurricular sports over education fundamentals.)
Oh, I see your point. For someone trying to play Xbox360 games and install Linux too, the message is "Skip Linux, just buy more games! Make us rich!" For someone intent only on installing Linux, "fuck off and die" is basically right.