There is a huge contingent of medical practitioners, particularly nutritionists, who believe that ASD symptoms are the result of the liver being inadequate to filter toxins from the blood. Diet modifications have been documented to alleviate many ASD symptoms.
How is that colon cleanse going? Solved your heavy metal problems yet?
It needs APIs the hardware people are unwilling/unable to provide and it wants capabilities for the hardware that are out of the hobbyist (used computer) range.
It doesn't address the major EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL problem that is intended to (unsuccessfully) blackmail the video card vendors into exposing their patent and copyright violations (not the stated intent, but certainly the effect).
And it fails to address the "look and feel is in the app not the window manager" problem.
microsoft.com honors DNT... Oh wait, they don't, it's just another way for them to screw with Google. Microsoft tracks you anyway, IE has it on by default in violation of the specification, guess only the people who honor it get screwed.
I'm not against the technology. You have no idea of the patents I hold (or the DOD secrecy orders), some of them assigned to Apple, some to IBM, some to Google. I'm a senior associate at IMM. What I'm against is the idea that there is somehow a funding fix for stupid ideas being successful just because underfunding of the stupid idea somehow pushes it out of stupid.
You really do not need a bunch of crap that can be wiped out by one EMP in order to teach. If you do, you are a defective teacher.
The immediacy of a tablet has merits. Lots of them. The backing infrastructure for that is HUGE, but frankly, it's already there.
Maybe we need to talk offline how to recharacterize moves in the right direction as approved expenditures, but if your intent is to get funding for non-dumbass moves, I think we can agree:).
Look, I'll respond to your ad hominim questions, but after you've read the responses, read the rest about the situation here in California.
However, how many education classes have you had?
8, college level, on a quarter system, total of 26 credit hours, which is one class shy of the minimum required for a bachelors of education at some colleges.
How many students have you taught?
Including those in computer science classes and the intro to physics classes, maybe 120? Including one and two-shot presentations, week long seminars, and labs at professional conferences like WWDC? About 7,000. And yeah, I used technology in almost all but the physics classes, but there was technology there, as props (a bowling ball on a rope is a pendulum, which is technology, right?). They were classes about technology. Most of the time I used a whiteboard or presentation software, but I've also used an overhead projector with water soluble pens.
Non-professionally (as a student), I TAed a number of classes and helped students in chemistry and CS labs as a lab assistant for another 800 or so.
With what methods?
Mostly lecture, demonstration, repetition, participation, and reflection.
How many parents have you called?
None. Typically you don't need to call parents of University students or people who pay to attend seminars or professional conferences. I've called security a couple of times, though. IMO it's the damn principals job to do the parent calling at the primary education level. Let him/her do it.
I'm not saying you can't do incrementally better with a bunch of expensive technology. Rich private schools can generally get better results than public schools, but the generally also have involved parents, which is more important than having a bunch of computers, and they typically have in loco parentis agreements which let the teacher/school actually effectively discipline the student, even if they never get discipline at home.
But also realize my SO basically runs a program for California schools in the Bay Area that begs for donations of pencils, paper, dry erase markers, erasers, pencil sharpeners, boxes of crayons, and other basic supplies for primary education in public schools whose higher up administrators make almost a quarter of a million dollars a year each:
That's 5 times the median household income for a resident there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Leandro,_California , and that's basically Oakland (it's right next to the Oakland airport), which is generally acknowledged as a poverty pit, and in 2006 was called "The Murder Capitol of the US".
Something is freaking wrong here, if they were to also start handing out iPads to teachers who were begging for basic supplies from a charity (not that there isn't enough indication above of something being wrong already). If they have money for iPads and multiple administrators, who after 5 years of "frugally" spending the entire median household income per year walk away millionaires, they damn well can afford pencils for the students.
Both my grandmothers (teachers) and two of my aunts (teachers, one for children with behavioral problems) used a typewriter and ditto machines for their tests. They damn well did not need Microsoft Word, and their students landed men on the moon and rovers on Mars.
There's no reason you/need/ a pixel level "mac-dinking" program like Microsoft Word to write a test. There is no reason you need dynamic geometry software or an interactive whiteboard if you know constructions; that will take you all the way through trig.
I have a hard time believing that you/need/ more advanced technology than textbooks, a copy machine, paper, pencils, a chalkboard, and a big chalk compass to teach pretty much anything up to and including calculus. Unless you're a music teacher, PE teacher, or a biology teacher, then you need musical instruments, gym equipment, and fetal pigs.
Does some technology make things easier in the classroom? Yes. But you quickly reach a point of diminishing returns, and as soon as you get there, you aren't buying teaching aids, you are buying toys.
Where do you see yourself being in 10 years? Do you expect to be doing the same things you are doing now for (roughly) the same inflation-adjusted pay, or do you expect to be managing a large(r) group, or running your own company, or living on a farm in Iowa?
If you find yourself at a job which is not aligned with your long term goals, it's probably time to start looking.
Note that just being offered a new position with better pay is not necessarily a reason to leave your current position immediately, unless what you are being offered works towards where you eventually want to find yourself. However, if being offered a new position with slightly better pay has you asking the question, it's probably time to start looking, even if you're not immediately departing.
I would almost say that you should keep your eyes open all the time, if doing so won't interfere with you doing your current job to the best of your ability, even if you are perfectly happy where you are now.
You want me to type a test about logarithms with keynote?
No, I'd prefer you do it in HTML and put it up on an internal web server for use by other teachers. You can edit HTML in a browser, no problem.
What am I suppose to create my teaching applets with?
Given that the devices in question are for the teachers use and not the kids use, I'm highly doubtful that you need teaching applets at all, but assuming you actually do, the correct answer for that is "you do it in X Code on the one or two Macintoshes that the school bought as part of the support infrastructure when they bought the iPads.
In the meantime I need to brush up on LaTeX and install LyX again but most worksheets, tests, investigative tasks, etc. are all typed with a version of Word and Microsoft's Formula Editor. Not having a compatible formula editor is a nonstarter.
By "compatible", you mean "buy into the whole Microsoft ecosystem using the Microsoft Formula Editor as a gateway drug", right?
Hi Dmitry! Thanks for the great code review! If you could please look at the new patches we've put up on github, and sign off on them, then the changes can make next Monday's release!
They could make it go faster than televised bass fishing.
Seriously, no one not wearing white polyester pants up to below their chest and golf shoes, or someone wearing hip waders and holding a fly reel, would have the patience to watch this.
Even if you could trick someone into watching it, you're never going to get beyond the "accumulate points" stage, unless there's an end goal, and you can see progress toward that goal well enough that the representation would allow you to predict a winner or a close race.
If it goes anywhere, it'll be because Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison favors a team and drops a bunch of machines into that teams cluster. Actually, if it's Larry Ellison, expect him to drop just enough computers into the underdog to be able to claim a tax write off and fix the Vegas odds to the point he can switch the support at the last minute and cash in.
If you wanted a calculating device, you bought a slide rule. You can still buy new-in-box Pickett's today.
The intent of the teacher was that if we didn't know how to do the math by hand, then having a calculator would just make us unable to do it by hand in the future.
Add a keyboard and a copy of Pages and Keynote and they probably would have been fine with their antique document formats and typing.
Worst case, if their stuff isn't larger than 100MB, they could just use the free version of Zamzar to convert all their documents: http://www.zamzar.com/conversionTypes.php
Hopefully they've put all their lesson plans and course materials online, if only on a school/district internal web server, but of course that would risk someone else being able to take the information and teach from it, so maybe they'd want it locked down for job security reasons, as opposed to, you know, educating the kids. Or God forbid, the kids accessing the information and learning at their own pace, reading ahead, and all sorts of other nasty things that would mean the teachers would have to concentrate on helping the kids having problems learning because they come from the shallow end of the gene pool.
* LibreOffice will do 99% of what most Office users would like.
The vast majority of people I know who use Office products (and I've really tried to pry them off it) are using an older Windows with an older Office, but the thing that they do is use them for their embeddable components and integration with Microsoft SQL Server.
All of these are SMB - small and medium business owners (read: usually 50 people or less), and they have either a consultant or one or two in house people, depending on size, who glues everything together into a vertical market application for the business using Visual Basic, or more recently, C#.
The real win here is the API contracts in user space for shared object modules (read DLLs) that have common functionality, and then also use the IUnknown interface to the class factory to pick up components from other DLLs. So long as the top level interface doesn't change, the internal contracts can go whatever way they want, but are usually versioned.
Microsoft didn't include the SQL functionality or the scriptability in the Office for Mac because this is their bread and butter: tools, certifications, captive market for replacement machines, or new machines, if someone new gets hired, escalating storage over time, etc.. They get one "my computer guy" who they pass around between them and their other SMB friends, and that hooks them on the Microsoft crack.
But realize: there's no capability for that type of ecosystem in Linux because of the lack of top end and intermediate contracts. You don't need something as complicated as DCOM/CORBA to implement this, they are all (effectively) COM components, which is effectively OLE stuff. When they need some third party package to handle the sales tax calculations in their point of sale systems, etc., they buy it, and just use the interfaces.
It's unfortunate that no one has stepped into this type of area for Linux (or BSD), but there really isn't much in the way of interchangeable components. You can't really replace Microsoft's components, either, but that's not the point: they've left enough space for niche component vendors to sell bar code scanner interfaces and so on, and it doesn't matter if they come from one vendor or another, so long as (A) each vendor gets enough to stay alive, (B) enough profit to keep them engaged and therefore keep the ecosystem running, and (C) they all come back to the Microsoft mothership to pay their union dues.
(1) Apple won't allow it because it's a general purpose emulator/interpreter; to use it, you'd have to bundle it with the ROMs so there was no download capability
(2) You'd have to offer it for free, because the first term in the MAME license is "Redistributions may not be sold, nor may they be used in a commercial product or activity."
Together, this means the MAME developers most certainly would not help you out unless you were laying out the costs ($99 + time and effort) with no way of recouping your sunk costs. This would also include an inability to recoup costs for ROM license fees for the game(s) you include, so basically you'd be paying the ROM owner a per copy royalty for a free download, which means an uncapped bleeding expense for you.
So its a bit more than a matter of "not bothering".
People are probably not seeing the AC responses, but several of them have been right on the mark.
You are not qualified to do a technical interview on this person, nor to screen them, nor to write the job posting in the first place.
For the job posting, you need to be able to ask for the skill set you need. To do that, you need to know what skill set you are going to need. If you don't already know Windows, you aren't going to know who to ask for.
For screening, which should have happened before you ever asked someone in for an interview, you need to know if the skill set they claim on their resume matches the job posting; if there are a lot of applicants, you need to verify references, credentials, and job history. This part can be mechanical, assuming you've done a good job on the job posting.
For the interview, you are there to evaluate the degree to which their resume reflects reality (85%) and team fit (15%). Team fit is all about personality. That leaves the technical part; o do this, you need to be able to ask them questions related to their claimed expertise and their claimed work experience, and (potentially) a problem that you've had that you've already solved, and which they would be responsible for solving if it cropped up again.
Your admitted lack of Windows experience means that you won't be able to do 85% of your job as an interviewer effectively. There's going to be some generic overlap between IT realms, but at beast you are talking 25%, or you would have already been able to hire a UNIX system administrator who could pick up the Windows side of things. That still puts you at 60-75% on the fail side.
Hire a domain expert who has knowledge on both sides to consult on the interview. Verify their own knowledge first by conducting a UNIX interview on them. If they didn't lie about knowing their job there, then they probably didn't lie about knowing the Windows side, and are therefore qualified to do the interview.
If you're smart, your consultant was hired already to write the job posting, after working for you in the job role for a week.
A general note:
I personally would excuse myself from the interview process if I had a 75% chance, or even a 60% chance, of my bullshit detector not being triggered because I didn't know what the candidate was talking about, and you need to be prepared to do the same. You're trying to hire someone specifically for knowledge and skills they have which you don't.
Nodding sagely when you don't understand the answer and then hiring someone because they dress like you, get your jokes, and like to eat at the same mexican restaurant you do is only going to buy you that 15%. It's an important 15%, so you should definitely interview them for team fit, but leave the technical interview to a professional with nothing to win or lose on the candidate being/not being hired.
Your math is not entirely correct. People who are sufficiently capable will inevitably become rich/powerful enough there are only minimal threats capable of outright destroying them beyond hope of medical reconstruction. Over time, you will be left with a small minority of ancients orchestrating the actions of everyone bellow themselves while fiercely defending their positions and preventing anyone from climbing up the same way they did. It's probably going to end bloody for them, but not until a couple of generations die because they couldn't afford to "buy time".
It's called a "mutual security game", and the specific name for that particular game is called "GloboCop". It's exactly this model which has removed the latitude for people to live in the world they want, rather than the world that the current superpowers want for them. That's the G12 of the IMF from most perspectives.
People who don't want to live in that globalist world, and admittedly, some of them are not very nice people to begin with, tend to act out with violence when all of their breathing space is exhausted by countries enforcing little things like human rights, while at the same time effectively enforcing an economic hegemony for themselves.
That, in a nutshell, is what's setting off the chains of violence we colloquially call terrorism, and will likely continue to escalate that violence until one side or the other is beaten down.
So as much as I'd like to disagree with you, it's a pretty realistic scenario that there would be a wealth/age divide that also resulted in some tearing down of institutions, but I'm pretty sure it would be a wealth-only divide, rather than age based. Unless Bill Gates and Warren Buffet get their way, in which case it may very well end up wealth/age.
On the other hand, it takes a very few motivated people to crash an economy for a decade or more, and wealth is pretty fickle, as perhaps Zuckerberg could attest these days.
All that said, I'm planning on living as long as technologically possible, since it seems that star travel is going to be limited speed for the foreseeable future, which means that a long life is the only way to make the trip.
Assuming you're in Silicon Valley... Jameco Electronics. Or NXP Semiconductors. Or Micrel. Or Bisco Industries. Or Beyond Components (no idea why the hell they have a store in Payson, Utah). Or Mouser Electronics.
Or if you live in Japan, you want Yodobashi, Bic, or Labi. Akihabara works if you are a tourist, since they have duty free shops, but you'll want to stay away from the main drag unless you are a cosplay otaku.
You can live an upper class life in the US on $10k, as long as you are willing to make a few sacrifices. It's all about your point of view.
I'd like to find the part of the US where $10,000/year would cover rent, utilities (heat/electricity/water), and food...
Look for off-base housing near military bases and student housing near college campuses.
You can get a 4 bedroom 2 bath apartment in Auburn Alabama for $275/month half a mile from the campus. That includes pool, tennis courts, spa, etc., right next to public transit. That leaves you $6700/year for the other stuff.
If you're willing to live in San Antonio, TX, you can get a 1 bedroom at budget suites for $199/month or $2338 a year. If you bump that up to $292/month or $3504 a year, you get a professionally staffed learning center with computers and net access with after school and adult programs.
If you insist on living in Silicon Valley, where recently all the apartments have raised their rent because they think everyone who works at Facebook is suddenly flush with cash (which is still in lockout, so they are trying to cash in on wishful thinking), yeah, you're not going to get by on $10K a year.
Generally, you wouldn't be paying any rent at this income level anyway, since you'd qualify for HUD housing, and the Section 8 program under HUD would give you a rent voucher and you could live where you wanted within the voucher amount. For San Mateo County in California, for example, a two person household bringing in $71,050/year is considered low enough income for subsidized housing, and under $44,400 is enough for a complete subsidy.
By the way, a 40 hour a week minimum wage job will net you $15,080 and the only thing you won't be getting back on your taxes is SSI and medicare contributions. Or you could get a higher than minimum wage job at McDonalds and get medical insurance, prescription coverage, dental, AD&D short and long term disability, dependent life insurance, paid educational assistance, and management training.
You'd be hard put to earn less, unless you are already on partial disability and can't work a full 40 hour work week. Even at this level, you're eligible for SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which is the renamed Food Stamps which uses a debit card in an attempt to prevent fraud.
I mentally translate "JRE" to "MRE" for Minecraft Runtime Environment.
In all seriousness, many banks run a captive Java application for login authentication using challenge/response as an anti-phishing mechanism to prevent storing the credentials. Given that Java is frequently exploited, this isn't a very effective strategy, given the current generation of online channel-breaking attacks.
As my geology prof exclaimed when the class complained about the amount of memorization required: "welcome to college."
Memorization is probably 50% of the work. The other 50% is knowing how to learn. I never learned to do homework until my third year in college. I learned it because of Dr. Tripp's analytical mechanics class: "Lambert, problem 4, up on the board".
One of the worst things about most educational formalism is the unwritten rules that let smart people get away without having to learn how to learn, or at least work to a schedule. The one thing that was the same for all my classes up to that point was that you turned in your homework at the end of class, which meant I did my homework in class and had it done by the time it was due. It got me through 5 AP classes (the school record, at the time) with college credit in all of them, and straight A's in everything but one P.E..class. To this day, I occasionally pause to thank Dr. Tripp.
If you are a teacher reading this, I'd really advise assigning homework at the end of class, and requiring it be turned in at the beginning of class. And to keep people honest, take a day a week to get random people up to the chalkboard/whiteboard to do a problem from the homework assignment.
Slashdot Mirror
For the Europeans amongst us: That's what you get in return for the freedom to bear arms.
For the US citizens amongst us: See your hard earned tax dollars at work.
We get the ability to shoot some percentage of assholes who were "just following orders".
As a European, you've heard of Nuremberg, right?
There is a huge contingent of medical practitioners, particularly nutritionists, who believe that ASD symptoms are the result of the liver being inadequate to filter toxins from the blood. Diet modifications have been documented to alleviate many ASD symptoms.
How is that colon cleanse going? Solved your heavy metal problems yet?
It needs APIs the hardware people are unwilling/unable to provide and it wants capabilities for the hardware that are out of the hobbyist (used computer) range.
It doesn't address the major EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL problem that is intended to (unsuccessfully) blackmail the video card vendors into exposing their patent and copyright violations (not the stated intent, but certainly the effect).
And it fails to address the "look and feel is in the app not the window manager" problem.
Bases covered?
> WILL
[citation needed]
microsoft.com honors DNT ... Oh wait, they don't, it's just another way for them to screw with Google. Microsoft tracks you anyway, IE has it on by default in violation of the specification, guess only the people who honor it get screwed.
Just saying.
Just saying. Not a lot of love from the red light cams when there is a mechanical failure that prevents you getting your car out of gear...
I'm not against the technology. You have no idea of the patents I hold (or the DOD secrecy orders), some of them assigned to Apple, some to IBM, some to Google. I'm a senior associate at IMM. What I'm against is the idea that there is somehow a funding fix for stupid ideas being successful just because underfunding of the stupid idea somehow pushes it out of stupid.
You really do not need a bunch of crap that can be wiped out by one EMP in order to teach. If you do, you are a defective teacher.
The immediacy of a tablet has merits. Lots of them. The backing infrastructure for that is HUGE, but frankly, it's already there.
Maybe we need to talk offline how to recharacterize moves in the right direction as approved expenditures, but if your intent is to get funding for non-dumbass moves, I think we can agree :).
I simply can not credit government wanting more money to line their pockets.
Look, I'll respond to your ad hominim questions, but after you've read the responses, read the rest about the situation here in California.
However, how many education classes have you had?
8, college level, on a quarter system, total of 26 credit hours, which is one class shy of the minimum required for a bachelors of education at some colleges.
How many students have you taught?
Including those in computer science classes and the intro to physics classes, maybe 120? Including one and two-shot presentations, week long seminars, and labs at professional conferences like WWDC? About 7,000. And yeah, I used technology in almost all but the physics classes, but there was technology there, as props (a bowling ball on a rope is a pendulum, which is technology, right?). They were classes about technology. Most of the time I used a whiteboard or presentation software, but I've also used an overhead projector with water soluble pens.
Non-professionally (as a student), I TAed a number of classes and helped students in chemistry and CS labs as a lab assistant for another 800 or so.
With what methods?
Mostly lecture, demonstration, repetition, participation, and reflection.
How many parents have you called?
None. Typically you don't need to call parents of University students or people who pay to attend seminars or professional conferences. I've called security a couple of times, though. IMO it's the damn principals job to do the parent calling at the primary education level. Let him/her do it.
I'm not saying you can't do incrementally better with a bunch of expensive technology. Rich private schools can generally get better results than public schools, but the generally also have involved parents, which is more important than having a bunch of computers, and they typically have in loco parentis agreements which let the teacher/school actually effectively discipline the student, even if they never get discipline at home.
But also realize my SO basically runs a program for California schools in the Bay Area that begs for donations of pencils, paper, dry erase markers, erasers, pencil sharpeners, boxes of crayons, and other basic supplies for primary education in public schools whose higher up administrators make almost a quarter of a million dollars a year each:
http://www.sanleandro.k12.ca.us/20771083115311603/lib/20771083115311603/Supt__Salary_11-12.pdf
That's 5 times the median household income for a resident there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Leandro,_California , and that's basically Oakland (it's right next to the Oakland airport), which is generally acknowledged as a poverty pit, and in 2006 was called "The Murder Capitol of the US".
Something is freaking wrong here, if they were to also start handing out iPads to teachers who were begging for basic supplies from a charity (not that there isn't enough indication above of something being wrong already). If they have money for iPads and multiple administrators, who after 5 years of "frugally" spending the entire median household income per year walk away millionaires, they damn well can afford pencils for the students.
Both my grandmothers (teachers) and two of my aunts (teachers, one for children with behavioral problems) used a typewriter and ditto machines for their tests. They damn well did not need Microsoft Word, and their students landed men on the moon and rovers on Mars.
There's no reason you /need/ a pixel level "mac-dinking" program like Microsoft Word to write a test. There is no reason you need dynamic geometry software or an interactive whiteboard if you know constructions; that will take you all the way through trig.
I have a hard time believing that you /need/ more advanced technology than textbooks, a copy machine, paper, pencils, a chalkboard, and a big chalk compass to teach pretty much anything up to and including calculus. Unless you're a music teacher, PE teacher, or a biology teacher, then you need musical instruments, gym equipment, and fetal pigs.
Does some technology make things easier in the classroom? Yes. But you quickly reach a point of diminishing returns, and as soon as you get there, you aren't buying teaching aids, you are buying toys.
Where do you see yourself being in 10 years? Do you expect to be doing the same things you are doing now for (roughly) the same inflation-adjusted pay, or do you expect to be managing a large(r) group, or running your own company, or living on a farm in Iowa?
If you find yourself at a job which is not aligned with your long term goals, it's probably time to start looking.
Note that just being offered a new position with better pay is not necessarily a reason to leave your current position immediately, unless what you are being offered works towards where you eventually want to find yourself. However, if being offered a new position with slightly better pay has you asking the question, it's probably time to start looking, even if you're not immediately departing.
I would almost say that you should keep your eyes open all the time, if doing so won't interfere with you doing your current job to the best of your ability, even if you are perfectly happy where you are now.
You want me to type a test about logarithms with keynote?
No, I'd prefer you do it in HTML and put it up on an internal web server for use by other teachers. You can edit HTML in a browser, no problem.
What am I suppose to create my teaching applets with?
Given that the devices in question are for the teachers use and not the kids use, I'm highly doubtful that you need teaching applets at all, but assuming you actually do, the correct answer for that is "you do it in X Code on the one or two Macintoshes that the school bought as part of the support infrastructure when they bought the iPads.
In the meantime I need to brush up on LaTeX and install LyX again but most worksheets, tests, investigative tasks, etc. are all typed with a version of Word and Microsoft's Formula Editor. Not having a compatible formula editor is a nonstarter.
By "compatible", you mean "buy into the whole Microsoft ecosystem using the Microsoft Formula Editor as a gateway drug", right?
Hi Dmitry! Thanks for the great code review! If you could please look at the new patches we've put up on github, and sign off on them, then the changes can make next Monday's release!
Seriously, how stupid is publishing this stuff?
They could make it go faster than televised bass fishing.
Seriously, no one not wearing white polyester pants up to below their chest and golf shoes, or someone wearing hip waders and holding a fly reel, would have the patience to watch this.
Even if you could trick someone into watching it, you're never going to get beyond the "accumulate points" stage, unless there's an end goal, and you can see progress toward that goal well enough that the representation would allow you to predict a winner or a close race.
If it goes anywhere, it'll be because Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison favors a team and drops a bunch of machines into that teams cluster. Actually, if it's Larry Ellison, expect him to drop just enough computers into the underdog to be able to claim a tax write off and fix the Vegas odds to the point he can switch the support at the last minute and cash in.
If you wanted a calculating device, you bought a slide rule. You can still buy new-in-box Pickett's today.
The intent of the teacher was that if we didn't know how to do the math by hand, then having a calculator would just make us unable to do it by hand in the future.
Add a keyboard and a copy of Pages and Keynote and they probably would have been fine with their antique document formats and typing.
Worst case, if their stuff isn't larger than 100MB, they could just use the free version of Zamzar to convert all their documents: http://www.zamzar.com/conversionTypes.php
Hopefully they've put all their lesson plans and course materials online, if only on a school/district internal web server, but of course that would risk someone else being able to take the information and teach from it, so maybe they'd want it locked down for job security reasons, as opposed to, you know, educating the kids. Or God forbid, the kids accessing the information and learning at their own pace, reading ahead, and all sorts of other nasty things that would mean the teachers would have to concentrate on helping the kids having problems learning because they come from the shallow end of the gene pool.
Linux desktop, with browser, backed by web applications.
Five OEM systems and counting.
* LibreOffice will do 99% of what most Office users would like.
The vast majority of people I know who use Office products (and I've really tried to pry them off it) are using an older Windows with an older Office, but the thing that they do is use them for their embeddable components and integration with Microsoft SQL Server.
All of these are SMB - small and medium business owners (read: usually 50 people or less), and they have either a consultant or one or two in house people, depending on size, who glues everything together into a vertical market application for the business using Visual Basic, or more recently, C#.
The real win here is the API contracts in user space for shared object modules (read DLLs) that have common functionality, and then also use the IUnknown interface to the class factory to pick up components from other DLLs. So long as the top level interface doesn't change, the internal contracts can go whatever way they want, but are usually versioned.
Microsoft didn't include the SQL functionality or the scriptability in the Office for Mac because this is their bread and butter: tools, certifications, captive market for replacement machines, or new machines, if someone new gets hired, escalating storage over time, etc.. They get one "my computer guy" who they pass around between them and their other SMB friends, and that hooks them on the Microsoft crack.
But realize: there's no capability for that type of ecosystem in Linux because of the lack of top end and intermediate contracts. You don't need something as complicated as DCOM/CORBA to implement this, they are all (effectively) COM components, which is effectively OLE stuff. When they need some third party package to handle the sales tax calculations in their point of sale systems, etc., they buy it, and just use the interfaces.
It's unfortunate that no one has stepped into this type of area for Linux (or BSD), but there really isn't much in the way of interchangeable components. You can't really replace Microsoft's components, either, but that's not the point: they've left enough space for niche component vendors to sell bar code scanner interfaces and so on, and it doesn't matter if they come from one vendor or another, so long as (A) each vendor gets enough to stay alive, (B) enough profit to keep them engaged and therefore keep the ecosystem running, and (C) they all come back to the Microsoft mothership to pay their union dues.
(1) Apple won't allow it because it's a general purpose emulator/interpreter; to use it, you'd have to bundle it with the ROMs so there was no download capability
(2) You'd have to offer it for free, because the first term in the MAME license is "Redistributions may not be sold, nor may they be used in a commercial product or activity."
Together, this means the MAME developers most certainly would not help you out unless you were laying out the costs ($99 + time and effort) with no way of recouping your sunk costs. This would also include an inability to recoup costs for ROM license fees for the game(s) you include, so basically you'd be paying the ROM owner a per copy royalty for a free download, which means an uncapped bleeding expense for you.
So its a bit more than a matter of "not bothering".
People are probably not seeing the AC responses, but several of them have been right on the mark.
You are not qualified to do a technical interview on this person, nor to screen them, nor to write the job posting in the first place.
For the job posting, you need to be able to ask for the skill set you need. To do that, you need to know what skill set you are going to need. If you don't already know Windows, you aren't going to know who to ask for.
For screening, which should have happened before you ever asked someone in for an interview, you need to know if the skill set they claim on their resume matches the job posting; if there are a lot of applicants, you need to verify references, credentials, and job history. This part can be mechanical, assuming you've done a good job on the job posting.
For the interview, you are there to evaluate the degree to which their resume reflects reality (85%) and team fit (15%). Team fit is all about personality. That leaves the technical part; o do this, you need to be able to ask them questions related to their claimed expertise and their claimed work experience, and (potentially) a problem that you've had that you've already solved, and which they would be responsible for solving if it cropped up again.
Your admitted lack of Windows experience means that you won't be able to do 85% of your job as an interviewer effectively. There's going to be some generic overlap between IT realms, but at beast you are talking 25%, or you would have already been able to hire a UNIX system administrator who could pick up the Windows side of things. That still puts you at 60-75% on the fail side.
Hire a domain expert who has knowledge on both sides to consult on the interview. Verify their own knowledge first by conducting a UNIX interview on them. If they didn't lie about knowing their job there, then they probably didn't lie about knowing the Windows side, and are therefore qualified to do the interview.
If you're smart, your consultant was hired already to write the job posting, after working for you in the job role for a week.
A general note:
I personally would excuse myself from the interview process if I had a 75% chance, or even a 60% chance, of my bullshit detector not being triggered because I didn't know what the candidate was talking about, and you need to be prepared to do the same. You're trying to hire someone specifically for knowledge and skills they have which you don't.
Nodding sagely when you don't understand the answer and then hiring someone because they dress like you, get your jokes, and like to eat at the same mexican restaurant you do is only going to buy you that 15%. It's an important 15%, so you should definitely interview them for team fit, but leave the technical interview to a professional with nothing to win or lose on the candidate being/not being hired.
Your math is not entirely correct. People who are sufficiently capable will inevitably become rich/powerful enough there are only minimal threats capable of outright destroying them beyond hope of medical reconstruction. Over time, you will be left with a small minority of ancients orchestrating the actions of everyone bellow themselves while fiercely defending their positions and preventing anyone from climbing up the same way they did.
It's probably going to end bloody for them, but not until a couple of generations die because they couldn't afford to "buy time".
It's called a "mutual security game", and the specific name for that particular game is called "GloboCop". It's exactly this model which has removed the latitude for people to live in the world they want, rather than the world that the current superpowers want for them. That's the G12 of the IMF from most perspectives.
People who don't want to live in that globalist world, and admittedly, some of them are not very nice people to begin with, tend to act out with violence when all of their breathing space is exhausted by countries enforcing little things like human rights, while at the same time effectively enforcing an economic hegemony for themselves.
That, in a nutshell, is what's setting off the chains of violence we colloquially call terrorism, and will likely continue to escalate that violence until one side or the other is beaten down.
So as much as I'd like to disagree with you, it's a pretty realistic scenario that there would be a wealth/age divide that also resulted in some tearing down of institutions, but I'm pretty sure it would be a wealth-only divide, rather than age based. Unless Bill Gates and Warren Buffet get their way, in which case it may very well end up wealth/age.
On the other hand, it takes a very few motivated people to crash an economy for a decade or more, and wealth is pretty fickle, as perhaps Zuckerberg could attest these days.
All that said, I'm planning on living as long as technologically possible, since it seems that star travel is going to be limited speed for the foreseeable future, which means that a long life is the only way to make the trip.
Assuming you're in Silicon Valley... Jameco Electronics. Or NXP Semiconductors. Or Micrel. Or Bisco Industries. Or Beyond Components (no idea why the hell they have a store in Payson, Utah). Or Mouser Electronics.
Or if you live in Japan, you want Yodobashi, Bic, or Labi. Akihabara works if you are a tourist, since they have duty free shops, but you'll want to stay away from the main drag unless you are a cosplay otaku.
You can live an upper class life in the US on $10k, as long as you are willing to make a few sacrifices. It's all about your point of view.
I'd like to find the part of the US where $10,000/year would cover rent, utilities (heat/electricity/water), and food...
Look for off-base housing near military bases and student housing near college campuses.
You can get a 4 bedroom 2 bath apartment in Auburn Alabama for $275/month half a mile from the campus. That includes pool, tennis courts, spa, etc., right next to public transit. That leaves you $6700/year for the other stuff.
If you're willing to live in San Antonio, TX, you can get a 1 bedroom at budget suites for $199/month or $2338 a year. If you bump that up to $292/month or $3504 a year, you get a professionally staffed learning center with computers and net access with after school and adult programs.
If you insist on living in Silicon Valley, where recently all the apartments have raised their rent because they think everyone who works at Facebook is suddenly flush with cash (which is still in lockout, so they are trying to cash in on wishful thinking), yeah, you're not going to get by on $10K a year.
Generally, you wouldn't be paying any rent at this income level anyway, since you'd qualify for HUD housing, and the Section 8 program under HUD would give you a rent voucher and you could live where you wanted within the voucher amount. For San Mateo County in California, for example, a two person household bringing in $71,050/year is considered low enough income for subsidized housing, and under $44,400 is enough for a complete subsidy.
By the way, a 40 hour a week minimum wage job will net you $15,080 and the only thing you won't be getting back on your taxes is SSI and medicare contributions. Or you could get a higher than minimum wage job at McDonalds and get medical insurance, prescription coverage, dental, AD&D short and long term disability, dependent life insurance, paid educational assistance, and management training.
You'd be hard put to earn less, unless you are already on partial disability and can't work a full 40 hour work week. Even at this level, you're eligible for SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which is the renamed Food Stamps which uses a debit card in an attempt to prevent fraud.
But.. but.. then how can I play Minecraft? :(
I mentally translate "JRE" to "MRE" for Minecraft Runtime Environment.
In all seriousness, many banks run a captive Java application for login authentication using challenge/response as an anti-phishing mechanism to prevent storing the credentials. Given that Java is frequently exploited, this isn't a very effective strategy, given the current generation of online channel-breaking attacks.
As my geology prof exclaimed when the class complained about the amount of memorization required: "welcome to college."
Memorization is probably 50% of the work. The other 50% is knowing how to learn. I never learned to do homework until my third year in college. I learned it because of Dr. Tripp's analytical mechanics class: "Lambert, problem 4, up on the board".
One of the worst things about most educational formalism is the unwritten rules that let smart people get away without having to learn how to learn, or at least work to a schedule. The one thing that was the same for all my classes up to that point was that you turned in your homework at the end of class, which meant I did my homework in class and had it done by the time it was due. It got me through 5 AP classes (the school record, at the time) with college credit in all of them, and straight A's in everything but one P.E..class. To this day, I occasionally pause to thank Dr. Tripp.
If you are a teacher reading this, I'd really advise assigning homework at the end of class, and requiring it be turned in at the beginning of class. And to keep people honest, take a day a week to get random people up to the chalkboard/whiteboard to do a problem from the homework assignment.