As far as I know, there aren't news articles on it (yet). I'm not a teacher, and was just speaking with some teachers I'm friendly with about it. I was back in town for spring break when the memo reached the elementary school and was handed out at a teacher's meeting. I don't even know when it was to be given -- at that time I was in town, the only people that knew about it were the teachers. It came from the state board of education level, so it's no local initiative. I asked for and got a copy of a page that the teachers were receiving precisely because I wanted to scan it in, but the paper itself is not particularly interesting. The teachers were apparently walked through how to give students the exam -- and since these are step-by-step instructions, they mandate IE. The school currently uses Netscape Navigator 4. It mentioned the donation (and, if I remember correctly, the consultant), but the questionnaire (which I didn't get to see myself, since I wasn't at the meeting) was the particularly nasty item...consumer questions are a no-no in my mind.
Apparently the principal of the local school was asked by one teacher whether the questions might cause privacy complaints from parents, and he evidently sent the question up the chain of command and after getting a response said that only aggregate data would be used -- to be fair to Microsoft, I did omit that bit.
As one of the other posters has pointed out, it's probably not illegal. Schools also desperately need money as much (if not more...WV is quite poor) in West Virginia as elsewhere. To them, the choice to use Microsoft products is pretty much already made -- they're trying to train people for the workplace. So it isn't that likely that Linux would be chosen, and Microsoft is, at least in the short term, doing more good than harm, since we don't even have computers at some schools in the state, and the money will go a long way.
I do rather dislike this, but can I prove that the Microsoft questionnaire (or Coke Day, or any similar sponsored public-school marketing events) is bad for the students in the school? No. Advertising and market research is all over PBS and the school educational channels anyway, so students are hardly getting a perfectly product-neutral viewpoint in schools. I just don't like *Microsoft* being the one doing it...:-)
I'm sorry I can't mention names, but there have been people laid off for three years now as funding drops, and making waves at the school that point back to specific people is likely to get people fired. People were willing to talk about this, but not to say anything that would get their names negative marks.
You can probably ask a primary-school educator in West Virginia, as they're likely to have been briefed on the questionnaire.
I don't know whether this questionnaire is the same as the one another respondent mentioned -- his "Microsoft questionnaire" was apparently in high school (post-AP?) and one state over.
Finally, as another respondent mentioned, if Microsoft can do this, so can the FSF -- doing this is not some special use of Microsoft monopoly power that lets Microsoft and Microsoft alone do things. I'm not claiming that what was done is illegal -- just frustrating, and not enough people know about it -- I'm not sure that everyone would agree that it's a good idea.
I'd love nothing more than for a reporter to investigate it (find and talk to the education officials involved and do a story on it). I'd just rather not get anyone I know in this in hot water...
In West Virginia, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just handed the state department of education 16 million dollars.
In return, the state board of ed sold out the public schools.
They handed down a memo saying that all students *must* take part in a questionaire administered by the teachers during school time. One teacher I know estimated that it would take 20 minutes per student, given that there are issues with reading ability at the age of the students being given the test.
This questionaire:
* Was given online. Teachers were required to have Internet Explorer (not "a browser", Internet Explorer) installed on all school computers used in this. Cute way for a monopolist to propogate their products. * Involved asking students the number and type of products such as camcorders and computers they have at home. Many parents are not willing to give out this information, so building profiles of families by asking adults doesn't work very well. However, when students, children, are required to take an questionare like this by a teacher, they don't have much of a choice, though I suppose they could lie if their parents have taught them the importance of privacy. Microsoft was given the go-ahead to repeat this study two and four years from this point in time. All results get sent to Microsoft. * Was given during school time. Taxpayers spend enormous amounts of money to pay for *children to be educated*. State laws are put in place to require students to be in school *to be educated*. These resources are supposed to go to education, not to (in my opinion, rather invasive) Microsoft marketing studies. * Finally, MS made another coup for those 16 million dollars -- they were given a right to appoint a consultant to conduct overviews and approve or deny technology education curriculum. Now, it's possible that this consultant is a totally objective person who really *will* choose Linux or the Mac OS over Windows, or competing office/database products over MS's offerings if those things are better choices in a given scenerio. However, I rather doubt it. This is traditionally a large Apple market, but in one fell swoop, MS cut the legs out from Apple throughout the entire state.
I'm wondering whether this is just my state, or whether this is happening elsewhere. Anyone else hear about similar things in their own states? I could be a new Microsoft offensive against Apple, or just something that's been going on for a while, but I feel more than a little uncomfortable with it, and I doubt any letters I write are going to quite measure up to 16 million dollars in terms of legislators' decisions.
Executor isn't even close...AFAIK, it doesn't even do PPC.
Re:Support the community
on
WineX 2.0
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· Score: 1
Regarding sending documents around -- unless you have the need to make the document editable for document collaboration, Microsoft Word format is a really awful interchange format, especially between companies. You have no guarantees on the fonts available at the other end. The version of Office at the other end may prevent the person from reading the thing, or may throw out some formatting information. You have a particularly nasty (and in the past, widespread) vector for computer viruses.
PDF is designed specifically for sending out copies of computer-generated documents for reading. It does a very good job of it, and should always be used instead of Office for doing this.
Re:Support the community
on
WineX 2.0
·
· Score: 1
Actually, while I've heard people rave about MS Office quite a bit, I've found it rather piss-poor as an Office suite. Word is a bloated, slow, buggy word processor (I was *really* bitter after I typed something up and submitted it to my boss and a bug in Word that screws up a numbered list font's last number if you change the font after the table had screwed up the sign). I'm from the school that used computers before toolbars became the only way most people control their programs, and so the toolbars that MS throws all over the place do very little to make me happy. Zippy the Paperclip -- which throws the program into an inexplicably modal environment upon unpredictable user input -- is one of the worst UI ideas I've ever seen. I don't like the fact that I need to go to a dialog box to restart numbering in a numbered list. I don't like the fact that the table editor is rather difficult to manipulate, clever as the interface idea may be.
Excel is probably the best piece of software in the package, but I hate the wizards, which takes away much of the functionality. If I ever get guppi set up with gnumeric, it may give excel a real run for its money, since I don't use any more functionality besides charting than gnumeric has.
I loathe powerpoint. I've yet to see a bulletized lecture made in powerpoint that's done anything to help me remember the lecture. At college, I'm better off if the prof puts up a text file or postscript file that can be downloaded after the class for study.
Access is crap. I'm not a huge database fanatic, but Access is crap for a database. I thought the entire point of having programmers run out and spend years developing a database was to get really good general-purpose performance out of the thing. Access is one of the slowest pieces of productivity software I've ever used.
"Integration" is not a good thing, regardless of how many times it's been trumpeted as a bullet point by MS. I'd prefer "modularity", thank you very much. A consistent user interface and standards based data interchange between programs do not imply "integration".
When it comes to flexibility, I'm lost. Office is "flexible" so far as you can reorganize the menus, which is rare for most GUI programs. But comparing Office to Linux programs and calling it flexible is just a joke.
And if "compability" means "Can read Microsoft Office files", then I agree. Microsoft's import filters have traditionally been less than stellar, outmatched by their competitors at DataViz and the import abilities in WordPerfect.
So Tivo could do it for less. Okay. They choose to charge $10 per month because people are willing to pay it. They are providing a *service*, which generally justifies a monthly fee. If you don't like it, slap some TV capture software onto your computer and do up a couple of perl scripts in Linux to grab shows at whatever time you want. As long as Yahoo can profitably put out free listings, you can bum off them.
Of course, many people don't want to do this much work, and want the reliability that the service fee guarantees, so they choose to pay for the Tivo.
And stop complaining about the services you purchase. Every single thing you listed (except for the possible exception of XM, which I'm afraid I haven't heard of) is a service that costs money to provide. They need the money to fund the service, and they want to make a profit instead of just barely breaking even. Furthermore, I can guarantee that you do not *need* a single one of these services, with the possible exception of the phone, and if your work requires you to have a phone it's a business expense. If you want all these great services, then yes, you do have to pay for them. Blackberry, for example, is a *luxury item*. It is not cheap. Cable is more of a consumer item, but it isn't necessary, and you can definitely get the bare minimum package. The Tivo isn't even close to necessary. A cell phone isn't necessary. If you want all these services, you do have to pay for them. Now, I agree that violating privacy policies would be a problem. You *can* sue for that, and they're in breech of contract if they're violating the agreement that you bought into. However, are they entitled to chare you money each month for the work they do each month? Of course! Same goes for raising prices -- inflation happens, and markets get worse sometimes. The USPS *should* raise stamp prices periodically, because otherwise they'd go bankrupt.
Besides, if they really don't have something unique and worth your money...then why do you buy their service? No one is making you use their products, and they aren't using a monopoly to squeeze others out -- something that could be said of MS. You are more than free to not use their service or go with a competitor's product.
Well, it certainly is fortunate that the Tivo is so hackable, isn't it?
And I'd imagine that skipping ads would be rather difficult to do with 100% accuracy, especially given that the TV stations will work hard to make any system break.
Re:Three cross-platform game programming libraries
on
WineX 2.0
·
· Score: 2, Informative
ClanLib and Allegro have a richer set of features than SDL
I rather prefer the SDL approach of small modular libraries that may be upgraded and fixed independently.
ClanLib is nice if you like C++. I've coded with both it and SDL, and the main reason I use SDL instead is because most Linux software happens to be in C rather than C++.
I've never liked Allegro, mostly because for time out of mind, the Linux versions have been poorly packaged.
Developers do have one good reason to write DirectX instead of SDL -- it's easy. Lots of code snippits out there, MS supports it well, you're pretty much guaranteed that people have DirectX, and most Windows game developers are much better versed in DirectX and inertia resists them changing to SDL.
That being said, SDL has many features that I really like. It's very easy to move between fullscreen and windowed mode -- less so on Windows than X11, but still not bad. There are excellent support libraries. SDL is relatively small and easy to learn. SDL is pretty fast. The end user can do all sorts of neat tricks with SDL, like have the output from it run through aalib...DirectX is much less configurable. SDL makes it really easy to use hardware-accelerated blitting. SDL pairs better with OpenGL than DirectX does.
Because raw audio doesn't save much cpu time and uses a huge amount of space.
Games have been using compressed formats for years -- playing a mod can use more cpu time than an mp3, and yet mods provided game background music for years.
Well, given that the $89.95 will get you installation tech support and nothing else, and I really, really hope that if some IT guy is installing 270,000 copies of Red Hat, he doesn't end up calling tech support each time, it doesn't make much sense to pay it. If you want full-blown corporate-level support, *then* you might negotiate something effective and pricy.
The original poster was talking about what economic benefits the DoD provides.
He used it only as support for his claim that geeks should stop complaining about taxes.
He didn't say a thing about whether he supports military spending. He didn't even say that military spending is a good idea. Now, I will grant that he didn't go off on some humanistic rant, but had he done so he wouldn't have furthered his point in the least.
Well written, and I agree with the argument, but part of this does come off as a bit ironic.
...we have bred an entire generation or subculture of people who can now live by the hard work of others who make btter[sic] decisions and handle the consequences to their actions without whining.
This whole "lets make it easy for kids to identify safe territory" thing is just stupid. If kids are looking for porn, they're going to get it. If they don't want porn, they're going to happily hang out around the sites they want.
And in the process, the once-proud TLD system gets a little more screwed up.
On point 3, you can make every IE window run as a difference process. It wastes huge amounts of RAM, but you can do it. Given IE's occasional crashes, some people have chosen to take this route.
They're bugfixes and updates and security fixes. More importantly, they're for the Red Hat *distribution*, not the OS. This is comparable to all the updates for every application on a Windows box plus the operating system patches, which is pretty much on par.
The difference is that there's an easy place to get all these updates if you're using Linux.
I've bought WD for years and been happy with them. Of course, I also buy the nice 5400 RPM drives that don't have heat and reliability problems (the cause of IBM's Deskstar problems and most other hard drive issues I've heard about).
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, there aren't news articles on it (yet). I'm not a teacher, and was just speaking with some teachers I'm friendly with about it. I was back in town for spring break when the memo reached the elementary school and was handed out at a teacher's meeting. I don't even know when it was to be given -- at that time I was in town, the only people that knew about it were the teachers. It came from the state board of education level, so it's no local initiative. I asked for and got a copy of a page that the teachers were receiving precisely because I wanted to scan it in, but the paper itself is not particularly interesting. The teachers were apparently walked through how to give students the exam -- and since these are step-by-step instructions, they mandate IE. The school currently uses Netscape Navigator 4. It mentioned the donation (and, if I remember correctly, the consultant), but the questionnaire (which I didn't get to see myself, since I wasn't at the meeting) was the particularly nasty item...consumer questions are a no-no in my mind.
:-)
Apparently the principal of the local school was asked by one teacher whether the questions might cause privacy complaints from parents, and he evidently sent the question up the chain of command and after getting a response said that only aggregate data would be used -- to be fair to Microsoft, I did omit that bit.
As one of the other posters has pointed out, it's probably not illegal. Schools also desperately need money as much (if not more...WV is quite poor) in West Virginia as elsewhere. To them, the choice to use Microsoft products is pretty much already made -- they're trying to train people for the workplace. So it isn't that likely that Linux would be chosen, and Microsoft is, at least in the short term, doing more good than harm, since we don't even have computers at some schools in the state, and the money will go a long way.
I do rather dislike this, but can I prove that the Microsoft questionnaire (or Coke Day, or any similar sponsored public-school marketing events) is bad for the students in the school? No. Advertising and market research is all over PBS and the school educational channels anyway, so students are hardly getting a perfectly product-neutral viewpoint in schools. I just don't like *Microsoft* being the one doing it...
I'm sorry I can't mention names, but there have been people laid off for three years now as funding drops, and making waves at the school that point back to specific people is likely to get people fired. People were willing to talk about this, but not to say anything that would get their names negative marks.
You can probably ask a primary-school educator in West Virginia, as they're likely to have been briefed on the questionnaire.
I don't know whether this questionnaire is the same as the one another respondent mentioned -- his "Microsoft questionnaire" was apparently in high school (post-AP?) and one state over.
Finally, as another respondent mentioned, if Microsoft can do this, so can the FSF -- doing this is not some special use of Microsoft monopoly power that lets Microsoft and Microsoft alone do things. I'm not claiming that what was done is illegal -- just frustrating, and not enough people know about it -- I'm not sure that everyone would agree that it's a good idea.
I'd love nothing more than for a reporter to investigate it (find and talk to the education officials involved and do a story on it). I'd just rather not get anyone I know in this in hot water...
You may have interpreted the document to mean this, but this is definitely not what it says.
Cynical me thinks that it's not unreasonable to assume that the misleading factor is intentional.
In West Virginia, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just handed the state department of education 16 million dollars.
In return, the state board of ed sold out the public schools.
They handed down a memo saying that all students *must* take part in a questionaire administered by the teachers during school time. One teacher I know estimated that it would take 20 minutes per student, given that there are issues with reading ability at the age of the students being given the test.
This questionaire:
* Was given online. Teachers were required to have Internet Explorer (not "a browser", Internet Explorer) installed on all school computers used in this. Cute way for a monopolist to propogate their products.
* Involved asking students the number and type of products such as camcorders and computers they have at home. Many parents are not willing to give out this information, so building profiles of families by asking adults doesn't work very well. However, when students, children, are required to take an questionare like this by a teacher, they don't have much of a choice, though I suppose they could lie if their parents have taught them the importance of privacy. Microsoft was given the go-ahead to repeat this study two and four years from this point in time. All results get sent to Microsoft.
* Was given during school time. Taxpayers spend enormous amounts of money to pay for *children to be educated*. State laws are put in place to require students to be in school *to be educated*. These resources are supposed to go to education, not to (in my opinion, rather invasive) Microsoft marketing studies.
* Finally, MS made another coup for those 16 million dollars -- they were given a right to appoint a consultant to conduct overviews and approve or deny technology education curriculum. Now, it's possible that this consultant is a totally objective person who really *will* choose Linux or the Mac OS over Windows, or competing office/database products over MS's offerings if those things are better choices in a given scenerio. However, I rather doubt it. This is traditionally a large Apple market, but in one fell swoop, MS cut the legs out from Apple throughout the entire state.
I'm wondering whether this is just my state, or whether this is happening elsewhere. Anyone else hear about similar things in their own states? I could be a new Microsoft offensive against Apple, or just something that's been going on for a while, but I feel more than a little uncomfortable with it, and I doubt any letters I write are going to quite measure up to 16 million dollars in terms of legislators' decisions.
She did in Dogma.
What are you using to emulate Mac OS 9?
Executor isn't even close...AFAIK, it doesn't even do PPC.
Regarding sending documents around -- unless you have the need to make the document editable for document collaboration, Microsoft Word format is a really awful interchange format, especially between companies. You have no guarantees on the fonts available at the other end. The version of Office at the other end may prevent the person from reading the thing, or may throw out some formatting information. You have a particularly nasty (and in the past, widespread) vector for computer viruses.
PDF is designed specifically for sending out copies of computer-generated documents for reading. It does a very good job of it, and should always be used instead of Office for doing this.
Actually, while I've heard people rave about MS Office quite a bit, I've found it rather piss-poor as an Office suite. Word is a bloated, slow, buggy word processor (I was *really* bitter after I typed something up and submitted it to my boss and a bug in Word that screws up a numbered list font's last number if you change the font after the table had screwed up the sign). I'm from the school that used computers before toolbars became the only way most people control their programs, and so the toolbars that MS throws all over the place do very little to make me happy. Zippy the Paperclip -- which throws the program into an inexplicably modal environment upon unpredictable user input -- is one of the worst UI ideas I've ever seen. I don't like the fact that I need to go to a dialog box to restart numbering in a numbered list. I don't like the fact that the table editor is rather difficult to manipulate, clever as the interface idea may be.
Excel is probably the best piece of software in the package, but I hate the wizards, which takes away much of the functionality. If I ever get guppi set up with gnumeric, it may give excel a real run for its money, since I don't use any more functionality besides charting than gnumeric has.
I loathe powerpoint. I've yet to see a bulletized lecture made in powerpoint that's done anything to help me remember the lecture. At college, I'm better off if the prof puts up a text file or postscript file that can be downloaded after the class for study.
Access is crap. I'm not a huge database fanatic, but Access is crap for a database. I thought the entire point of having programmers run out and spend years developing a database was to get really good general-purpose performance out of the thing. Access is one of the slowest pieces of productivity software I've ever used.
"Integration" is not a good thing, regardless of how many times it's been trumpeted as a bullet point by MS. I'd prefer "modularity", thank you very much. A consistent user interface and standards based data interchange between programs do not imply "integration".
When it comes to flexibility, I'm lost. Office is "flexible" so far as you can reorganize the menus, which is rare for most GUI programs. But comparing Office to Linux programs and calling it flexible is just a joke.
And if "compability" means "Can read Microsoft Office files", then I agree. Microsoft's import filters have traditionally been less than stellar, outmatched by their competitors at DataViz and the import abilities in WordPerfect.
So Tivo could do it for less. Okay. They choose to charge $10 per month because people are willing to pay it. They are providing a *service*, which generally justifies a monthly fee. If you don't like it, slap some TV capture software onto your computer and do up a couple of perl scripts in Linux to grab shows at whatever time you want. As long as Yahoo can profitably put out free listings, you can bum off them.
Of course, many people don't want to do this much work, and want the reliability that the service fee guarantees, so they choose to pay for the Tivo.
And stop complaining about the services you purchase. Every single thing you listed (except for the possible exception of XM, which I'm afraid I haven't heard of) is a service that costs money to provide. They need the money to fund the service, and they want to make a profit instead of just barely breaking even. Furthermore, I can guarantee that you do not *need* a single one of these services, with the possible exception of the phone, and if your work requires you to have a phone it's a business expense. If you want all these great services, then yes, you do have to pay for them. Blackberry, for example, is a *luxury item*. It is not cheap. Cable is more of a consumer item, but it isn't necessary, and you can definitely get the bare minimum package. The Tivo isn't even close to necessary. A cell phone isn't necessary. If you want all these services, you do have to pay for them. Now, I agree that violating privacy policies would be a problem. You *can* sue for that, and they're in breech of contract if they're violating the agreement that you bought into. However, are they entitled to chare you money each month for the work they do each month? Of course! Same goes for raising prices -- inflation happens, and markets get worse sometimes. The USPS *should* raise stamp prices periodically, because otherwise they'd go bankrupt.
Besides, if they really don't have something unique and worth your money...then why do you buy their service? No one is making you use their products, and they aren't using a monopoly to squeeze others out -- something that could be said of MS. You are more than free to not use their service or go with a competitor's product.
I'd guess that it's a one-time pad, if they have to download the thing each day.
Well, it certainly is fortunate that the Tivo is so hackable, isn't it?
And I'd imagine that skipping ads would be rather difficult to do with 100% accuracy, especially given that the TV stations will work hard to make any system break.
ClanLib and Allegro have a richer set of features than SDL
I rather prefer the SDL approach of small modular libraries that may be upgraded and fixed independently.
ClanLib is nice if you like C++. I've coded with both it and SDL, and the main reason I use SDL instead is because most Linux software happens to be in C rather than C++.
I've never liked Allegro, mostly because for time out of mind, the Linux versions have been poorly packaged.
Developers do have one good reason to write DirectX instead of SDL -- it's easy. Lots of code snippits out there, MS supports it well, you're pretty much guaranteed that people have DirectX, and most Windows game developers are much better versed in DirectX and inertia resists them changing to SDL.
That being said, SDL has many features that I really like. It's very easy to move between fullscreen and windowed mode -- less so on Windows than X11, but still not bad. There are excellent support libraries. SDL is relatively small and easy to learn. SDL is pretty fast. The end user can do all sorts of neat tricks with SDL, like have the output from it run through aalib...DirectX is much less configurable. SDL makes it really easy to use hardware-accelerated blitting. SDL pairs better with OpenGL than DirectX does.
In high school, my teacher told me gravity travels at the speed of light.
Slashdot protocol dictates that pro-class trolls have "troll" in their name.
Because raw audio doesn't save much cpu time and uses a huge amount of space.
Games have been using compressed formats for years -- playing a mod can use more cpu time than an mp3, and yet mods provided game background music for years.
Well, given that the $89.95 will get you installation tech support and nothing else, and I really, really hope that if some IT guy is installing 270,000 copies of Red Hat, he doesn't end up calling tech support each time, it doesn't make much sense to pay it. If you want full-blown corporate-level support, *then* you might negotiate something effective and pricy.
The original poster was talking about what economic benefits the DoD provides.
He used it only as support for his claim that geeks should stop complaining about taxes.
He didn't say a thing about whether he supports military spending. He didn't even say that military spending is a good idea. Now, I will grant that he didn't go off on some humanistic rant, but had he done so he wouldn't have furthered his point in the least.
Well written, and I agree with the argument, but part of this does come off as a bit ironic.
...we have bred an entire generation or subculture of people who can now live by the hard work of others who make btter[sic] decisions and handle the consequences to their actions without whining.
:-)
This whole "lets make it easy for kids to identify safe territory" thing is just stupid. If kids are looking for porn, they're going to get it. If they don't want porn, they're going to happily hang out around the sites they want.
And in the process, the once-proud TLD system gets a little more screwed up.
If you're a Linux user, try dillo. Lightweight and fast. Like opera but more so.
The overwhelming majority of sawfish is in rep (the Lisp variant).
On point 3, you can make every IE window run as a difference process. It wastes huge amounts of RAM, but you can do it. Given IE's occasional crashes, some people have chosen to take this route.
They're bugfixes and updates and security fixes. More importantly, they're for the Red Hat *distribution*, not the OS. This is comparable to all the updates for every application on a Windows box plus the operating system patches, which is pretty much on par.
The difference is that there's an easy place to get all these updates if you're using Linux.
MS altered IIS to give Explorer users priority over Mozilla users a while ago. This is not new. :-(
How do you try programming in a hardware platform?
FWIW, I think OS/400 may be the most godawful ugly thing in existence.
I've bought WD for years and been happy with them. Of course, I also buy the nice 5400 RPM drives that don't have heat and reliability problems (the cause of IBM's Deskstar problems and most other hard drive issues I've heard about).