My sister called me a few weeks ago. She works 3 days a week as a nurse working 12 hour shifts at a facility about 60 miles from her house. She has a vehicle that gets about 20mpg and is in great shape. More than that, it is 100% paid for. She wanted to know my opinion on getting a new car.
So even if she had a car that was able to get 40mpg, her gas consumption would go from 9 gallons a week down to 4 gallons at best. 5 gallons at $5 a gallon is $25 a week or $100 a month. A new car payment would be better than $250 a month.
I told her as long as her current car was safe and dependable, don't go buy a new car to "save money".
Since electric cars are still more than $20,000 more than conventional vehicles, plus you are asking tax payers, many who make less money than you to subsidize an additional $10,000 or more of your auto purchase. that does not seem like much of a bargain to me. Batteries have to be replaced every 5 years. You are not really doing this to save money.
All of the extra nasty non-green things that goes into manufacturing your lightweight car, motors and batteries PLUS using electrical current generated by coal burning plants. All you have done is moved WHERE the environment is polluted at from your exhaust pipe, to someplace else. You are not really saving the environment either.
I have been involved in events 3 times in my life where there was media coverage. All 3 times the media made major mistakes in what they reported and omissions of what they did not report. Details like "the business was shut down, and all equipment was removed from the building", when the reality was the business was not shut down and the police removed a single PC from the business. All the local news did was read a press release written the previous day by the party that requested the police search the building. The local media did not even attempt to contact anyone to gather any facts or to collaborate any details. The other two news stories had the facts all wrong as well.
Honestly I am afraid to watch the new.s I fear ever time I watch a news story that I am actually becoming dumber instead of becoming more informed.
With the cost of gas and oil on its way up it's a wonder that any one would be against the use of renewable energy sources."
Notice we are talking about subsidies here. Wind turbines still are not turning a profit on their own. Otherwise they would not have to be subsidized. I would be fine if solar, wave or wind was close to "almost" breaking even, after factoring in some way to "store" the power for when the sun is not out or there is no wind. Then a subsidy would be to "jump start" the market.
But when the facts are that these things cost x millions to build, cost y thousands to maintain and generate z dollars worth of power, and it turns out that x + y z. Way less than Z, then someone has to absorb the cost of building power generation systems that do not turn a profit.
The person or company who builds the never to turn a profit wind turbine should eat this expense. Not the tax payers. As it stands , the turbines built 5 years ago did not turn a profit, the ones being built now are not turning a profit, the ones we will build 5 years from now will not turn a profit. What is the point of subsiding them? If it is evident that "jump starting the market" means after 10 years and they are still no where near profitable, that is the wrong market for the government to encourage.
Do you know why gas and oil are so hard to kill? Because they are cheap. Even with the rising prices, they can still be produced at a profit.
In Gnome/KDE every window can do that (haven't used XFCE or LXDE so I can't say, but it seems like that's a pretty standard feature of every competent window manager).
With XFCE or LXDE you can use Compiz which will provide a "Maximize" plugin so you can set hotkeys that will let you size windows this way
Metro is not a better metaphor for someone using a mouse and keyboard with multiple 23 inch monitors.
Saying give them a break because it may be a little rough on their first try is like saying give the doctor a break the first time he tries curing cancer by shooting the patient. There is no use in trying to improve the wrong approach. It will still remain a FAIL.
To launch by October, they will have to RTM (Release to Manufacturing) sometime in July. That gives them 4 months to fix it. Please note we are currently running the only Beta version that Microsoft is making. There are things they will try to change, that they may still get wrong because they have not been beta tested. At this point you can pretty much be looking for the changes that will be made in the first Service Pack.
I think this is all about getting everyone to an interface that looks like an iPhone and selling all software through the "Microsoft Store" where they get a small slice of every transaction. That means Metro stays up front and the "trying to get work done with a mouse and keyboard on my desktop" stuff remains a second class citizen. I predict a lot of people will still be running Windows 7 in 2015.
Remember there will be two types of Win 8 Metro tablets: ARM and Intel
The ARM tablet will have metro apps, a web browser and Office. No compatibility with almost 30 years of DOS/Windows software and from the looks of it, will not be able to join a domain. That is the low end tablet market. Where it will have to compete with $200 Kindle Fires and Color Nooks. It does not offer any real advantages there once you figure out it SUCKS trying to use Office on touchpad
The INTEL tablet will keep the Metro interface but add app compatibility and the ability to join a domain. However, at this point, you are now in the price range of an iPad. Again, once people figure out doing any real work on one of this things is "suboptimal" there is not much reason to not for an iPad which has 3 years of maturity and a 100,000 app head start.
The whole thing is baffling. The are betting the whole farm on getting people to switch to a version of Windows where they will purchase everything though an app store where Microsoft will make something off of every purchase.
At this point it looks like ARM devices will not be able to join a domain. ARM devices will only run WinRT software. Without software and network integration why not just use your Applet or Android tablet?
They might just pull it off, being the big gorrilla in the room. Strong arming OEMs and people finally just giving up and gettting used to their junk. But that sounds like the PC market. So far in over a decade of phone and tablets all Microsoft has is the stink of death attached to it. From 25% of the smart phone market down to 6%. Then WinMo 7 is out, 500 million in advertising, 1 billion to Nokia and now we are 1 1/2 years out, 1.5 billion spent and they have gone from 6% to 4.5% of the smart phone market. They actually have to compete at phones and tablets with iOS and Android. I am not sure they are up to it.
I expect that by Windows 9 they will still have the PC market but will just be going through the motions on ARM.
Here are the facts 1. PCs are not going away. Heavy duty document and photo editing needs a real PC, not a tablet or smartphone. 2. OEMs are only selling winodws. So windows 8, 9, and 10 will all have a home...on the next new Computer you buy. 3. The Metro Interface allows Microsoft to get in on the "App Store" action. All software being sold through their own store and them taking part of the profit is to strong of force for them to ignore.
Call it doubling down on stupid if you want. Microsoft is just like Apple in this. Give them both one or two OS revisions and all software will be sold through their app store and only pirates or big corps with special needs will sideload apps.
Marketing experts? Bill Gates in a mall eating a f*cking churro and wiggling his butt walking though the parking lot?
What they have are the OEMs. They can't load OS X on a computer. Do you see anyone being successful loading Linpus Linux? Even the "Mighty Ubuntu" has no real traction. OEMs have to play Microsofts game and load whatever version of WIndows comes along.
Home users will pirate what ever version of windows works for them. Even if they have to pay a friend to load it onto their system.
Big Businesses will get a license and run whatever version of Windows run the applications they use.
Small Business will just complain.
Then everyone will get used to the crappy version whenever they have to deal with it and wait for Microsoft's next version which will "hopefully" fix the mistakes.
I am 45 and my wife is 41. We have 4 kids who are 22, 21, 18 and 17. NONE of the kids will read a book on a Kindle, iPhone or on the computer. They think the Kindle is a ho-hum "whatever" device.
My wife loves her Kindle (looks like paper) but has always abhorred reading books on her computer (hates the backlit display). Whereas myself. I love reading it however I can get it. Palm-Pilot, Computer, Kindle. I will probably purchase a Kindle Fire by Christmas time this year.
I wonder if it is a generational thing. With my generation being told we were growing up in the computer age as this stuff started appearing when we were 8 or 9 years old. We just cant get enough of anything "high-tech". Whereas my kids, have had computers around them from the time they got out of a crib. This is all no big deal for them. They pick and choose what works for them. It seems there judgement is that only people over 35 want to read books on a computer or handheld device. Maybe people over 35 are starting to realized what the kids already knew.
On the other hand, you will have to pry my kindle and 2000 book library out of me cold, dead fingers.
finally with the entire right wing signing Grover Norquist's "No new taxes on teh rich EVAR!" pledge good luck doing anything about the debt we are drowning in which means no more money for NASA, hell look at how many are having a shitfit at Obama calling to LOWER corporate taxes simply because he wants to close the loopholes that give companies like GE billions in return for nothing.
Your really worried about the Republicans? Really?
Take a look at the lay of the land. Texas and Northern Florida both elect Republicans. The with a Democratic Majority, anything space related starves republican communities and leads to the chance of more Democratic victories in the future.
What the United States has left of a space program is being gutted by the Democrats. I would predict that the Republicans would re-fund NASA and the space sector. Not continue to strip it down as would happen if the Democrats win the Presidency.
I am saying that the kind of person who would spend money to send a child to private school is also the kind of parent who is involved with their childs education at home. A school with involved parents can spend half as much as a school without involved parents and get far better results. And yes there are plenty of parents that can not afford a private school and care about their childs education and are involved in it. The point was to consider the parental involvement, not the money.
Children anywhere do better if their parents are involved in helping them learn and teaching them. They will do well in private school or public school.
Learning should start at home LONG before school. I don't mean formally sitting down and teaching 3 year olds to read. Most of them are not ready for it at that point. With our children, every day of life was a classroom for them. They hung out with us. I explained how things worked, answered questions. Read to them. Stopped movies while we were watching them and asked them questions about what was going on and explained what I thought was happening. My wife did this as well.
Though I did not graduate from high school (I had to drop out and get a job to help support my siblings) and my wife only had a high school diploma. We were both well read. My son had hearing problems which caused some speech issued when he was young. At 5 years old he tested out with the vocabulary of the average 10 year old. By the time he was 8 he tested out with the vocabulary of a first year college student. When we used a big word, we explained what it meant. The difference between the almost right word and the right word is like the difference between a lightening bug and a lightening bolt. Sometimes the larger word is the right word for the job and my kids learned the right words.
It did not always help with them making friends. "I am afraid you have impressed upon me a speech pattern which will attract ridicule from my peer group." But my kids were always able to carry on a conversation with their friends parents.
Most kids need new parents. Or at least parents that care and take responsibility. Parents that read to their children, help them pick up the basics, teach good study habits and make sure their children do their homework, will have students who do well in any school.
If Johnny can not read, it is mom and dads job to teach Johnny or to find someone who can. For any parent who is literate, the fact that they can have a child hit middle school who cant read is a sign of laziness. You pay taxes so that your city will provide primary education for your child. However you cant just put a sandwich in a lunch bag and send them out the door every morning for 12 years and expect that someone who is paid to show up for 8 hours a day at a union job will do a better job at loving your child and teaching them than you will.
I have 3 adult children. I am a high school dropout. Most of their lives we lived at or near the poverty level. Two of my three kids manage to get scholarships that pay for 90% of all their college expenses. They were all students who received good grades. Sometimes it was a lot of work for us. If a kid has a different learning style than how a teacher teaches, it was up to us to turn the TV off and spend time with our offspring and help them to learn.
I have worked 10 hours, driven another hour home, and then sat down and helped one child with math and read to another child. Face it, teachers are like any other group. Only 10% of them graduated in the top 10% of their class. College only required them to be right 70% of the time. That is right. Your child may be taught by someone who gets 30% of the material wrong, and that is before they perform a poor job at communicating what they DO know.
Many private schools spend half as much as public schools do per student yet the children learn far better? Why is this? Maybe because someone who is taxed for public schools and then still ponies up money for a private insinuation cares enough about their child's education to be involved and make sure that the succeed no matter what.
if you care about your kids. it is YOUR job to make sure they know the things they need to know. Passing it off on someone else and then acting powerless when your child is in 3rd grade has problems and wringing your hands for the next 9 years that nothing can be done is a cop out.
I think the fixed sized menu is useful. A good portion of the menu stays exactly where it was no matter what. We find things on the computer spatially. When I hit that "start" button. I pretty well know where things will be located.
The real problem there is the way many menus are laid out. Most linux desktops get it right. A menu should have less than 10 items on it.
Accessories Graphics Internet Office Programming System Utilities
Is a pretty good layout.
However, having the option to change it to behave to take up the available vertical real-estate and having it disabled by default would be a good thing.
We used to run the Norton Corporate product and we loved it. It is much lighter on system resources than the retail product. Corp 9, then Corp 10 then Corp 11.
Once we hit version 11 we had a problem. Every time it did a download and update, it would keep a copy of the older downloads and updates. Every 3 months our hard drive would run out of room. The solution a) wait for the patch to fix this for customers with this issue and b) uninstall the software from the server, reinstall it, and then manually every client back in. We would lose a full day every 3 months doing this. After more than a year of this and no patch forthcoming we switched products.
As it turns out there are other products that are even ligther on resources, as easy to administer and cost less as well. A 3 year license came to $18 a system. At the cost of $6 a year for a professional antivirus product, it was easy to make the switch.
I have to admit, that I am very pro-linux and very pro-google.
I still think there is a big difference between Google and Microsoft in this case. Microsoft tends to do things to create lock in wherever they can. Back then by doing things with HTML, addons, etc, to tie you to Windows. Now by having a signed boot loader that can only boot Windows 8 on the ARM platform. They play "open" where they have to, but play "lock in" and "monopoly" whenever they think they can get away with it. This means if they could kill off other browsers, they would. if it means making HTML a Microsoft product and a must have, while breaking the internet, they would.
Google has a different goal. The more stuff people do on line, the more likely they are to use Google services, and the more Google services they use, the more money Google makes. Google does not lock people in. If you want to leave google mail, hoock up to it via IMAP and copy your stuff out. You can opt out and go elsewhere when ever you want. Most people dont. Googles goal with web browsers is to make them such a powerful platform that google services run as well as native apps. So they work on their own browser, their improved javascript engine, a replacement for javascript. Why? Speed, everyone else is able to copy what they are doing and make their web browsers better. It does not matter in the long run if you use Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox. If they improve so that the google experience is good, they are happy and they have "won".
With Google they want others to take advantage of their work with HTML, scripting and other web advancements. Please do so, on any platform you want, create your own dev tools. We will make it easy for you to use our standard. Versus Microsofts, only our implementation is standard, it only runs on our platform, you should only use our platform.
I now do my Arch setups by installing ArchBang. ArchBang is a riff on CrunchBang. As a live CD, it is Arch Linux with an OpenBox GUI, a Tint2 panel, system info shown in conky and some slick CrunchBang style GUI configuration tools for OpenBox. Now setting up an Arch Linux system takes about 15 minutes. That is all the time it takes run the installer. As part of the install you need to edit two files. In rc.conf you set your hostname. In pacman.d/mirrorlist, you need to move the mirrors in your country to the top of the file. That is it.
After 15 minutes of work, you have a completely working Arch Linux system with sound, X and a Window Manager with font smoothing all set up for you.
In addition to pacman they also include packer. Which is able to install all the standard packages that pacman does but is also able to perform installs from AUR using the same syntax as pacman.
This is not the first time this has happened. It is just the first time we have heard about a virus being in place for a decade and not being detected.
I am sure there are more colleges and government agencies that are compromised like this.
As an added bonus. This is why you should post AC when posting from College.
There is one thing that we know about education. The higher value the student places upon and takes responsibility for learning, the better the student does. If a student wants to learn, they can learn despite bad teachers, or bad online courses. The better the tools and more opportunity a student like this has. The more they will learn.
Sometimes a student lights this flame inside all by themselves.
Sometimes a teacher lights this flame for them.
More often than not though. It is parental involvement at home that makes a difference. Everything from reading to a child, installing the love of learning, to just making sure learn good study habits and get their homework done.
Parents who do not do this at home and rely on teachers to do it because "it is there job" are the real problem. Even the best teacher can not be guaranteed to be able to do this with the number of students and time they have in class. By definition, not all teachers can be exceptional. Many will fail at this because they don't have what it takes to inspire. It is still the parents job at home to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
My sister called me a few weeks ago. She works 3 days a week as a nurse working 12 hour shifts at a facility about 60 miles from her house. She has a vehicle that gets about 20mpg and is in great shape. More than that, it is 100% paid for. She wanted to know my opinion on getting a new car.
So even if she had a car that was able to get 40mpg, her gas consumption would go from 9 gallons a week down to 4 gallons at best. 5 gallons at $5 a gallon is $25 a week or $100 a month. A new car payment would be better than $250 a month.
I told her as long as her current car was safe and dependable, don't go buy a new car to "save money".
Since electric cars are still more than $20,000 more than conventional vehicles, plus you are asking tax payers, many who make less money than you to subsidize an additional $10,000 or more of your auto purchase. that does not seem like much of a bargain to me. Batteries have to be replaced every 5 years. You are not really doing this to save money.
All of the extra nasty non-green things that goes into manufacturing your lightweight car, motors and batteries PLUS using electrical current generated by coal burning plants. All you have done is moved WHERE the environment is polluted at from your exhaust pipe, to someplace else. You are not really saving the environment either.
I have been involved in events 3 times in my life where there was media coverage. All 3 times the media made major mistakes in what they reported and omissions of what they did not report. Details like "the business was shut down, and all equipment was removed from the building", when the reality was the business was not shut down and the police removed a single PC from the business. All the local news did was read a press release written the previous day by the party that requested the police search the building. The local media did not even attempt to contact anyone to gather any facts or to collaborate any details. The other two news stories had the facts all wrong as well.
Honestly I am afraid to watch the new.s I fear ever time I watch a news story that I am actually becoming dumber instead of becoming more informed.
Notice we are talking about subsidies here. Wind turbines still are not turning a profit on their own. Otherwise they would not have to be subsidized. I would be fine if solar, wave or wind was close to "almost" breaking even, after factoring in some way to "store" the power for when the sun is not out or there is no wind. Then a subsidy would be to "jump start" the market.
But when the facts are that these things cost x millions to build, cost y thousands to maintain and generate z dollars worth of power, and it turns out that x + y z. Way less than Z, then someone has to absorb the cost of building power generation systems that do not turn a profit.
The person or company who builds the never to turn a profit wind turbine should eat this expense. Not the tax payers. As it stands , the turbines built 5 years ago did not turn a profit, the ones being built now are not turning a profit, the ones we will build 5 years from now will not turn a profit. What is the point of subsiding them? If it is evident that "jump starting the market" means after 10 years and they are still no where near profitable, that is the wrong market for the government to encourage.
Do you know why gas and oil are so hard to kill? Because they are cheap. Even with the rising prices, they can still be produced at a profit.
In Gnome/KDE every window can do that (haven't used XFCE or LXDE so I can't say, but it seems like that's a pretty standard feature of every competent window manager).
With XFCE or LXDE you can use Compiz which will provide a "Maximize" plugin so you can set hotkeys that will let you size windows this way
Metro is not a better metaphor for someone using a mouse and keyboard with multiple 23 inch monitors.
Saying give them a break because it may be a little rough on their first try is like saying give the doctor a break the first time he tries curing cancer by shooting the patient. There is no use in trying to improve the wrong approach. It will still remain a FAIL.
To launch by October, they will have to RTM (Release to Manufacturing) sometime in July. That gives them 4 months to fix it. Please note we are currently running the only Beta version that Microsoft is making. There are things they will try to change, that they may still get wrong because they have not been beta tested. At this point you can pretty much be looking for the changes that will be made in the first Service Pack.
I think this is all about getting everyone to an interface that looks like an iPhone and selling all software through the "Microsoft Store" where they get a small slice of every transaction. That means Metro stays up front and the "trying to get work done with a mouse and keyboard on my desktop" stuff remains a second class citizen. I predict a lot of people will still be running Windows 7 in 2015.
Why would I want this on a tablet?
Remember there will be two types of Win 8 Metro tablets: ARM and Intel
The ARM tablet will have metro apps, a web browser and Office. No compatibility with almost 30 years of DOS/Windows software and from the looks of it, will not be able to join a domain. That is the low end tablet market. Where it will have to compete with $200 Kindle Fires and Color Nooks. It does not offer any real advantages there once you figure out it SUCKS trying to use Office on touchpad
The INTEL tablet will keep the Metro interface but add app compatibility and the ability to join a domain. However, at this point, you are now in the price range of an iPad. Again, once people figure out doing any real work on one of this things is "suboptimal" there is not much reason to not for an iPad which has 3 years of maturity and a 100,000 app head start.
The whole thing is baffling. The are betting the whole farm on getting people to switch to a version of Windows where they will purchase everything though an app store where Microsoft will make something off of every purchase.
ARM will bite them in the butt on this.
At this point it looks like ARM devices will not be able to join a domain. ARM devices will only run WinRT software. Without software and network integration why not just use your Applet or Android tablet?
They might just pull it off, being the big gorrilla in the room. Strong arming OEMs and people finally just giving up and gettting used to their junk. But that sounds like the PC market. So far in over a decade of phone and tablets all Microsoft has is the stink of death attached to it. From 25% of the smart phone market down to 6%. Then WinMo 7 is out, 500 million in advertising, 1 billion to Nokia and now we are 1 1/2 years out, 1.5 billion spent and they have gone from 6% to 4.5% of the smart phone market. They actually have to compete at phones and tablets with iOS and Android. I am not sure they are up to it.
I expect that by Windows 9 they will still have the PC market but will just be going through the motions on ARM.
Windows 9 will not be a step back from 8.
Here are the facts
1. PCs are not going away. Heavy duty document and photo editing needs a real PC, not a tablet or smartphone.
2. OEMs are only selling winodws. So windows 8, 9, and 10 will all have a home...on the next new Computer you buy.
3. The Metro Interface allows Microsoft to get in on the "App Store" action. All software being sold through their own store and them taking part of the profit is to strong of force for them to ignore.
Call it doubling down on stupid if you want. Microsoft is just like Apple in this. Give them both one or two OS revisions and all software will be sold through their app store and only pirates or big corps with special needs will sideload apps.
Marketing experts? Bill Gates in a mall eating a f*cking churro and wiggling his butt walking though the parking lot?
What they have are the OEMs. They can't load OS X on a computer. Do you see anyone being successful loading Linpus Linux? Even the "Mighty Ubuntu" has no real traction. OEMs have to play Microsofts game and load whatever version of WIndows comes along.
Home users will pirate what ever version of windows works for them. Even if they have to pay a friend to load it onto their system.
Big Businesses will get a license and run whatever version of Windows run the applications they use.
Small Business will just complain.
Then everyone will get used to the crappy version whenever they have to deal with it and wait for Microsoft's next version which will "hopefully" fix the mistakes.
CD? As I recall I loaded it from a set of floppies.
Hard Core Old School all the way.
"Look, good against cottages is one thing. Good against the living with a tin foil hat? That's something else."
I went with Appleseed.
My routers are Deunan Knute and Briareos.
My servers are Athena, Hitomi, Niki, Tereus and Yoshi
I am 45 and my wife is 41. We have 4 kids who are 22, 21, 18 and 17. NONE of the kids will read a book on a Kindle, iPhone or on the computer. They think the Kindle is a ho-hum "whatever" device.
My wife loves her Kindle (looks like paper) but has always abhorred reading books on her computer (hates the backlit display). Whereas myself. I love reading it however I can get it. Palm-Pilot, Computer, Kindle. I will probably purchase a Kindle Fire by Christmas time this year.
I wonder if it is a generational thing. With my generation being told we were growing up in the computer age as this stuff started appearing when we were 8 or 9 years old. We just cant get enough of anything "high-tech". Whereas my kids, have had computers around them from the time they got out of a crib. This is all no big deal for them. They pick and choose what works for them. It seems there judgement is that only people over 35 want to read books on a computer or handheld device. Maybe people over 35 are starting to realized what the kids already knew.
On the other hand, you will have to pry my kindle and 2000 book library out of me cold, dead fingers.
finally with the entire right wing signing Grover Norquist's "No new taxes on teh rich EVAR!" pledge good luck doing anything about the debt we are drowning in which means no more money for NASA, hell look at how many are having a shitfit at Obama calling to LOWER corporate taxes simply because he wants to close the loopholes that give companies like GE billions in return for nothing.
Your really worried about the Republicans? Really?
Take a look at the lay of the land. Texas and Northern Florida both elect Republicans. The with a Democratic Majority, anything space related starves republican communities and leads to the chance of more Democratic victories in the future.
What the United States has left of a space program is being gutted by the Democrats. I would predict that the Republicans would re-fund NASA and the space sector. Not continue to strip it down as would happen if the Democrats win the Presidency.
Can you please explain that statement with a car analogy?
It is not about affording private schools.
I am saying that the kind of person who would spend money to send a child to private school is also the kind of parent who is involved with their childs education at home. A school with involved parents can spend half as much as a school without involved parents and get far better results. And yes there are plenty of parents that can not afford a private school and care about their childs education and are involved in it. The point was to consider the parental involvement, not the money.
Children anywhere do better if their parents are involved in helping them learn and teaching them. They will do well in private school or public school.
Learning should start at home LONG before school. I don't mean formally sitting down and teaching 3 year olds to read. Most of them are not ready for it at that point. With our children, every day of life was a classroom for them. They hung out with us. I explained how things worked, answered questions. Read to them. Stopped movies while we were watching them and asked them questions about what was going on and explained what I thought was happening. My wife did this as well.
Though I did not graduate from high school (I had to drop out and get a job to help support my siblings) and my wife only had a high school diploma. We were both well read. My son had hearing problems which caused some speech issued when he was young. At 5 years old he tested out with the vocabulary of the average 10 year old. By the time he was 8 he tested out with the vocabulary of a first year college student. When we used a big word, we explained what it meant. The difference between the almost right word and the right word is like the difference between a lightening bug and a lightening bolt. Sometimes the larger word is the right word for the job and my kids learned the right words.
It did not always help with them making friends. "I am afraid you have impressed upon me a speech pattern which will attract ridicule from my peer group." But my kids were always able to carry on a conversation with their friends parents.
From a parent who gets it. Tell your wife thank you.
Most kids need new parents. Or at least parents that care and take responsibility. Parents that read to their children, help them pick up the basics, teach good study habits and make sure their children do their homework, will have students who do well in any school.
If Johnny can not read, it is mom and dads job to teach Johnny or to find someone who can. For any parent who is literate, the fact that they can have a child hit middle school who cant read is a sign of laziness. You pay taxes so that your city will provide primary education for your child. However you cant just put a sandwich in a lunch bag and send them out the door every morning for 12 years and expect that someone who is paid to show up for 8 hours a day at a union job will do a better job at loving your child and teaching them than you will.
I have 3 adult children. I am a high school dropout. Most of their lives we lived at or near the poverty level. Two of my three kids manage to get scholarships that pay for 90% of all their college expenses. They were all students who received good grades. Sometimes it was a lot of work for us. If a kid has a different learning style than how a teacher teaches, it was up to us to turn the TV off and spend time with our offspring and help them to learn.
I have worked 10 hours, driven another hour home, and then sat down and helped one child with math and read to another child. Face it, teachers are like any other group. Only 10% of them graduated in the top 10% of their class. College only required them to be right 70% of the time. That is right. Your child may be taught by someone who gets 30% of the material wrong, and that is before they perform a poor job at communicating what they DO know.
Many private schools spend half as much as public schools do per student yet the children learn far better? Why is this? Maybe because someone who is taxed for public schools and then still ponies up money for a private insinuation cares enough about their child's education to be involved and make sure that the succeed no matter what.
if you care about your kids. it is YOUR job to make sure they know the things they need to know. Passing it off on someone else and then acting powerless when your child is in 3rd grade has problems and wringing your hands for the next 9 years that nothing can be done is a cop out.
Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie said it best. Every OS Sucks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI
I think the fixed sized menu is useful. A good portion of the menu stays exactly where it was no matter what. We find things on the computer spatially. When I hit that "start" button. I pretty well know where things will be located.
The real problem there is the way many menus are laid out. Most linux desktops get it right. A menu should have less than 10 items on it.
Accessories
Graphics
Internet
Office
Programming
System
Utilities
Is a pretty good layout.
However, having the option to change it to behave to take up the available vertical real-estate and having it disabled by default would be a good thing.
We used to run the Norton Corporate product and we loved it. It is much lighter on system resources than the retail product. Corp 9, then Corp 10 then Corp 11.
Once we hit version 11 we had a problem. Every time it did a download and update, it would keep a copy of the older downloads and updates. Every 3 months our hard drive would run out of room. The solution a) wait for the patch to fix this for customers with this issue and b) uninstall the software from the server, reinstall it, and then manually every client back in. We would lose a full day every 3 months doing this. After more than a year of this and no patch forthcoming we switched products.
As it turns out there are other products that are even ligther on resources, as easy to administer and cost less as well. A 3 year license came to $18 a system. At the cost of $6 a year for a professional antivirus product, it was easy to make the switch.
I have to admit, that I am very pro-linux and very pro-google.
I still think there is a big difference between Google and Microsoft in this case. Microsoft tends to do things to create lock in wherever they can. Back then by doing things with HTML, addons, etc, to tie you to Windows. Now by having a signed boot loader that can only boot Windows 8 on the ARM platform. They play "open" where they have to, but play "lock in" and "monopoly" whenever they think they can get away with it. This means if they could kill off other browsers, they would. if it means making HTML a Microsoft product and a must have, while breaking the internet, they would.
Google has a different goal. The more stuff people do on line, the more likely they are to use Google services, and the more Google services they use, the more money Google makes. Google does not lock people in. If you want to leave google mail, hoock up to it via IMAP and copy your stuff out. You can opt out and go elsewhere when ever you want. Most people dont. Googles goal with web browsers is to make them such a powerful platform that google services run as well as native apps. So they work on their own browser, their improved javascript engine, a replacement for javascript. Why? Speed, everyone else is able to copy what they are doing and make their web browsers better. It does not matter in the long run if you use Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox. If they improve so that the google experience is good, they are happy and they have "won".
With Google they want others to take advantage of their work with HTML, scripting and other web advancements. Please do so, on any platform you want, create your own dev tools. We will make it easy for you to use our standard. Versus Microsofts, only our implementation is standard, it only runs on our platform, you should only use our platform.
Setting up Arch Linux is not hard. The article at http://lifehacker.com/5680453/build-a-killer-customized-arch-linux-installation-and-learn-all-about-linux-in-the-process is particularly useful. I did not even need to refer to the guide. Just followed the instructions at LifeHacker and then used the Arch Wiki to configure and fine tune things from there. So yeah, I can do it. But I found a better way.
I now do my Arch setups by installing ArchBang. ArchBang is a riff on CrunchBang. As a live CD, it is Arch Linux with an OpenBox GUI, a Tint2 panel, system info shown in conky and some slick CrunchBang style GUI configuration tools for OpenBox. Now setting up an Arch Linux system takes about 15 minutes. That is all the time it takes run the installer. As part of the install you need to edit two files. In rc.conf you set your hostname. In pacman.d/mirrorlist, you need to move the mirrors in your country to the top of the file. That is it.
After 15 minutes of work, you have a completely working Arch Linux system with sound, X and a Window Manager with font smoothing all set up for you.
In addition to pacman they also include packer. Which is able to install all the standard packages that pacman does but is also able to perform installs from AUR using the same syntax as pacman.
Arch + Openbox + Packer = ArchBang
This is not the first time this has happened. It is just the first time we have heard about a virus being in place for a decade and not being detected.
I am sure there are more colleges and government agencies that are compromised like this.
As an added bonus. This is why you should post AC when posting from College.
There is one thing that we know about education. The higher value the student places upon and takes responsibility for learning, the better the student does. If a student wants to learn, they can learn despite bad teachers, or bad online courses. The better the tools and more opportunity a student like this has. The more they will learn.
Sometimes a student lights this flame inside all by themselves.
Sometimes a teacher lights this flame for them.
More often than not though. It is parental involvement at home that makes a difference. Everything from reading to a child, installing the love of learning, to just making sure learn good study habits and get their homework done.
Parents who do not do this at home and rely on teachers to do it because "it is there job" are the real problem. Even the best teacher can not be guaranteed to be able to do this with the number of students and time they have in class. By definition, not all teachers can be exceptional. Many will fail at this because they don't have what it takes to inspire. It is still the parents job at home to do this.