I think in a lot of ways it's brilliant. In others, it's way short, but then again, he's 15. He's more creative than half the $150/hr consultants we hire, that's for sure.
Seriously, though, we (the sewage district I work for) are looking at micro-treatment - treatment at the point of source for sewage. Lots of reasons but google for PECs (Pollutants of Emerging Concern) if you really want to know why. Eventually we see large scale municipal plants going away and micro-plants with instant recycling being the norm.
This kid is just about 20 years ahead of his time. I want stock in his company.
If you're unafraid of your klutziness, join a dance troupe. Or a theatre group. You'd be surprised; most such organizations desperately need someone to do lighting and such, and are woefully ignorant of basics. So if you can wire a lightswitch, can follow a script, you can be a stagehand or a technical director.
Volunteer for trail building. OK, this only works if you're an outdoor person, but that's where the sort of women I like hang out. You can build a trail in a local park, get to work next to some really good looking women, and perhaps have something to talk about - especially if you can keep your mouth shut and listen to eco babble about salmon runs and invasive species.
Or....
Anyway, find an activity that's not a dating meatmarket. Someplace where your social awkwardness (if such exists) is irrelevant, where you're working toward a common goal, and pretty soon you'll find some fellow tree planter or trail builder or invasive-species puller is asking you to come out next weekend to do something else.
The whole idea is that if you set out to find "fellow geeks" you'll end up in a room full of guys with stilted conversations about geek stuff. If you set out to do something different, and are honest and accepting and funny about your ineptitude, you will meet some really cool people.
When I was studying computer science I had a horrible time understanding recursion. Now understand that this was a long time ago, and structured programming was just beginning to be developed, so recursion was something new, both conceptually and technically.
But a big problem was the way it was presented. Basically we were thrown into a world of stacks, heaps, pointers, and so on, without a single word of why recursion was useful, and without any sort of introduction to recursion.
Years later, when I taught CS, I would take my students outside, have them pull a leaf off the tree, and trace the veins. We'd talk about the self-replicating nature of the structure of the veins in the leaf, at smaller and smaller scales, and finally stopping at some point.
Once my students understood this self-replicating nature of nature, we'd start implementing it in the classroom on a computer. And things like recursion, binary trees, and traversal became trivial.
It's all about tying real world observations to the science you're doing.
Yeah, I'm involved in a small gov't - and the cruft that accretes over time is incredible. We have nearly as many employee classifications as employees. (that means nearly every employee has his/her own job description and responsibilities and pay scale.)
We have union contracts. Several different ones, with different benefits. We have different health care benefits, retirement benefits, and so on. In some cases, we have a single employee who has a particular health plan and retirement plan, and they're grandfathered in, so we can't change them.
It's not just a matter of paying all the different taxes; it's that you have to understand all of the classifications, grandfather clauses, pay scales, benefits, and so on. I would guess that for UM, you multiply this by 10 or 20 and you see what you're dealing with.
The *only* way this can be done is to reclassify all your employees into some sort of structure that makes sense; this will invariably be shot down by the union as some members will see an erosion of benefits.
So most organizations will outsource this, blame it all on the consultant, take it to council/board of trustees/etc, and then run like hell from the fallout.
"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didnâ(TM)t speak up because I wasnâ(TM)t a Communist; And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didnâ(TM)t speak up because I wasnâ(TM)t a trade unionist; And then they came for the Jews, And I didnâ(TM)t speak up because I wasnâ(TM)t a Jew; And then... they came for me... And by that time there was no one left to speak up."
Really, I don't see how this is going to work unless you firewall DNS. Then your official DNS servers are going to have to do a lot of work. Eventually businesses are going to revolt if this is causing downtime....
Good instructors don't recycle their work over and over.
Anyway, I could see if a lot of work went into developing the assignments. But it really didn't and there is no reason why the prof couldn't develop new and better assignments in response to new tech and student needs. That's part of teaching; you respond to your students, you grow and develop.
Recycling the same assignment from year to year doesn't say much for the prof and his own development and learning; telling your student to take down a website says a lot about how ignorant you are about the web, Streisand effect, and a few other minor tidbits that have come along since the heyday of COBOL.
I used to teach comp sci back when.... I had a single assigment that the students worked on all semester. We started out with the basics, and then added more and more features until we had a full-featured program.
While the assignment never changed, you really couldn't cheat as it would be really difficult to fake your way through months of ever more complex code development.
The class was typically small enough where I could talk to each student once in a while and probe their understanding of what they were doing.
Not only is the prof an idiot, he's a lazy bastard as well.
That actually describes my area. My ISP is a small, local outfit. They don't eve show up on the ISP list on the website.
Here's what's interesting: the ISPs that do show up as providing ESPN360 in my area don't actually serve my house.
I wouldn't be surprised if the larger ISPs are in cahoots here as this will drive the small ISPs out of business if it catches on. Certainly, if I wanted access, I would have to get Qwest (shudder) to provide me with services, and drop my local ISP, who provide fantastic service.
Re:If you don't read TFA
on
One-Tweet Wonders
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Makes you wonder how many of these are some sort of throwaway code.
getting ready for cannes == set the date Printing latest briefing == getting the drugs Folding shirts == meet at designated spot
and so on.... Seems that twitter would be a great way to use one-time pads and code phrases.....
I'm an engineer and I've designed and built things that aren't anywhere near as complex as an aircraft, and I can't tell you how many times I've looked at one of my designs, and thought "What fucking dumbshit designed that?"
Heck, I *know* that engineers, for all our foresight and training, overlook the obvious. Still, I trust airplanes more than, say, cars.
An 11 year old is 6th grade, so presumably the payout would be higher. As I said in the beginning, I'd love to see a statistical breakdown, *especially* what happens once the rewards stop.
I've been around long enough to see these programs come and fail. Every one of these bizarre ideas that fail to understand that education is important in and of itself has so far failed in the long run.
It still doesn't address the rewards of cheating; this program monetizes getting good scores on a test, not for learning. That's a huge incentive for cheating.
I've taught college level classes and the most troublesome students are those who feel entitled to a grade because they tried hard, or showed up to class, and utterly failed to understand that they're there not be rewarded by the prof/teacher but to actually learn something.
Heh... In the 10 years I owned my company, I never had a person quit to go to work for a competitor. Actually most people like working for me. And the benefits we offered were better than most of our competitors. But enough of that.
I don't ridicule rewarding kids; I ridicule paying kids cash - huge amounts of cash - for doing what they should be doing. I think kids should be rewarded for doing well. A pizza - great. A movie ticket, an afternoon at the bowling alley - great.
But hundreds of dollars for a kid who is 11? That seems seems a bit out of line....
Interesting. I'd never heard of Frank Miller. Point taken on Heinlein in re literature. But I think you missed the greater point; paying kids to attend school is absurd on so many levels that it's been ridiculed over and over.
And I think you missed my other point - it's not about kids who had a shitty childhood; some of those kids that I've known had good childhoods but still were motivated to be the first ones in their family to get a high school diploma, or a college degree, or a regular job with benefits.
They valued those things in and of themselves, because they were proud to achieve them.
Anyway, not that many years ago parents had to pay for kids to go school; we still do in the US but we call it taxes and impact fees. Now education is free for those who need it most. Education is worth a lot and paying kids results in absurd entitlment attitude when they grow up.
True story: I had someone demand that they get a bonus for not taking sick days. (Recent hire.) They really expected to be rewarded for showing up and not realizing that they already get a reward - it's called a paycheck.
And so what happens to your kid who gets a job, works hard, and gets fired? I can hear the wailing now.
Guess what - the world doesn't work that way. You work hard, you achieve good things, and more often than not, you get fucked by some equally greedy asshole higher up the foodchain taking his "reward" for "working hard".
Better teach your kids that work is work, you get paid for work, but it's not all rewards, and if they want to control their own destiny, they better take control of it and not rely on some benevolent dictator to "reward" them for trying. That's one of the greatest problems with new hires; they expect to be rewarded every time they walk into the office on time without snot on their nose.
Come on, the world sucks right now for the wage slaves. teach your kids to think, to be daring, and to know right from wrong. They won't be slaves to the dollar and will be a lot happier.
The problem with paying for grades is that it takes No Child Left Behind even further - it now gives a solid price for cheating and "teaching to the test".
Before you started paying kids, it was just about teachers' rewards - like pay incentives and keeping their jobs. IIRC in some districts teachers' cheating approached 30% (I could be wrong on this; read Steven Levitt's Freakonomics.)
Now you've put a solid price on cheating.
In my experience, the best people on the job aren't those who got the best grades, it's the ones who overcame more than others, who demonstrated true effort. I can tell you stories aabout the penniless kids who boostrapped themselves from Harlem, or Mexico, or Eastern Europe. They make the best employees; they work hard, they value work, and they strive for improvement. Heck, I've had work crews get pissed because I told them they couldn't work on Thanksgiving.
So rewarding kids for grades has put a solid price on cheating, and will eventually result in kids saying: Pay me or I won't go to school.
Heinlein lampooned this in Stranger in a Strange land; perhaps those giving out money should actually read some literature.
I really would love to see a statistical analysis of the kids' tests.
I remember watching the TDF a few years ago. There was a breakaway that opened up a huge gap. As the kilometers wore on, riders who couldn't keep the pace dropped from the breakaway and got swallowed by the peleton. Finally, there were just two riders left. They knew one would take the stage. At the 1KM banner, they slowed, shook hands, and each went for the finish.
Take a lesson from the gambling industry. They have to audit all of their machines regularly. The entire OS, including the bootloader, sits on SD cards. You can yank the SD card, audit it, and stick it back in. It's much more difficult to hack these on a long-term basis as the SD card audit will catch it. There are no keyboad ports. (Assuming, of course, the auditor is honest and the lock on the machine is secure. No joy if the person refilling the machine has access to the guts of the machine.)
Anyone here actually programmed one of these? I built an embedded box on the hardware, and the bootloader-on-the-SD-card made me ask what it was for.
I wish more people would read the history of the world. Boys age 8 and 9 were expected to drive mule trains to their brothers and fathers in the field; often they were sent out on overnight trips with nothing but 4 mules and a horse for company. Girls that age were expected to run a kitchen; that meant slaughering small game, often hunting that game with a small caliber rifle, and preparing dinner.
Folks, kids can do so much more than we allow them to do. They can act responsibly and make decisions for themselves; we as parents have to teach them how to make decisions.
I'm constantly amazed at how we treat our kids like they're made of spun sugar and will dissolve if so much as a drop of rain hits them.
Kids are tough; they are the progeny of the most successful predator to ever walk this planet.
Teach them to make decisions, teach them how to act, and teach them what to do in unexpected situations.
We fail our kids by not putting them in situations where they have to make decisions. We fail our kids every day by building an environment where their every need is met and where there is no price for failure.
The kid should know her bus number. The kid should know her bus mates. The kid should know where she lives and her parents' phone numbers.
And the parents should stop freaking out and look at this as a lesson for their child. The OP didn't say how the kid reacted; did she do the right thing? Call home from someone's house? Great. Reinforce that she made the right decision; talk about how to deal with it the next time.
Did she freak out and throw a temper tantrum and go in to hysterics? Was she unable to tell an adult her name, parents' names and phone numbers, home address? Time to drill that into her head NOW! Before it's too late.
BECAUSE THERE WILL BE A NEXT TIME!!!! And daddy with all his Open Source linux gadgets won't be able to make a decision for her. She needs to make that decision herself.
No shit. I was born under communism; I vividly recall the grade school lectures about leaving the country being a crime.
We left there to the land of the free. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would live to see the day when borders in formerly communist nations are no more and Americans must present the proper papers and fingerprints! to leave the country.
As soon as I posted, I realized I left that part out.
Without the need to justify the cost of upgrades, there is no need for the sort of feature for feature's sake that often goes with commercial software. At one point, I worked with AutoCAD a lot. Autodesk decided to improve its bottom line by releasing a new version every 12 months. There was a huge backlash against this as it takes about 6 months to get fully productive with a new version, mostly because the UI changes. Not only are features added and removed, but command functionality is changed, which breaks scripts.
With non-commercial software, this incentive to change the UI just so we can say that we have a 209 shiny new widgets isn't there. Change can be incremental, in such a way as not to break too much at any one time. The cost of upgrades is spread over a much longer timebase.
To address your point, there are stable distros - RedHat, Debian Stable, which remain stable for years. There are wildly unstable distros - Debian Experimental for one. And there are the bleeding edge distros.
I run Debian Stable. I have no trouble with upgrades. I build the bleeding edge packages I need from source.
Again, if the manufacturers understood the linux production cycle, they would not be so afraid.
OK, but that's very 80s and 90s thinking. The whole idea that systems have to be static, fixed, rigid is very much in the past.
There is no reason why releases have to be so long apart. That thinking comes from a license fee driven mentality; when you charge people for an upgrade, they must have something for it. So there is a huge incentive for feature bloat; look at "ribbons" v. "menus". I've yet to see a substantive difference in use but it's a brand new feature that's used to justify the huge cost of an upgrade.
Now look at the way linux develops. It's incremental, it's fast, and it relies on repositories. It doesn't have an attachment to the past. So a vendor doesn't have to customize the software to each distro, that's the distro maintainers' job.
Distro maintainers in linux are much like the OEMs in the MS world. They're ultimately responsible for making stuff work. The problem currently is that the major commercial vendors just plain don't understand how linux works, and so don't want to trust, support, or even acknowledge the package maintainers' role in making their product work.
The flip side is that the linux community has a short bullshit fuse; with flux and change being the norm, a commercial vendor has to be just as nimble, just as competitive, just as flexible as an open source project. Most of them simply cannot do that as they have too many internally competing goals.
So a piece of software that is not being actively developed is likely to be dropped in favor of some other. Look at what's happening to MySQL right now.
MS has been very successful in convincing the unwashed masses that computers are fraught with problems, and that the typical end user should expect sudden, unanticipated failures for no apparent reason.
So the inability to play a DVD is just shrugged off as another minor quirk of "the computer" - as is the virus infection, the weird slowing down over time, and a host of other issues.
So
Every time a Windows user can't figure out how to play a DVD, a new pirate is born.
just doesn't hold up. It's more like "every time a Windows user can't figure out how to play a DVD, they just shrug and move on."
It's like being married to a cheating spouse. After a while, you get used to the abuse.
As someone who actually does this - I have one system with 3 monitors, another with 2 - it's possible. Is it easy? No.
First of all, all I know is linux. I have no clue about Windows.
If you have a separate GPU per monitor, you can get full acceleration. There's some voodoo you have to pull off to separate the GPUs in xorg, but the info is out there.
If you have a dual-dvi card with a single GPU, you won't get acceleration on either one as you have to run Xephyr on top of your X server.
If it's just a "passing phase", I'd go down to your local computer recycler, buy a relatively recent box for $100, and be done with it.
Right now Xorg is in a state of flux and maybe in 6 months or a year true multiuser will arrive with the rootless X server, but I'm not holding my breath. The xorg devs are doing a fantastic job, but it's a big job....
Slashdot Mirror
I think in a lot of ways it's brilliant. In others, it's way short, but then again, he's 15. He's more creative than half the $150/hr consultants we hire, that's for sure.
Seriously, though, we (the sewage district I work for) are looking at micro-treatment - treatment at the point of source for sewage. Lots of reasons but google for PECs (Pollutants of Emerging Concern) if you really want to know why. Eventually we see large scale municipal plants going away and micro-plants with instant recycling being the norm.
This kid is just about 20 years ahead of his time. I want stock in his company.
Some ideas:
If you're unafraid of your klutziness, join a dance troupe. Or a theatre group. You'd be surprised; most such organizations desperately need someone to do lighting and such, and are woefully ignorant of basics. So if you can wire a lightswitch, can follow a script, you can be a stagehand or a technical director.
Volunteer for trail building. OK, this only works if you're an outdoor person, but that's where the sort of women I like hang out. You can build a trail in a local park, get to work next to some really good looking women, and perhaps have something to talk about - especially if you can keep your mouth shut and listen to eco babble about salmon runs and invasive species.
Or....
Anyway, find an activity that's not a dating meatmarket. Someplace where your social awkwardness (if such exists) is irrelevant, where you're working toward a common goal, and pretty soon you'll find some fellow tree planter or trail builder or invasive-species puller is asking you to come out next weekend to do something else.
The whole idea is that if you set out to find "fellow geeks" you'll end up in a room full of guys with stilted conversations about geek stuff. If you set out to do something different, and are honest and accepting and funny about your ineptitude, you will meet some really cool people.
When I was studying computer science I had a horrible time understanding recursion. Now understand that this was a long time ago, and structured programming was just beginning to be developed, so recursion was something new, both conceptually and technically.
But a big problem was the way it was presented. Basically we were thrown into a world of stacks, heaps, pointers, and so on, without a single word of why recursion was useful, and without any sort of introduction to recursion.
Years later, when I taught CS, I would take my students outside, have them pull a leaf off the tree, and trace the veins. We'd talk about the self-replicating nature of the structure of the veins in the leaf, at smaller and smaller scales, and finally stopping at some point.
Once my students understood this self-replicating nature of nature, we'd start implementing it in the classroom on a computer. And things like recursion, binary trees, and traversal became trivial.
It's all about tying real world observations to the science you're doing.
Yeah, I'm involved in a small gov't - and the cruft that accretes over time is incredible. We have nearly as many employee classifications as employees. (that means nearly every employee has his/her own job description and responsibilities and pay scale.)
We have union contracts. Several different ones, with different benefits. We have different health care benefits, retirement benefits, and so on. In some cases, we have a single employee who has a particular health plan and retirement plan, and they're grandfathered in, so we can't change them.
It's not just a matter of paying all the different taxes; it's that you have to understand all of the classifications, grandfather clauses, pay scales, benefits, and so on. I would guess that for UM, you multiply this by 10 or 20 and you see what you're dealing with.
The *only* way this can be done is to reclassify all your employees into some sort of structure that makes sense; this will invariably be shot down by the union as some members will see an erosion of benefits.
So most organizations will outsource this, blame it all on the consultant, take it to council/board of trustees/etc, and then run like hell from the fallout.
"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didnâ(TM)t speak up because I wasnâ(TM)t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didnâ(TM)t speak up because I wasnâ(TM)t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews, And I didnâ(TM)t speak up because I wasnâ(TM)t a Jew;
And then... they came for me... And by that time there was no one left to speak up."
the Green Dam folks to write the DNS firewall.
Really, I don't see how this is going to work unless you firewall DNS. Then your official DNS servers are going to have to do a lot of work. Eventually businesses are going to revolt if this is causing downtime....
But music changes..... At some point your friends will abandond you, your girlfriend will leave, and you will be left with your outdated collection.
All to save a few bucks. Or pounds. Or whatever.
Good instructors don't recycle their work over and over.
Anyway, I could see if a lot of work went into developing the assignments. But it really didn't and there is no reason why the prof couldn't develop new and better assignments in response to new tech and student needs. That's part of teaching; you respond to your students, you grow and develop.
Recycling the same assignment from year to year doesn't say much for the prof and his own development and learning; telling your student to take down a website says a lot about how ignorant you are about the web, Streisand effect, and a few other minor tidbits that have come along since the heyday of COBOL.
Yup....
I used to teach comp sci back when.... I had a single assigment that the students worked on all semester. We started out with the basics, and then added more and more features until we had a full-featured program.
While the assignment never changed, you really couldn't cheat as it would be really difficult to fake your way through months of ever more complex code development.
The class was typically small enough where I could talk to each student once in a while and probe their understanding of what they were doing.
Not only is the prof an idiot, he's a lazy bastard as well.
That actually describes my area. My ISP is a small, local outfit. They don't eve show up on the ISP list on the website.
Here's what's interesting: the ISPs that do show up as providing ESPN360 in my area don't actually serve my house.
I wouldn't be surprised if the larger ISPs are in cahoots here as this will drive the small ISPs out of business if it catches on. Certainly, if I wanted access, I would have to get Qwest (shudder) to provide me with services, and drop my local ISP, who provide fantastic service.
Makes you wonder how many of these are some sort of throwaway code.
getting ready for cannes == set the date
Printing latest briefing == getting the drugs
Folding shirts == meet at designated spot
and so on.... Seems that twitter would be a great way to use one-time pads and code phrases.....
I'm an engineer and I've designed and built things that aren't anywhere near as complex as an aircraft, and I can't tell you how many times I've looked at one of my designs, and thought "What fucking dumbshit designed that?"
Heck, I *know* that engineers, for all our foresight and training, overlook the obvious. Still, I trust airplanes more than, say, cars.
An 11 year old is 6th grade, so presumably the payout would be higher. As I said in the beginning, I'd love to see a statistical breakdown, *especially* what happens once the rewards stop.
I've been around long enough to see these programs come and fail. Every one of these bizarre ideas that fail to understand that education is important in and of itself has so far failed in the long run.
It still doesn't address the rewards of cheating; this program monetizes getting good scores on a test, not for learning. That's a huge incentive for cheating.
I've taught college level classes and the most troublesome students are those who feel entitled to a grade because they tried hard, or showed up to class, and utterly failed to understand that they're there not be rewarded by the prof/teacher but to actually learn something.
Heh... In the 10 years I owned my company, I never had a person quit to go to work for a competitor. Actually most people like working for me. And the benefits we offered were better than most of our competitors. But enough of that.
I don't ridicule rewarding kids; I ridicule paying kids cash - huge amounts of cash - for doing what they should be doing. I think kids should be rewarded for doing well. A pizza - great. A movie ticket, an afternoon at the bowling alley - great.
But hundreds of dollars for a kid who is 11? That seems seems a bit out of line....
Interesting. I'd never heard of Frank Miller. Point taken on Heinlein in re literature. But I think you missed the greater point; paying kids to attend school is absurd on so many levels that it's been ridiculed over and over.
And I think you missed my other point - it's not about kids who had a shitty childhood; some of those kids that I've known had good childhoods but still were motivated to be the first ones in their family to get a high school diploma, or a college degree, or a regular job with benefits.
They valued those things in and of themselves, because they were proud to achieve them.
Anyway, not that many years ago parents had to pay for kids to go school; we still do in the US but we call it taxes and impact fees. Now education is free for those who need it most. Education is worth a lot and paying kids results in absurd entitlment attitude when they grow up.
True story: I had someone demand that they get a bonus for not taking sick days. (Recent hire.) They really expected to be rewarded for showing up and not realizing that they already get a reward - it's called a paycheck.
And so what happens to your kid who gets a job, works hard, and gets fired? I can hear the wailing now.
Guess what - the world doesn't work that way. You work hard, you achieve good things, and more often than not, you get fucked by some equally greedy asshole higher up the foodchain taking his "reward" for "working hard".
Better teach your kids that work is work, you get paid for work, but it's not all rewards, and if they want to control their own destiny, they better take control of it and not rely on some benevolent dictator to "reward" them for trying. That's one of the greatest problems with new hires; they expect to be rewarded every time they walk into the office on time without snot on their nose.
Come on, the world sucks right now for the wage slaves. teach your kids to think, to be daring, and to know right from wrong. They won't be slaves to the dollar and will be a lot happier.
The problem with paying for grades is that it takes No Child Left Behind even further - it now gives a solid price for cheating and "teaching to the test".
Before you started paying kids, it was just about teachers' rewards - like pay incentives and keeping their jobs. IIRC in some districts teachers' cheating approached 30% (I could be wrong on this; read Steven Levitt's Freakonomics.)
Now you've put a solid price on cheating.
In my experience, the best people on the job aren't those who got the best grades, it's the ones who overcame more than others, who demonstrated true effort. I can tell you stories aabout the penniless kids who boostrapped themselves from Harlem, or Mexico, or Eastern Europe. They make the best employees; they work hard, they value work, and they strive for improvement. Heck, I've had work crews get pissed because I told them they couldn't work on Thanksgiving.
So rewarding kids for grades has put a solid price on cheating, and will eventually result in kids saying: Pay me or I won't go to school.
Heinlein lampooned this in Stranger in a Strange land; perhaps those giving out money should actually read some literature.
I really would love to see a statistical analysis of the kids' tests.
I remember watching the TDF a few years ago. There was a breakaway that opened up a huge gap. As the kilometers wore on, riders who couldn't keep the pace dropped from the breakaway and got swallowed by the peleton. Finally, there were just two riders left. They knew one would take the stage. At the 1KM banner, they slowed, shook hands, and each went for the finish.
First cooperation, then competition.
Take a lesson from the gambling industry. They have to audit all of their machines regularly. The entire OS, including the bootloader, sits on SD cards. You can yank the SD card, audit it, and stick it back in. It's much more difficult to hack these on a long-term basis as the SD card audit will catch it. There are no keyboad ports. (Assuming, of course, the auditor is honest and the lock on the machine is secure. No joy if the person refilling the machine has access to the guts of the machine.)
Anyone here actually programmed one of these? I built an embedded box on the hardware, and the bootloader-on-the-SD-card made me ask what it was for.
I wish more people would read the history of the world. Boys age 8 and 9 were expected to drive mule trains to their brothers and fathers in the field; often they were sent out on overnight trips with nothing but 4 mules and a horse for company. Girls that age were expected to run a kitchen; that meant slaughering small game, often hunting that game with a small caliber rifle, and preparing dinner.
Folks, kids can do so much more than we allow them to do. They can act responsibly and make decisions for themselves; we as parents have to teach them how to make decisions.
I'm constantly amazed at how we treat our kids like they're made of spun sugar and will dissolve if so much as a drop of rain hits them.
Kids are tough; they are the progeny of the most successful predator to ever walk this planet.
Teach them to make decisions, teach them how to act, and teach them what to do in unexpected situations.
We fail our kids by not putting them in situations where they have to make decisions. We fail our kids every day by building an environment where their every need is met and where there is no price for failure.
The kid should know her bus number. The kid should know her bus mates. The kid should know where she lives and her parents' phone numbers.
And the parents should stop freaking out and look at this as a lesson for their child. The OP didn't say how the kid reacted; did she do the right thing? Call home from someone's house? Great. Reinforce that she made the right decision; talk about how to deal with it the next time.
Did she freak out and throw a temper tantrum and go in to hysterics? Was she unable to tell an adult her name, parents' names and phone numbers, home address? Time to drill that into her head NOW! Before it's too late.
BECAUSE THERE WILL BE A NEXT TIME!!!! And daddy with all his Open Source linux gadgets won't be able to make a decision for her. She needs to make that decision herself.
No shit. I was born under communism; I vividly recall the grade school lectures about leaving the country being a crime.
We left there to the land of the free. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would live to see the day when borders in formerly communist nations are no more and Americans must present the proper papers and fingerprints! to leave the country.
As soon as I posted, I realized I left that part out.
Without the need to justify the cost of upgrades, there is no need for the sort of feature for feature's sake that often goes with commercial software. At one point, I worked with AutoCAD a lot. Autodesk decided to improve its bottom line by releasing a new version every 12 months. There was a huge backlash against this as it takes about 6 months to get fully productive with a new version, mostly because the UI changes. Not only are features added and removed, but command functionality is changed, which breaks scripts.
With non-commercial software, this incentive to change the UI just so we can say that we have a 209 shiny new widgets isn't there. Change can be incremental, in such a way as not to break too much at any one time. The cost of upgrades is spread over a much longer timebase.
To address your point, there are stable distros - RedHat, Debian Stable, which remain stable for years. There are wildly unstable distros - Debian Experimental for one. And there are the bleeding edge distros.
I run Debian Stable. I have no trouble with upgrades. I build the bleeding edge packages I need from source.
Again, if the manufacturers understood the linux production cycle, they would not be so afraid.
OK, but that's very 80s and 90s thinking. The whole idea that systems have to be static, fixed, rigid is very much in the past.
There is no reason why releases have to be so long apart. That thinking comes from a license fee driven mentality; when you charge people for an upgrade, they must have something for it. So there is a huge incentive for feature bloat; look at "ribbons" v. "menus". I've yet to see a substantive difference in use but it's a brand new feature that's used to justify the huge cost of an upgrade.
Now look at the way linux develops. It's incremental, it's fast, and it relies on repositories. It doesn't have an attachment to the past. So a vendor doesn't have to customize the software to each distro, that's the distro maintainers' job.
Distro maintainers in linux are much like the OEMs in the MS world. They're ultimately responsible for making stuff work. The problem currently is that the major commercial vendors just plain don't understand how linux works, and so don't want to trust, support, or even acknowledge the package maintainers' role in making their product work.
The flip side is that the linux community has a short bullshit fuse; with flux and change being the norm, a commercial vendor has to be just as nimble, just as competitive, just as flexible as an open source project. Most of them simply cannot do that as they have too many internally competing goals.
So a piece of software that is not being actively developed is likely to be dropped in favor of some other. Look at what's happening to MySQL right now.
Not really.
MS has been very successful in convincing the unwashed masses that computers are fraught with problems, and that the typical end user should expect sudden, unanticipated failures for no apparent reason.
So the inability to play a DVD is just shrugged off as another minor quirk of "the computer" - as is the virus infection, the weird slowing down over time, and a host of other issues.
So
Every time a Windows user can't figure out how to play a DVD, a new pirate is born.
just doesn't hold up. It's more like "every time a Windows user can't figure out how to play a DVD, they just shrug and move on."
It's like being married to a cheating spouse. After a while, you get used to the abuse.
As someone who actually does this - I have one system with 3 monitors, another with 2 - it's possible. Is it easy? No.
First of all, all I know is linux. I have no clue about Windows.
If you have a separate GPU per monitor, you can get full acceleration. There's some voodoo you have to pull off to separate the GPUs in xorg, but the info is out there.
If you have a dual-dvi card with a single GPU, you won't get acceleration on either one as you have to run Xephyr on top of your X server.
If it's just a "passing phase", I'd go down to your local computer recycler, buy a relatively recent box for $100, and be done with it.
Right now Xorg is in a state of flux and maybe in 6 months or a year true multiuser will arrive with the rootless X server, but I'm not holding my breath. The xorg devs are doing a fantastic job, but it's a big job....