Public schools are just day care facilities for single parents or traditional families to allow both parents to work so they can afford all the stuff they need, like a $300,000+ home, $80,000+ worth of cars, the beach house, the big HDTV in the living room (plus a smaller home theater in the family SUV).
Many administrators don't look at is as a position of compassion & opportunity, but rather one of protection and numbers. Protect the kids from killing each other before they graduate, and make sure they all score well on the standardized tests.
I remember how bad it was when I went through, and see how much worse it has gotten. As a father of two now (three before the next school year starts) this is something I'm very concerned with. So what did I do?
* I don't live in a $300,000 house. I bought $24,000 worth of land and $76,000 worth of house. $100,000. Huge yard, modest house. I bought the land outright and the house payments will be very modest. * I don't drive a new car. I have two running cars and one very small car payment. * I didn't buy any bigger a TV than I felt comfortable paying cash for. In fact, almost all of my big purchases are done with cash. Makes me consider how much I really need something. * I don't have a single credit card anymore. * My lifestyle is so inexpensive that my wife can afford to stay home with the kids. * My kids are homeschooled. My 4 year old could probably graduate Kindergarten right now and she's doing a great job learning to read and write. My 2 year old is learning a lot of things past what most people think a 2 year old should be learning because she watches her big sister and learns. Between the playgroups and the field trips and the playground time, she's getting socialized (if I had a nickle for every time someone raised that issue...). She's probably more socially adjusted than Kindergarten kids because while the Kindergarten kids are in school my kids are out in real society interacting with adults. When they want to buy things, they have to take the stuff they want up to the clerk and pay for it themselves, and they aren't shy about it.
Public school is an antiquated system that is destroying our children. The public schools should be closed and/or privatized. The tax burden for subsidizing public schools should be relieved. People should pay for their own kids to go to school with subsidies available on a sliding scale based on real need. The public schools now are doing less and less with more and more money, to satisfy demands from the teachers to make better salaries for their 9 months a year jobs. How a teacher who works 9 months a year should make $70,000+ befuddles me. I'm all for a combination of homeschooling or private schooling with apprenticeships/mentorships. As a homeschooling parent I'd love to be able to contract with a private school for a la carte opportunities for subject areas that my wife & I are not well equipped to instruct in (like music).
I got my license this year and I think there is quite a lot in amateur radio to hold interest.
I've learned more in the last 6 months about RF theory than I did in my previous 33 years of life combined. And looking ahead I see I still have quite a lot to learn.
Once I've broken in my soldering iron learning to make a few different kinds of antennas for my radio, I'm looking forward to buidling a couple of APRS rigs. One for my car, the other for my All Terrain Vehicle. I might even put one in my backpack for when I'm out backpacking in the mountains and my family is worried about me being alone in the wilderness. They will be able to follow my progress.
I find out about severe weather conditions before the mass media can report it. Indeed, it is radio amateurs that provide the weather service with early warnings of approaching dangerous weather patterns. Living in the hurricane belt, and an area not unknown for springtime tornadoes, this is valuable to me.
Of course when the storms hit, and the public infrastructure goes down (including internet, cell phones, land lines) I can still communicate with people in and out of my immediate area.
As our world becomes more and more dependent on technological infrastructure, I think it is that much more important to preserve and grow the amateur radio service to be there as a fallback for when all of those other communications mediums fail (and they do, frighteningly often). During 9/11 attacks it was radio amateurs providing communications capabilities to the first responders in Manhatten. During the major power blackout in the northeastern US a few years back, it was radio amateurs that passed emergency communications reliably. During the rescue efforts following hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it was radio amateurs coordinating emergency communications between all of the different rescue groups involved. Despite all of this newfangled technology we enjoy today, it only works when things are going well. When things aren't going well, we still need radio.
1) SAN, any SAN, pick a SAN. I'm not going to endorse any one brand here. 2) a pair of IBM pSeries boxes that can be DLPAR'd 3) Put all storage, including boot disks, on the SAN. All servers boot off of the SAN within the pSeries hardware. All servers have a failover DLPAR ready to go on the second pSeries box. 4) Run Linux on all of the DLPAR's. The storage servers would be running OpenAFS.
OpenAFS client is well supported on *NIX & Windows... it's a mature and actively developed platform. Very secure. Combined with the hardware mentioned above, performance and reliability will be outstanding unless you seriously screw up the configuration.
The FCC doesn't do much at all to track down violators. But hams and scanner buffs do. If the FCC is presented with evidence, they usually will act on it.
If you mess with your WAP to operate outside of legal bands, there is an excellent chance a local ham radio operator will track you down and submit a couple of pounds of evidence to the FCC (or other regulatory body if you are outside of the US) which could (and sometimes does) result in a nice fat fine.
Your access point has limits for a reason. Please respect them. If you start pissing all over someone else's hobby with your computer junk, they're licensed and you're not, you're the one in the wrong.
I don't know if you noticed or not, but President Bush is walking hand-in-hand with Ted Kennedy of all people, one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate, on the issue of "immigration reform" (aka "amnesty for illegal aliens and identity thieves"). They both believe in entitlement programs and big government. The main disagreement seems to be about whether to pay for it through higher taxes or by increasing the national debt.
You must have provided the wrong link. The link that you provided only attacked the character of the archeologist who made the clame of Bosnian pyramids. It didn't in any way disprove the claim. The only way to disprove the claim will be to reveal what is under that hill, either by digging or more advanced technological surveying techniques.
Unfortunately by leaving out the historical lineage, it doesn't really show how Fedora, SuSE, and Mandriva are all descended from Red Hat Linux. Others are grouped together by things like size or security rather than lineage. It's not very logical or consistent in its current layout. And by ignoring lineage, it has sacraficed its relevance.
Try to make a point that is in any way questioning of the global warming theory, or even make a statement to the effect that it is not a man made phenomenon but a natural cycle, watch the/. hoardes mod you down and make sure fewer people read your opinion.
Sun has contributed very little to the free software community. The only distros that do support Sun can only do so very weakly, due to lack of any material contributions from Sun. No hardware, no documentation, nothing. Aurora, CentOS, Debian, and so on can only half-ass support SPARC at this time.
IBM has a whole division just for working with the Linux community and making sure that Linux runs well on all of their hardware. Yes, including Power architecture.
So all of you folks running RHEL or SLES (IBM's partners), check out your source RPM's and look at all of the contributions released under the Gnu GPL to make sure that Linux runs like a top on Power architecture.
He's partnered with Red Hat to provide software. A distribution so big it's now unweildy to install from CDROM. Even if you say you only want KDE, you'll still get Gnome whether you want it or not.
So of course he's going to gripe about bloat. He's starting from one of the fattest Linux distributions around.
...why not start from something skinny and build up from there?
I've regularly gotten OpenBSD to fit very nicely into a 500MB drive with room to spare. I'm sure it could be squeezed down to about 200M or so if you left out the compilers.
It's just outside of the 20 year scope of this article but I don't think anything changed what was to become the Internet more than DNS back in '83. Before that we were all sharing a big hostfile.
If this weren't/. I would have been surprised that this article even got posted. For example, to mention Skype in the same breath as Sendmail... Sendmail quickly became something that everyone relied upon for email. Skype is just one solution used by some people, but certainly not everyone. Not by a long shot. And it's not really revolutionary so much as evolutionary. So I think there is a great disparity between the impact felt by some of these technologies.
Right now I am root on one of the biggest private GForge implementations in the world, and we use PostgreSQL on the back end. I've been thoroughly impressed with it. There were some complaints when I came on board about PostgreSQL falling over but when I looked into it, to my astonishment, there were a number of problems with the system configuration that caused PostgreSQL to run out of available connections. It had never been tuned from the default settings! So no problems were seen until we were past 17,000 developers. Honestly, I still haven't tuned it. Haven't needed to. It's very fast with the default configuration and once I got the OS and the hardware tuned that it was sitting on, it ran faster than ever.
I've managed PostgreSQL at a few shops and usually about the time someone is ready to rip it out and replace it with Oracle, it's because the DBA is a paper tiger who was only trained and certified in Oracle and doesn't know how to tune PostgreSQL, and won't take the time to learn.
Sounds great in theory, but I can pretty much guarantee that the centralized IT folks will always look upon your IT guy with distrust (no matter how de-centralized you get, you must always have a centralized staff overseeing the satellite folks and making sure standards are kept). Since this guy is answerable to you and not to IT, it's pretty much a given that he will be asked to compromise corporate policy, bending or breaking the rules from time to time in order to further your own department's agenda.
Usually when an IT department is falling short, you can attribute it to some very common problems. Perhaps the IT department really is incompetent or apathetic. But more commonly, the IT department is just underfunded and as a result demoralized. Using some of your political capital to help the IT team hire to appropriate staffing levels and get the equipment they need will go a lot farther towards your goal of getting decent support. Hiring your own IT guy is a pretty sure fire way to get you blacklisted by the IT guys and create more problems.
1) DRM. This is the same reason I don't own an iPod. Yes I know I can use an iPod with my own unencumbered MP3's but I don't want to give $$$ to an arm of Apple that thrives on DRM content. When Apple can convince the record companies to release unencumbered content via ITMS, then I'll get an iPod. Similarly, I don't want to buy a reader that was intended to handle DRM'd book content.
2) Random searching. Something about flipping through a book is so much more satisfying than fumbling with an electronic device's user interface to do an explicit search for subject matter.
3) Yet another electronic device to carry. I even gave up my PDA so I could carry a far more practical Gerber multitool.
Though there is something to be said for having a device that can hold a whole library in something that will fit in a fanny pack.
I don't think the technology is "there" yet, and more importantly I think DRM is severely holding back progress on technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Public schools are just day care facilities for single parents or traditional families to allow both parents to work so they can afford all the stuff they need, like a $300,000+ home, $80,000+ worth of cars, the beach house, the big HDTV in the living room (plus a smaller home theater in the family SUV).
Many administrators don't look at is as a position of compassion & opportunity, but rather one of protection and numbers. Protect the kids from killing each other before they graduate, and make sure they all score well on the standardized tests.
I remember how bad it was when I went through, and see how much worse it has gotten. As a father of two now (three before the next school year starts) this is something I'm very concerned with. So what did I do?
* I don't live in a $300,000 house. I bought $24,000 worth of land and $76,000 worth of house. $100,000. Huge yard, modest house. I bought the land outright and the house payments will be very modest.
* I don't drive a new car. I have two running cars and one very small car payment.
* I didn't buy any bigger a TV than I felt comfortable paying cash for. In fact, almost all of my big purchases are done with cash. Makes me consider how much I really need something.
* I don't have a single credit card anymore.
* My lifestyle is so inexpensive that my wife can afford to stay home with the kids.
* My kids are homeschooled. My 4 year old could probably graduate Kindergarten right now and she's doing a great job learning to read and write. My 2 year old is learning a lot of things past what most people think a 2 year old should be learning because she watches her big sister and learns. Between the playgroups and the field trips and the playground time, she's getting socialized (if I had a nickle for every time someone raised that issue...). She's probably more socially adjusted than Kindergarten kids because while the Kindergarten kids are in school my kids are out in real society interacting with adults. When they want to buy things, they have to take the stuff they want up to the clerk and pay for it themselves, and they aren't shy about it.
Public school is an antiquated system that is destroying our children. The public schools should be closed and/or privatized. The tax burden for subsidizing public schools should be relieved. People should pay for their own kids to go to school with subsidies available on a sliding scale based on real need. The public schools now are doing less and less with more and more money, to satisfy demands from the teachers to make better salaries for their 9 months a year jobs. How a teacher who works 9 months a year should make $70,000+ befuddles me. I'm all for a combination of homeschooling or private schooling with apprenticeships/mentorships. As a homeschooling parent I'd love to be able to contract with a private school for a la carte opportunities for subject areas that my wife & I are not well equipped to instruct in (like music).
I got my license this year and I think there is quite a lot in amateur radio to hold interest.
I've learned more in the last 6 months about RF theory than I did in my previous 33 years of life combined. And looking ahead I see I still have quite a lot to learn.
Once I've broken in my soldering iron learning to make a few different kinds of antennas for my radio, I'm looking forward to buidling a couple of APRS rigs. One for my car, the other for my All Terrain Vehicle. I might even put one in my backpack for when I'm out backpacking in the mountains and my family is worried about me being alone in the wilderness. They will be able to follow my progress.
I find out about severe weather conditions before the mass media can report it. Indeed, it is radio amateurs that provide the weather service with early warnings of approaching dangerous weather patterns. Living in the hurricane belt, and an area not unknown for springtime tornadoes, this is valuable to me.
Of course when the storms hit, and the public infrastructure goes down (including internet, cell phones, land lines) I can still communicate with people in and out of my immediate area.
As our world becomes more and more dependent on technological infrastructure, I think it is that much more important to preserve and grow the amateur radio service to be there as a fallback for when all of those other communications mediums fail (and they do, frighteningly often). During 9/11 attacks it was radio amateurs providing communications capabilities to the first responders in Manhatten. During the major power blackout in the northeastern US a few years back, it was radio amateurs that passed emergency communications reliably. During the rescue efforts following hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it was radio amateurs coordinating emergency communications between all of the different rescue groups involved. Despite all of this newfangled technology we enjoy today, it only works when things are going well. When things aren't going well, we still need radio.
I find it almost sad that this is the first story on Slashdot in almost exactly a year.
And if they had posted stories before now, we would all be complaining that it was vaporware.
For once the editors did the right thing and waited until there was a finished product.
1) SAN, any SAN, pick a SAN. I'm not going to endorse any one brand here.
2) a pair of IBM pSeries boxes that can be DLPAR'd
3) Put all storage, including boot disks, on the SAN. All servers boot off of the SAN within the pSeries hardware. All servers have a failover DLPAR ready to go on the second pSeries box.
4) Run Linux on all of the DLPAR's. The storage servers would be running OpenAFS.
OpenAFS client is well supported on *NIX & Windows... it's a mature and actively developed platform. Very secure. Combined with the hardware mentioned above, performance and reliability will be outstanding unless you seriously screw up the configuration.
The FCC doesn't do much at all to track down violators. But hams and scanner buffs do. If the FCC is presented with evidence, they usually will act on it.
If you mess with your WAP to operate outside of legal bands, there is an excellent chance a local ham radio operator will track you down and submit a couple of pounds of evidence to the FCC (or other regulatory body if you are outside of the US) which could (and sometimes does) result in a nice fat fine.
Your access point has limits for a reason. Please respect them. If you start pissing all over someone else's hobby with your computer junk, they're licensed and you're not, you're the one in the wrong.
Vote in a Democrat?
I don't know if you noticed or not, but President Bush is walking hand-in-hand with Ted Kennedy of all people, one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate, on the issue of "immigration reform" (aka "amnesty for illegal aliens and identity thieves"). They both believe in entitlement programs and big government. The main disagreement seems to be about whether to pay for it through higher taxes or by increasing the national debt.
You must have provided the wrong link. The link that you provided only attacked the character of the archeologist who made the clame of Bosnian pyramids. It didn't in any way disprove the claim. The only way to disprove the claim will be to reveal what is under that hill, either by digging or more advanced technological surveying techniques.
....irrelevance?
Unfortunately by leaving out the historical lineage, it doesn't really show how Fedora, SuSE, and Mandriva are all descended from Red Hat Linux. Others are grouped together by things like size or security rather than lineage. It's not very logical or consistent in its current layout. And by ignoring lineage, it has sacraficed its relevance.
"The US refuses to cut emissions"
This is a very typical method used to win someone over to your side. Take a nugget of truth and twist it until it barely resembles the original fact.
The fact is that the United States has refused to sign onto the Kyoto protocols.
The other fact is that US auto makers are furious with the Bush administration for recent increases in demands on SUV fuel economy.
The US has not refused to cut emissions. The US has been, and continues to push forward with emissions controls by its own sovereign processes.
I will probably be modded down for being an American now.
Try to make a point that is in any way questioning of the global warming theory, or even make a statement to the effect that it is not a man made phenomenon but a natural cycle, watch the /. hoardes mod you down and make sure fewer people read your opinion.
Sun has contributed very little to the free software community. The only distros that do support Sun can only do so very weakly, due to lack of any material contributions from Sun. No hardware, no documentation, nothing. Aurora, CentOS, Debian, and so on can only half-ass support SPARC at this time.
IBM has a whole division just for working with the Linux community and making sure that Linux runs well on all of their hardware. Yes, including Power architecture.
So all of you folks running RHEL or SLES (IBM's partners), check out your source RPM's and look at all of the contributions released under the Gnu GPL to make sure that Linux runs like a top on Power architecture.
He's partnered with Red Hat to provide software. A distribution so big it's now unweildy to install from CDROM. Even if you say you only want KDE, you'll still get Gnome whether you want it or not.
So of course he's going to gripe about bloat. He's starting from one of the fattest Linux distributions around.
...why not start from something skinny and build up from there?
I've regularly gotten OpenBSD to fit very nicely into a 500MB drive with room to spare. I'm sure it could be squeezed down to about 200M or so if you left out the compilers.
"In his current column" my eye. That links to your blog, not his current column. Why aren't the editors catching this crap?
I am going to get modded down for this, I'm sure, because it's an unpopular POV on what's going on with our climate. But it needs to be said.
Perhaps this is just a natural phenomenon, the likes of which our planet has seen several times before, and will see several times again.
HP has had this for years. This is like saying "Microsoft just released a new operating system called Windows XP".
/. editors. Job well done.
Thank you,
It's just outside of the 20 year scope of this article but I don't think anything changed what was to become the Internet more than DNS back in '83. Before that we were all sharing a big hostfile.
/. I would have been surprised that this article even got posted. For example, to mention Skype in the same breath as Sendmail... Sendmail quickly became something that everyone relied upon for email. Skype is just one solution used by some people, but certainly not everyone. Not by a long shot. And it's not really revolutionary so much as evolutionary. So I think there is a great disparity between the impact felt by some of these technologies.
If this weren't
Sue "Linux" (or more realistically, Linux vendors) for patent infringement and I think you'll wake up IBM with its huge patent portfolio.
NFSv4
cfengine is your friend.
Right now I am root on one of the biggest private GForge implementations in the world, and we use PostgreSQL on the back end. I've been thoroughly impressed with it. There were some complaints when I came on board about PostgreSQL falling over but when I looked into it, to my astonishment, there were a number of problems with the system configuration that caused PostgreSQL to run out of available connections. It had never been tuned from the default settings! So no problems were seen until we were past 17,000 developers. Honestly, I still haven't tuned it. Haven't needed to. It's very fast with the default configuration and once I got the OS and the hardware tuned that it was sitting on, it ran faster than ever.
I've managed PostgreSQL at a few shops and usually about the time someone is ready to rip it out and replace it with Oracle, it's because the DBA is a paper tiger who was only trained and certified in Oracle and doesn't know how to tune PostgreSQL, and won't take the time to learn.
Sounds great in theory, but I can pretty much guarantee that the centralized IT folks will always look upon your IT guy with distrust (no matter how de-centralized you get, you must always have a centralized staff overseeing the satellite folks and making sure standards are kept). Since this guy is answerable to you and not to IT, it's pretty much a given that he will be asked to compromise corporate policy, bending or breaking the rules from time to time in order to further your own department's agenda.
Usually when an IT department is falling short, you can attribute it to some very common problems. Perhaps the IT department really is incompetent or apathetic. But more commonly, the IT department is just underfunded and as a result demoralized. Using some of your political capital to help the IT team hire to appropriate staffing levels and get the equipment they need will go a lot farther towards your goal of getting decent support. Hiring your own IT guy is a pretty sure fire way to get you blacklisted by the IT guys and create more problems.
1) DRM. This is the same reason I don't own an iPod. Yes I know I can use an iPod with my own unencumbered MP3's but I don't want to give $$$ to an arm of Apple that thrives on DRM content. When Apple can convince the record companies to release unencumbered content via ITMS, then I'll get an iPod. Similarly, I don't want to buy a reader that was intended to handle DRM'd book content.
2) Random searching. Something about flipping through a book is so much more satisfying than fumbling with an electronic device's user interface to do an explicit search for subject matter.
3) Yet another electronic device to carry. I even gave up my PDA so I could carry a far more practical Gerber multitool.
Though there is something to be said for having a device that can hold a whole library in something that will fit in a fanny pack.
I don't think the technology is "there" yet, and more importantly I think DRM is severely holding back progress on technology.
IBM no longer sells PCs or laptops. That's Lenovo now. Or, if you prefer, the Peoples Republic of China.