I agree wholeheartedly on the reading. Compare the writing on any book discussion forum for adults to the writing on other forums. Department of Education studies confirm the correlation between the number of books in a home and a child's academic performance, highlighting the fact that it is largely a parental responsibility to nurture an avid reader.
There are two things that teachers often do that discourage students from recreational reading. The first is not giving enough time to fully enjoy any assigned reading. The second is disparaging certain genres. Newspapers and magazines often have very good writing. There are also very good and very bad examples in genres such as romance, mystery, horror, and science fiction. Teachers should help students evaluate the quality of anything they enjoy reading.
One of my favorite brevity quotes is by Carl Friedrich Gauss: "You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length." Enough said.
I trust my main political news sources, thomas.loc.gov and my equivalent state and local sites, an order of magnitude more than any of those sources you mentioned.
The Internet is also a better source of what I call controlled bias, where the bias is strong and clear enough that you can easily take it into account by reading something clearly biased the other way. For example, reading both rnc.org and dnc.org will provide a better picture than a news anchor who is trying (but invariably failing) to be neutral.
The closer to the horse's mouth, the better. english.aljazeera.net is great for an Arabic perspective. I get sports news directly from my teams' web sites. I get entertainment news directly from local venues' mailing lists. I read and sometimes watch the video of the white house press briefings.
It sounds like a lot of effort, but it isn't. In the half hour I would have wasted waiting for the one story in the newscast that interests me, I can use my laptop to google the subject from the teaser commercials and get to the other news I want more quickly, while I am watching a show I like.
This is the same group where 1/3 couldn't find Louisiana on a map, half couldn't find Mississippi, 60% couldn't find Iraq, and 30% thought the U.S./Mexico border was the most heavily fortified in the world.
Whatever online news sources they trust should be put on some sort of blacklist.
Yes it's annoying having to guess if your e-mail made it or not, but this problem can only truly be solved socially.
I guess your company must not have as smart of management as mine does, because my managers solved this problem years ago:
Use high priority flag.
Call on phone or stop by desk to make sure email was received.
Send regular countdown emails to follow up on the subject of the first email. i.e. I need a response within 3 days, within 2 days, by COB tomorrow, by the end of the day, thanks I received it yesterday.
Dedicate a status meeting to the subject of the email.
Create a shared spreadsheet to track the status of the subject of the email.
Stop by desk to confirm what is stated in any email responses and/or status spreadsheets.
Send a series of emails wondering why there is such poor attendance at status meetings, obviously pointing to the need to hold more of them.
What does he have to gain by posturing? Senator Specter is not up for re-election until 2010, and he's Republican enough to not be out to hurt the party. Maybe he actually believes it is an important issue?
I was home sick from work yesterday and watched C-SPAN for a while. Do you know what they were debating yesterday on the Senate floor? Things like whether or not to spend $15 million on an ad campaign to encourage eating seafood. Call me crazy, but I think a Senator knowing the details of a program that may or may not be violating the constitution before committing more of my tax money to pay for it is at least as important as seafood commercials.
It is my experience that society is a lot more accepting than people are of themselves.
I was a somewhat geeky valedictorian of my high school class, and my close circle of friends consisted mostly of people who I had a lot in common with, but I could have a walk between classes or slow dance length conversation with just about anybody, and frequently did.
I believe the vast majority of social exclusion is self-inflicted. Think about it. Did that cheerleader never talk to you in high school because you got good grades, or because you were too scared of her to make eye contact, not to mention say anything coherent? There are some jerks out there, but with most people if you act like you belong, they will believe you do.
The problem isn't that achievement is socially unacceptable; the problem is that failure is politically incorrect.
I remember hearing about a police department in New Hamshipre that would not take applicants with above a 105 IQ
It's not necessarily limited to jobs that don't require a college degree. I know a guy who couldn't get a job as a software engineer until he took his doctorate off of his resumé.
Whether Vista is a disappointment or not depends on your user requirements.
For example, despite only having used Windows for about a year before giving up on it, I am still considered the foremost Windows expert in my family. Each time family members switch to a new Windows release, I spend a lot of time on the phone and in person setting up all the new applications, drivers, networks, etc.
Therefore, my ideal Windows release is as late as possible with as few changes as possible. I don't care what everyone else says. In my book so far, Vista rocks!
Do you mean that OpenOffice doesn't handle Word document revision tracking well or that OpenOffice doesn't handle revision tracking of its own documents well?
If the former, then you just made a great case against Microsoft Office file format and for open document standards.
If the latter, I find nothing lacking in OpenOffice's revision tracking. Although, I'm not familiar enough with Microsoft's implementation to make a fair comparison.
I think the proper question is not when is Linux ready for the organization, but when is the organization ready for Linux?
Hardly anyone realized it back then, but the best time to switch to Linux was about 7-10 years ago. IT shops didn't have 10 years of Windows-only experience; it was new to everybody. BSODs were a common occurrence. The relatively recent introduction of the Internet to the unwashed masses brought a huge influx of worms that people were still learning how to deal with properly. I still remember the amazement that my modem lights didn't blink all the time while using Linux. There were still a lot of people who didn't use MS Office, so sharing between different office suites was a common problem.
The main drawback to using Linux back then was you had to be very careful about what hardware you bought, especially modems and printers. However, you usually ended up with higher quality hardware. I have an external modem I bought back then that is better than the modem that came with the computer I bought last year and still in good working order. A huge number of people dismissed Linux back then because it didn't work with their modem/printer/whatever and they wouldn't risk the cost of new hardware that was easy to get working with Linux.
The bottom line is if you didn't switch during the Windows "dark ages," why would you switch now from a Windows that is more stable, mature, and familiar? Linux is getting better every day, but that is not enough. Something about the organization must change in order for it to consider a switch.
Pointing out sites that are more liberal than the mainstream media doesn't support your argument. I may as well argue that I am the perfect weight at 250 lbs because there is a guy across the aisle from me who weighs 300. It is possible to have a small liberal bias. You didn't exactly choose a neutral source for your supporting "research," either.
Bias isn't only about what is reported, it's also about how it is reported. People don't continue to watch the news without analysis, and it's near impossible to provide political analysis without favoring one side or the other. Only on the short, facts-only news reports is it impossible to detect a bias in the reporter. The only political web site I consider truly neutral is http://thomas.loc.gov.
In my opinion, the next best thing is to not try to hide your bias at all, but to cite sources that clearly disagree with you. Fox News is often maligned as an example of conservative bias. As a conservative myself, I freely concede that. However, all their biased reports include a lengthy debate with at least one person who feels strongly in the opposite direction. Without that, it would be too biased for my taste, even though I usually agree with the hosts.
What I don't understand is why "liberal media" is a negative phrase to liberals. I'd think the fact that the media tends to side with them would be viewed as a positive.
I know a 55 year old man who is flat broke, living with his mother, and often suicidal as the result of a chain of events stemming from being addicted to pornography very early in his youth and throughout his life. I also know it is a central factor in nearly all cases of child abuse. You'll never convince me that it isn't harmful to children, and I think the vast majority of people agree with me. Whether or not it is harmful to adults is outside the scope of the discussion.
All of the opposition to this kind of legislation is based on a completely hypothetical restriction of first amendment rights. I've never heard of a single case where a parent complained that their child was unable to visit a pornographic website in the school library. Complaints by the industry about being banned from the lucrative school library market are equally ridiculous. Any legislation that is more restrictive than preventing exposure to kids in public places never even makes it to a vote.
This isn't the result of the religious imposing their morals on others. It's about parents being able to trust that their children won't be accidentally exposed to things that undermine their own morals, in public places where they should have a reasonable expectation of that.
I'm the *ONLY* person in the 4 years I've been at school I know who is a CIS major who took these classes.
Not that it will help you now, but that's a clue that you're in the wrong major or possibly the wrong school for your aptitude. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your major or school, just that you personally may have been happier somewhere else.
People don't understand pointers because they are extraneous to the understanding of algorithms. You only need to know the address of a variable when you are writing something like a device driver or a compiler. Of all the programming languages you mentioned, I believe C/C++ is the only one where pointers are a commonplace concern for the programmer (don't know about cobol).
It is not pointers that intrinsically make C/C++ unsafe. Pointers are an unavoidable part of software, even though they are usually avoidable by the programmer. In fact, internally a Java program will use many more pointers than the equivalent program in C.
What makes C unsafe is that programmers constantly must reimplement potentially unsafe code to fit different situations. You'll find that your coworkers will have approximately the same mix of talent as your classmates did, but even highly talented and experienced engineers make trivial mistakes in pointer code sometimes. Compare this to a language like Java or Ada which implements that dangerous code only once inside the compiler, usually by the best programmers on a team, taking unsafe pointer conditions as a primary design concern, and then reuses that hardened and highly scrutinized code everywhere.
it's pretty well accepted that you need at least two anti-spyware programs to catch everything.
Is that really true? Do you need to pay for subscriptions to keep them both up to date? If not, how do the companies make money? If they don't make money, why do they care if Microsoft steps up to take care of the problem?
Forgive my ignorance, but I only really used Windows for about a year before throwing in the towel.
You forgot to post the link to the Microsoft pricing and information about needed upgrade frequency. Does that include operating system licenses? Do you really go for 5 years without upgrading? 3 years seems like a more realistic upgrade cycle based on the release frequency.
I'm no IT expert so maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that perhaps since it has the same features, a small business would want the small business edition for $2900 per year for 100 users, for a total 3 year cost of $8700 with upgrades and OS licenses included.
However, since we are talking about a business with 6000 users, let's look at that cost:
Zimbra
6000 x $28 x 3 years = $504,000 with upgrades and full support included
Exchange
$1100 + (5995 / 5 x $500) = $600,600 with no upgrades
See, you can twist the numbers either way. I'll leave it to the mods to decide who was more realistic. Microsoft may have some volume licensing that I'm not aware of, but why should I track down the exact price when you wouldn't?
Of course, if I was the CFO, I would go with secret option number 3: spend $150,000 to hire a full-time developer for a year to make an ultra-customized version of the zimbra open source edition that will meet my company's exact needs.
I wouldn't say my daughter is banned from using alternative operating systems like Windows, but since we don't have any in the house, she doesn't really have a choice until she's old enough to buy her own computer.
The reasons I use Linux are not philosophical. I started using it because I needed a good development environment for freelance web/database work, and moved over completely after seeing how nice the desktop environments were and the amount of choice I had for such a low cost.
Along the same lines, I don't avoid Microsoft products for philosophical reasons either. I received an Xbox for a Christmas gift a few years ago, and actually quite like it and have bought several games.
My daughter is only two now, but when she gets older I plan to try very hard to stick to the facts when a comparison is necessary. For example, "If you want your friends to be able to read that CD-ROM you're burning, you'll need to enable this option because Windows doesn't know about the other file systems." If she chooses Windows as an adult, it will be on its merits and not because it is all she knows.
Hmm...is there a feature you can click that turns up the 'intelligence' of the posts your read?
It's called "Read at +3", and I've been using it for years. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking on a "replies beneath your current threshold" or "parent" link of an intelligent reply, like I did to read your post.
And yes, I'm aware that I am calling this very post unintelligent by my own definition.
You're giving him too much leeway by letting him define "crappy hardware."
My 486 is pretty responsive with the latest versions of the linux kernel, lynx, pine, and vim, for surfing the net, reading email, and writing documents. I could probably get software suspend working if I cared enough.
I'm in the Phoenix area if anyone wants to load XP on their 486 and have a showdown.
I agree. When a wealthy internet behemoth like MercExchange tramples the rights of a poor, unknown startup like eBay, someone has got to stand up and do something. Jesus Himself would have been sued for violating the copyrights of Old Testament prophets.
Too bad we don't believe it's okay to use military force to overthrow an oppressive government that violates the rights of the poor. I've been ignoring copyrights for years, and all I have to show for it is a bunch of free music.
suggested mod to the satire impaired: funny flamebait
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, but can you help those of us who always mix up "she's" and "hers" as well?
There are two things that teachers often do that discourage students from recreational reading. The first is not giving enough time to fully enjoy any assigned reading. The second is disparaging certain genres. Newspapers and magazines often have very good writing. There are also very good and very bad examples in genres such as romance, mystery, horror, and science fiction. Teachers should help students evaluate the quality of anything they enjoy reading.
One of my favorite brevity quotes is by Carl Friedrich Gauss: "You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length." Enough said.
The Internet is also a better source of what I call controlled bias, where the bias is strong and clear enough that you can easily take it into account by reading something clearly biased the other way. For example, reading both rnc.org and dnc.org will provide a better picture than a news anchor who is trying (but invariably failing) to be neutral.
The closer to the horse's mouth, the better. english.aljazeera.net is great for an Arabic perspective. I get sports news directly from my teams' web sites. I get entertainment news directly from local venues' mailing lists. I read and sometimes watch the video of the white house press briefings.
It sounds like a lot of effort, but it isn't. In the half hour I would have wasted waiting for the one story in the newscast that interests me, I can use my laptop to google the subject from the teaser commercials and get to the other news I want more quickly, while I am watching a show I like.
Whatever online news sources they trust should be put on some sort of blacklist.
I guess your company must not have as smart of management as mine does, because my managers solved this problem years ago:
I was home sick from work yesterday and watched C-SPAN for a while. Do you know what they were debating yesterday on the Senate floor? Things like whether or not to spend $15 million on an ad campaign to encourage eating seafood. Call me crazy, but I think a Senator knowing the details of a program that may or may not be violating the constitution before committing more of my tax money to pay for it is at least as important as seafood commercials.
It is my experience that society is a lot more accepting than people are of themselves.
I was a somewhat geeky valedictorian of my high school class, and my close circle of friends consisted mostly of people who I had a lot in common with, but I could have a walk between classes or slow dance length conversation with just about anybody, and frequently did.
I believe the vast majority of social exclusion is self-inflicted. Think about it. Did that cheerleader never talk to you in high school because you got good grades, or because you were too scared of her to make eye contact, not to mention say anything coherent? There are some jerks out there, but with most people if you act like you belong, they will believe you do.
The problem isn't that achievement is socially unacceptable; the problem is that failure is politically incorrect.
They are just thinking longer term than us. Running out of oil, we can deal with. But running out of wind would be a true ecological disaster.
It's not necessarily limited to jobs that don't require a college degree. I know a guy who couldn't get a job as a software engineer until he took his doctorate off of his resumé.
For example, despite only having used Windows for about a year before giving up on it, I am still considered the foremost Windows expert in my family. Each time family members switch to a new Windows release, I spend a lot of time on the phone and in person setting up all the new applications, drivers, networks, etc.
Therefore, my ideal Windows release is as late as possible with as few changes as possible. I don't care what everyone else says. In my book so far, Vista rocks!
Translation: "I don't know because I've never had the desire to try it, but my ego doesn't allow me to admit that I don't know."
I did a quick google search and it looks promising, but does anyone know what kind of battery life I can expect?
If the former, then you just made a great case against Microsoft Office file format and for open document standards.
If the latter, I find nothing lacking in OpenOffice's revision tracking. Although, I'm not familiar enough with Microsoft's implementation to make a fair comparison.
Hardly anyone realized it back then, but the best time to switch to Linux was about 7-10 years ago. IT shops didn't have 10 years of Windows-only experience; it was new to everybody. BSODs were a common occurrence. The relatively recent introduction of the Internet to the unwashed masses brought a huge influx of worms that people were still learning how to deal with properly. I still remember the amazement that my modem lights didn't blink all the time while using Linux. There were still a lot of people who didn't use MS Office, so sharing between different office suites was a common problem.
The main drawback to using Linux back then was you had to be very careful about what hardware you bought, especially modems and printers. However, you usually ended up with higher quality hardware. I have an external modem I bought back then that is better than the modem that came with the computer I bought last year and still in good working order. A huge number of people dismissed Linux back then because it didn't work with their modem/printer/whatever and they wouldn't risk the cost of new hardware that was easy to get working with Linux.
The bottom line is if you didn't switch during the Windows "dark ages," why would you switch now from a Windows that is more stable, mature, and familiar? Linux is getting better every day, but that is not enough. Something about the organization must change in order for it to consider a switch.
Bias isn't only about what is reported, it's also about how it is reported. People don't continue to watch the news without analysis, and it's near impossible to provide political analysis without favoring one side or the other. Only on the short, facts-only news reports is it impossible to detect a bias in the reporter. The only political web site I consider truly neutral is http://thomas.loc.gov.
In my opinion, the next best thing is to not try to hide your bias at all, but to cite sources that clearly disagree with you. Fox News is often maligned as an example of conservative bias. As a conservative myself, I freely concede that. However, all their biased reports include a lengthy debate with at least one person who feels strongly in the opposite direction. Without that, it would be too biased for my taste, even though I usually agree with the hosts.
What I don't understand is why "liberal media" is a negative phrase to liberals. I'd think the fact that the media tends to side with them would be viewed as a positive.
All of the opposition to this kind of legislation is based on a completely hypothetical restriction of first amendment rights. I've never heard of a single case where a parent complained that their child was unable to visit a pornographic website in the school library. Complaints by the industry about being banned from the lucrative school library market are equally ridiculous. Any legislation that is more restrictive than preventing exposure to kids in public places never even makes it to a vote.
This isn't the result of the religious imposing their morals on others. It's about parents being able to trust that their children won't be accidentally exposed to things that undermine their own morals, in public places where they should have a reasonable expectation of that.
Not that it will help you now, but that's a clue that you're in the wrong major or possibly the wrong school for your aptitude. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your major or school, just that you personally may have been happier somewhere else.
People don't understand pointers because they are extraneous to the understanding of algorithms. You only need to know the address of a variable when you are writing something like a device driver or a compiler. Of all the programming languages you mentioned, I believe C/C++ is the only one where pointers are a commonplace concern for the programmer (don't know about cobol).
It is not pointers that intrinsically make C/C++ unsafe. Pointers are an unavoidable part of software, even though they are usually avoidable by the programmer. In fact, internally a Java program will use many more pointers than the equivalent program in C.
What makes C unsafe is that programmers constantly must reimplement potentially unsafe code to fit different situations. You'll find that your coworkers will have approximately the same mix of talent as your classmates did, but even highly talented and experienced engineers make trivial mistakes in pointer code sometimes. Compare this to a language like Java or Ada which implements that dangerous code only once inside the compiler, usually by the best programmers on a team, taking unsafe pointer conditions as a primary design concern, and then reuses that hardened and highly scrutinized code everywhere.
Is that really true? Do you need to pay for subscriptions to keep them both up to date? If not, how do the companies make money? If they don't make money, why do they care if Microsoft steps up to take care of the problem?
Forgive my ignorance, but I only really used Windows for about a year before throwing in the towel.
I'm no IT expert so maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that perhaps since it has the same features, a small business would want the small business edition for $2900 per year for 100 users, for a total 3 year cost of $8700 with upgrades and OS licenses included.
However, since we are talking about a business with 6000 users, let's look at that cost:
Zimbra 6000 x $28 x 3 years = $504,000 with upgrades and full support included Exchange $1100 + (5995 / 5 x $500) = $600,600 with no upgradesSee, you can twist the numbers either way. I'll leave it to the mods to decide who was more realistic. Microsoft may have some volume licensing that I'm not aware of, but why should I track down the exact price when you wouldn't?
Of course, if I was the CFO, I would go with secret option number 3: spend $150,000 to hire a full-time developer for a year to make an ultra-customized version of the zimbra open source edition that will meet my company's exact needs.
The reasons I use Linux are not philosophical. I started using it because I needed a good development environment for freelance web/database work, and moved over completely after seeing how nice the desktop environments were and the amount of choice I had for such a low cost.
Along the same lines, I don't avoid Microsoft products for philosophical reasons either. I received an Xbox for a Christmas gift a few years ago, and actually quite like it and have bought several games.
My daughter is only two now, but when she gets older I plan to try very hard to stick to the facts when a comparison is necessary. For example, "If you want your friends to be able to read that CD-ROM you're burning, you'll need to enable this option because Windows doesn't know about the other file systems." If she chooses Windows as an adult, it will be on its merits and not because it is all she knows.
Ironic that by advocating conformism on slashdot, you are actually being non-conformist.
It's called "Read at +3", and I've been using it for years. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking on a "replies beneath your current threshold" or "parent" link of an intelligent reply, like I did to read your post.
And yes, I'm aware that I am calling this very post unintelligent by my own definition.
My 486 is pretty responsive with the latest versions of the linux kernel, lynx, pine, and vim, for surfing the net, reading email, and writing documents. I could probably get software suspend working if I cared enough.
I'm in the Phoenix area if anyone wants to load XP on their 486 and have a showdown.
William Jefferson Clinton
Too bad we don't believe it's okay to use military force to overthrow an oppressive government that violates the rights of the poor. I've been ignoring copyrights for years, and all I have to show for it is a bunch of free music.
suggested mod to the satire impaired: funny flamebait