As a former special education teacher, I have to say that ADHD *DOES* exist. While there are too many kids who are diagnosed as "ADHD" when the real problem is lack of parenting, this does not take away from the fact that there are indeed kids who have problems with their brains that affect their ability to control themselves. For example, I once taught a kid I'll call "Ed" who was a very nice, sweet kid... but he'd do things that were STUPID just on a whim, without any of the normal checks and balances that keep most of us from doing stupid things. Then when you sent him to timeout and asked him afterwards why he did X, he'd say "I dunno, I just did it," very abashedly (not defiantly).
To say that all ADHD kids are diagnosed as ADHD because they're "defiant" or "rebellious" is an insult to those kids who are basically good kids who just don't seem to have the normal "filters" that keep most kids from killing themselves before age 10. The kids I met who were "really" ADHD (as vs. kids who had been diagnosed for convenience) were generally sweet (but very sloppy!) kids who were in no way "defiant" or "rebellious".
70% of those with autism suffer from mild to severe mental retardation? More likely, parents don't want their kids to be retards, so diagnosticians are helpfully hanging "autism" tags on the kids.
I know that when I was teaching special education, we had that happen a lot. Middle to upper class parents were particularly insistent that no child of theirs could POSSIBLY be a "retard". Hang the autism tag on the kid, and suddenly everything was cool -- "you mean he's like Rain Man?". Yeah, right. But hey, it made the parent happy, which was the important thing, and it did qualify the kid for the exact same special education treatment he would have gotten WITHOUT the autism label.
Hair analysis is useless as a measure of antimony and arsenic contamination. What you want is blood and urine tests. Only quacks rely on hair analysis. In one case that Dr. Barrett discussed, he sent hair samples to one of these "hair analysis" quacks from random people off the street, and EVERY SINGLE ONE came back with a diagnosis of "has mercury poisoning, contact us for treatment".
Beware of *ANY* web site that is selling anything. "Information" on that site is intended to sell product, not to inform. Quackery is especially rampant under such conditions.
What is needed is good, hard, double-blind scientific study. These are hard to come across. For example, I read one study that purported to show bad effects from very low levels of mercury contamination, levels far below what OSHA regulations allow (they studied dentists, who encounter mercury regularly since it is a component in various dental materials). They measured the performance of the dentists on various tests, then they measured both near-term exposure to mercury (via urine test) and long-term exposure to mercury (via administering a chelation agent and seeing how much mercury got flushed out of body tissues that way). What they found was interesting: short-term exposure had no correlation, while long-term exposure correlated with symptoms of mercury poisoning (poor hand control, poor short-term memory, etc.). BUT THEY DID NOT TAKE INTO ACCOUNT AGE! That is, older dentists are the ones who would have encountered the most mercury in their life time -- but decreased short-term memory and reduced hand control are symptoms of aging as well as of mercury poisoning! So did they simply prove that older people have bad memories and trembly hands? Could be.
And look, that's one of the BETTER experiments in the area. There's so much shoddy "research" out there done by people with an agenda that it's ridiculous. There's so much quackery out there that making any kind of conclusions about environmental aspects of autism is pretty much impossible right now. There are some better (longitudinal) studies under way, but it'll be some years before we really know anything from those.
Chelation is very hard on the kidneys. There *HAVE* been cases of kidney failure caused by chelation. Thus I wouldn't personally recommend it unless there is some real evidence of heavy metal poisoning.
"If in doubt, do no harm" should be the watchword here. There is certainly doubt about the effectiveness and safety of chelation when dealing with non-specific syndromes (as vs. diagnosed heavy metal poisoning).
I taught special education in the early 90's. One thing I found out was that middle and upper class parents did not like to hear a diagnosis of "moderate to severe retardation" for their child. Retards were so, like, "not cool". If the diagnostician changed the diagnosis to "autistic" (and put the 'moderate to severe retardation' into tiny print on the last page), they're like "Oh, autism! That's cool, like Rain Man!". So we called'em autistic, and stuck'em into the same special ed classroom that they'd have been in if diagnosed as retarded, with the same treatment, and voila, everybody was happy.
I wonder if the diagnosis of "mental retardation" is going down at the same time that the diagnosis of "autism" is going up?
Dude, she was reading off of a customer service script. Every time you asked her a question, she had to go read through question-answer stuff to figure out what she was supposed to tell you. She's not allowed to make up her own answers, if you ask her a question that's not in her customer support scripts she's supposed to forward you to second-line support. She can get fired for giving a different answer than what is on the script. You don't think that managers of front-line support monkeys expect said monkeys to THINK, do you?
This is standard practice in the industry, except that this "Angela" that you talked to appears to be a rather slow reader, based on your experience. Oh well, guess it's hard to hire good technical help for $8/hour!
The majority of the "burn rate" is long-term contracts with telecoms providers for land lines and (ta da!) bond payments. In fact,the majority of the burn rate may be bond payments.
Shutting down doesn't void the land-line contracts with the telecoms providers, or the leases on their data centers, or etc. It just cuts off their cash flow. That is why this game of Internet chicken is so astoundingly stupid.
If you look at accounting, what you will see is that a loss does not mean negative cash flow. All equipment must be depreciated as if it has lost value, even though in actuality the equipment is paid for and works fine. Bad investments made with shareholder money must be marked down and counted as losses, even though the money went out the door years ago. So you can actually be building up money in your bank accounts while racking up paper "losses".
I'd be interested in seeing their cash position. My bet is that Excite has a terribly negative cash position, but if you sever @Home from Excite, you end up with a very good positive cash flow (even while racking up the paper losses). However, said cash flow, with 4,200,000 customers, is unlikely to be able to swiftly pay back $750M in bonds. So the bond holders think they can get more money by trying to bribe the AT&T, Cox, Comcast. The problem is that Cox and Comcast decided months ago that they weren't playing that game, leaving the bond holders to play with AT&T. And AT&T doesn't play. They have their own long-haul backbones that they can swiftly transition their customers to.
Of course, bankers don't understand these technical details. So we get this nonsense. What will happen is that @Home is finished. Kaput. Ended. There will be no more @Home. The routers and servers and such will be sold off for pennies on the dollar on eBay. The bonds will be paid off for pennies on the dollar, if the bankruptcy court deems to give them even that much ahead of other debtors. The landlines provisioned will revert to the carriers, who will then sell the capacity to someone else for cheap. And Internet access will get that much cheaper for ISP's and businesses. Us consumers are unlikely to enjoy things as much, but hey, this is the Corporate States of America, nobody cares about consumers.
They're currently making money off of @Home. 73.4% of the design capacity is plenty to make money off of. What sucked them down was two things:
The "Excite!" portal, and
The bond payments
However, by shutting the network down they've just destroyed its value. I'll probably be down tomorrow, and if so, I will swiftly arrange for an alternative arrangement on Monday and never return to @Home.
The problem with SpamCop is that its slice-dice algorithm spews reports to people who had nothing to do with the spam. For example, I got a note from SpamCop. Somebody had spammed a newsgroup. Somebody had replied to the spam with a URL on my home page giving information about that particular vile bunch of spammers (let's just say that anybody reading this information would run screaming away from those criminals, I rip'em a new bunghole). Some third party took the second note (the one with my URL ripping the spammers in it) and shipped it to SpamCop. So I get a note saying that I'm spamming. Yeah right.
SpamCop is a sorta good idea, but the implementation sucks. It's no wonder why @Home black-holed it, all those automated spam notifications for spams that weren't spams must have been driving their guys nuts (not that their guys had much sanity in the first place, otherwise they wouldn't have been working @Home).
Heheh. But I suspect you're close to the truth. I, too, cannot figure out what 250 people would be doing to the PGP product. Yes, they had more products than PGP. Someone mentioned 12 products. However, most of those products were rather trivial. If there was more than 1 or 2 engineers on each of those products then someone was seriously padding the payroll with second cousins. Even assuming 5 engineers per product (which is a gross overstaffing for most of their products unless the engineering department was staffed by total incompetents) that would be 60 engineers and 190 people to sell and market the products.
I think it is clear that this is a company on the verge of crash because of management featherbedding and incompetence, not because of lack of product (their products are great, according to everything I've read, though since they do not have a Linux version I do not of course have personal knowledge of such). They took an idea that will support a company of perhaps 25 people and tried to create a company of 250 people. In the process they ran up massive debts and chewed through massive amounts of cash. This, alas, is a common thing nowdays.
Note that HP has actually moved much HP/UX development offshore to India. I have no idea what their long-term commitment is to HP/UX, but it's pretty clear that for the short term it has not been "abandoned" as you suggest.
Regarding Linux, probably 60-75% of Linux originates overseas with part-time developers. Virtually all of KDE, QT, major subsystems of the Linux kernel, etc. were developed overseas. These people are unlikely to quit developing Linux just because a few American dot-coms go bust. For that matter, I no longer work for a Linux company myself, and still fix the occasional bugs that are found with the software I support (or with hardware that it drives, which sometimes requires the software to be hacked to make a certain piece of brain dead hardware work:-(. )
Many of these buyouts were done with dot-com magic fairy dust (i.e., now-worthless stock). For example, one buyout that I'm familiar with was 60% stock/40% cash. And yes, when the larger dot-com that did the buyout folded the smaller subsidiary, the founders *did* try to start operations back up again, but because various trademarks were owned by the company that did the buyout, they had to start up under a different name, and because they only got 40% cash, they didn't have enough cash to publicize and fully ramp up operations again. And of course the stock is now worthless.
There are other such buy-outs that were virtually all-stock. With 1-year lock-ins so that the founders can't sell stock. With non-compete clauses in the contract. Etc. There's one word for those small company founders now that the stocks they were paid with are worthless: SCREWED.
Note that in a corporate environment, the secretary (or whoever) never sees an "initial setup" screen, s/he gets a standard desktop setup with icons pre-installed etc. for all the major applications. Expecting a secretary to wade through configuration menus is unrealistic even in tech companies.
If you're talking a young band without much following, perhaps this is the best thing to happen to them (no contract, that is), because most of these young kids end up getting ripped off, used, and thrown out on the streets as "one-hit wonders" so that the record companies can sign yet another artists^h^h^h^h^hvictim to hype and rip off.
Yes, indeed, non-technical people do need training even to use a GUI environment like KDE. For example: Single click vs. double click. On Windows, you double-click to open a program. On KDE, you single-click. Minor difference, you say? Tell that to the secretary who manages to open StarOffice *TWICE* (after her disk stops churning, that is!).
StarOffice: Yep, you have to train the secretaries how to do basic operations in StarOffice. Many learned MS Word in school. That's what they know, and they don't know how to learn without being trained. Does this make them stupid? Well, maybe (at least as far as computers go), but that's why they're secretaries, not highly paid engineers like you.
Basically, you cannot just throw out the software and expect them to "get it". Even if the software is utterly intuitive to a highly trained engineer, it is *NOT* intuitive to someone who is not a computer geek. I remember the first time one of my musician friends used Windows... "okay, double-click on that icon... left button... no, not that left, the other left!". Why assume that Linux will be any easier?
They did away with Microsoft Offal (Office), replacing it with StarOffice, but they're still running StarOffice atop Microsoft Windows (it does run there, y'know?).
They state that their "eventual" goal is to do away with Windows too, but that's not now.
For example, my employer standardized on Netscape close to 5 years ago, and it is still corporate policy that the default browser on all installs shall be Netscape. This is on *WINDOWS*, BTW.
While John Keker is contributing his services for free, defending a criminal case in no way is "free" even if the lawyer is. Depositions and notrary fees, fees for service of subpoenas, fees for investigators to dig up facts supporting the defendent, etc. all cost money. While the court is supposed to provide for those for indigent defendents, the reality is that if you don't put out the money, you go to jail.
I have no idea how much money Elcomsoft makes, but I doubt it's a huge amount. This has to be hurting.
The main Open Source project I manage is 'mtx', the media changer driver included with most Linux distributions. The very nature of the project limits collaboration. There are very few people on this planet with a good knowledge of low-level SCSI, and even fewer who are familiar with the SCSI commands needed for media drivers, and of those, very few indeed are Linux users because most Linux programmers appear to believe in the Linus Torvalds school of backups ("I don't back up my source code, that's why they invented mirror sites").
The 'mtx' package in all its glory consists of 5,000 lines of code. This also limits the amount of 3rd party collaboration needed -- it just doesn't take a bazaar to write a 5,000 line program. Of those 5,000 lines, perhaps 500 lines were inherited from Leonard Zhubkoff (I re-wrote the remainder of the original 'mtx' pretty much from scratch when I split it into two parts, added a.h file, and changed over to use GNU Autoconf for configuring). The next biggest contributor is William Smith, who contributed the HP/UX port, which is approximately 150 lines of code. Those are pretty much the biggest chunks of the program written by other people. (Note: The 1100 lines of code in the 'contrib' directory are not included in any of this).
Yes, I receive patches. No, most of those patches are never applied. This is not malice. Usually the patches fix a particular problem with a particular loader by hacking around the problem. If a problem has a general solution, though, the patch goes into the garbage and I instead program the general solution. The last time this happened, a guy sent me a 5-line patch to make 'mtx' work with a particular optical jukebox. I looked at the problem, figured out a general solution for the problem for *all* jukeboxes that had that same general problem, and re-wrote the READ_ELEMENT_STATUS code for the third time, splitting it into three different subroutines and issuing separate SCSI requests for each element type rather than one big SCSI request. I ended up changing about 200 lines of code to solve the problem that this guy's 5-line patch "solved". The problem was that this guy's 5-line patch would have resulted in random core dumps on various architectures, though it worked on his particular machine with his particular loader, and his patch, while it solved the problem for that particular loader, did not solve the general problem (which was the problem of multi-drive loaders reporting "ghost drives"). My changes solved the problem -- but required an intimate knowledge of how the READ_ELEMENT_STATUS parser code worked, and how other loaders handled that same basic problem. I will not be modest here -- there was not another person on this planet who could have solved this problem within hours, as I did, and nobody did. I wrote the code, I knew how it worked, I could swiftly split up one big routine into three different routines and add a driver routine because I knew exactly what needed doing, no study required. Collaboration, in this case, was necessary in that I needed the guy who had the problem as a test bed for the changed code to make sure it actually solved the problem, but the patch was tossed because -- like most patches I recieve -- it simply patched around the problem, it didn't fix it.
I would count 'mtx' as a successful Open Source project. When I took over maintenance it supported DAT autoloaders with one drive and up to 8 slots. Today, it supports virtually every SCSI SMC-compliant device out there, including enormous optical jukeboxes with thousands of slots and dozens of drives. The participation of others was crucial for this -- but their participation was most valuable their suggestions, and for helping test whether my code actually worked with their loader, not for their programming contributions, which, with the exception of Mr. Smith, were negligible. I don't know how it could have been any other way, because I was the one who had the knowledge of the code and the knowledge of SCSI and the knowledge of all those other busted loaders out there, and someone who was just coming in from the outside with a particular problem with a particular loader simply does not have the knowledge, in the general case, to contribute a meaningful patch
I've seen people compare per-pupil spending in Iowa with per-pupil spending in New Jersey. Setting aside the obvious difference in student population, there's also an obvious difference in living expenses. A salary of $30,000/year in Iowa will buy you a 4-bedroom house and support a family of 4 with no problem. A salary of $50,000 in New Jersey will qualify you for public housing.
If you are going to use per-pupil numbers, you must use the local cost of living to adjust them if you wish to compare them. I would gladly go to work teaching in Iowa for $40,000/year -- that would put me in the top 10% of the population there. Teaching in the Bay Area for $40,000/year, on the other hand... what, you want me to take vows of poverty?
Note that Catholic schools are heavily subsidized by the Catholic Church. They are administered mostly by Catholic priests and nuns (no administrative costs, in other words), their building costs are heavily subsidized by the church, and it is otherwise difficult to directly compare per-pupil costs between Church schools and public schools.
However, it's still possible to directly compare public school and private school costs. Just don't include the religious (church-subsidized) schools. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, non-religious private schools actually spent *MORE* per-pupil in 1996 (the last year I have statistics for) than public schools did. Given that Catholic schools and non-religious private schools have similar student bodies and facilities, it's reasonable to expect that Catholic schools, once you add in the subsidies, have similar costs -- i.e., more expensive than the public schools.
In other words, Rush Limbaugh is a big fat liar. But you already knew that, right?
Adjusted for local costs of housing and other necessities, Iowa actually has nearly the *HIGHEST* teacher salaries in the U.S., not to mention that Iowa has so few real jobs that anybody intelligent who wishes to remain in Iowa basically can either raise corn or teach. Ain't much else to do there.
A better example would perhaps be Arizona. Arizona ranks near the bottom of per-pupil spending, and has equivalent results -- near the bottom. Arizona living expenses are average for the U.S. -- less expensive than NYC or the Bay Area, more expensive than places like Iowa.
Money isn't everything. But saying that Iowa spends less per-capita than New York City is ridiculous. You can buy a 4 bedroom house for $50,000 in Iowa. The equivalent monthly payments in NYC would rent a closet, maybe.
Slashdot Mirror
To say that all ADHD kids are diagnosed as ADHD because they're "defiant" or "rebellious" is an insult to those kids who are basically good kids who just don't seem to have the normal "filters" that keep most kids from killing themselves before age 10. The kids I met who were "really" ADHD (as vs. kids who had been diagnosed for convenience) were generally sweet (but very sloppy!) kids who were in no way "defiant" or "rebellious".
-E
I know that when I was teaching special education, we had that happen a lot. Middle to upper class parents were particularly insistent that no child of theirs could POSSIBLY be a "retard". Hang the autism tag on the kid, and suddenly everything was cool -- "you mean he's like Rain Man?". Yeah, right. But hey, it made the parent happy, which was the important thing, and it did qualify the kid for the exact same special education treatment he would have gotten WITHOUT the autism label.
-E
- Hair analysis is useless as a measure of antimony and arsenic contamination. What you want is blood and urine tests. Only quacks rely on hair analysis. In one case that Dr. Barrett discussed, he sent hair samples to one of these "hair analysis" quacks from random people off the street, and EVERY SINGLE ONE came back with a diagnosis of "has mercury poisoning, contact us for treatment".
- Beware of *ANY* web site that is selling anything. "Information" on that site is intended to sell product, not to inform. Quackery is especially rampant under such conditions.
What is needed is good, hard, double-blind scientific study. These are hard to come across. For example, I read one study that purported to show bad effects from very low levels of mercury contamination, levels far below what OSHA regulations allow (they studied dentists, who encounter mercury regularly since it is a component in various dental materials). They measured the performance of the dentists on various tests, then they measured both near-term exposure to mercury (via urine test) and long-term exposure to mercury (via administering a chelation agent and seeing how much mercury got flushed out of body tissues that way). What they found was interesting: short-term exposure had no correlation, while long-term exposure correlated with symptoms of mercury poisoning (poor hand control, poor short-term memory, etc.). BUT THEY DID NOT TAKE INTO ACCOUNT AGE! That is, older dentists are the ones who would have encountered the most mercury in their life time -- but decreased short-term memory and reduced hand control are symptoms of aging as well as of mercury poisoning! So did they simply prove that older people have bad memories and trembly hands? Could be.And look, that's one of the BETTER experiments in the area. There's so much shoddy "research" out there done by people with an agenda that it's ridiculous. There's so much quackery out there that making any kind of conclusions about environmental aspects of autism is pretty much impossible right now. There are some better (longitudinal) studies under way, but it'll be some years before we really know anything from those.
-E
"If in doubt, do no harm" should be the watchword here. There is certainly doubt about the effectiveness and safety of chelation when dealing with non-specific syndromes (as vs. diagnosed heavy metal poisoning).
-E
I wonder if the diagnosis of "mental retardation" is going down at the same time that the diagnosis of "autism" is going up?
-E
This is standard practice in the industry, except that this "Angela" that you talked to appears to be a rather slow reader, based on your experience. Oh well, guess it's hard to hire good technical help for $8/hour!
% rpm -q bind /etc/resolv.conf
bind-9.1.3-4
% rpm -q caching-nameserver
caching-nameserver-7.2-1
% rpm -q redhat-release
redhat-release-7.2-1
% cat
domain inhouse
nameserver 127.0.0.1
%
Yep, it's there. (And if you're running Windows... why are you reading Slashdot?)
-E
Shutting down doesn't void the land-line contracts with the telecoms providers, or the leases on their data centers, or etc. It just cuts off their cash flow. That is why this game of Internet chicken is so astoundingly stupid.
I'd be interested in seeing their cash position. My bet is that Excite has a terribly negative cash position, but if you sever @Home from Excite, you end up with a very good positive cash flow (even while racking up the paper losses). However, said cash flow, with 4,200,000 customers, is unlikely to be able to swiftly pay back $750M in bonds. So the bond holders think they can get more money by trying to bribe the AT&T, Cox, Comcast. The problem is that Cox and Comcast decided months ago that they weren't playing that game, leaving the bond holders to play with AT&T. And AT&T doesn't play. They have their own long-haul backbones that they can swiftly transition their customers to.
Of course, bankers don't understand these technical details. So we get this nonsense. What will happen is that @Home is finished. Kaput. Ended. There will be no more @Home. The routers and servers and such will be sold off for pennies on the dollar on eBay. The bonds will be paid off for pennies on the dollar, if the bankruptcy court deems to give them even that much ahead of other debtors. The landlines provisioned will revert to the carriers, who will then sell the capacity to someone else for cheap. And Internet access will get that much cheaper for ISP's and businesses. Us consumers are unlikely to enjoy things as much, but hey, this is the Corporate States of America, nobody cares about consumers.
From what I can tell, AT&T wins either way. They do sell DSL service too, after all.
- The "Excite!" portal, and
- The bond payments
However, by shutting the network down they've just destroyed its value. I'll probably be down tomorrow, and if so, I will swiftly arrange for an alternative arrangement on Monday and never return to @Home.-E
SpamCop is a sorta good idea, but the implementation sucks. It's no wonder why @Home black-holed it, all those automated spam notifications for spams that weren't spams must have been driving their guys nuts (not that their guys had much sanity in the first place, otherwise they wouldn't have been working @Home).
-E
I think it is clear that this is a company on the verge of crash because of management featherbedding and incompetence, not because of lack of product (their products are great, according to everything I've read, though since they do not have a Linux version I do not of course have personal knowledge of such). They took an idea that will support a company of perhaps 25 people and tried to create a company of 250 people. In the process they ran up massive debts and chewed through massive amounts of cash. This, alas, is a common thing nowdays.
Regarding Linux, probably 60-75% of Linux originates overseas with part-time developers. Virtually all of KDE, QT, major subsystems of the Linux kernel, etc. were developed overseas. These people are unlikely to quit developing Linux just because a few American dot-coms go bust. For that matter, I no longer work for a Linux company myself, and still fix the occasional bugs that are found with the software I support (or with hardware that it drives, which sometimes requires the software to be hacked to make a certain piece of brain dead hardware work :-(. )
There are other such buy-outs that were virtually all-stock. With 1-year lock-ins so that the founders can't sell stock. With non-compete clauses in the contract. Etc. There's one word for those small company founders now that the stocks they were paid with are worthless: SCREWED.
NEXT!
Note that in a corporate environment, the secretary (or whoever) never sees an "initial setup" screen, s/he gets a standard desktop setup with icons pre-installed etc. for all the major applications. Expecting a secretary to wade through configuration menus is unrealistic even in tech companies.
-E
StarOffice: Yep, you have to train the secretaries how to do basic operations in StarOffice. Many learned MS Word in school. That's what they know, and they don't know how to learn without being trained. Does this make them stupid? Well, maybe (at least as far as computers go), but that's why they're secretaries, not highly paid engineers like you.
Basically, you cannot just throw out the software and expect them to "get it". Even if the software is utterly intuitive to a highly trained engineer, it is *NOT* intuitive to someone who is not a computer geek. I remember the first time one of my musician friends used Windows... "okay, double-click on that icon ... left button... no, not that left, the other left!". Why assume that Linux will be any easier?
-E
They state that their "eventual" goal is to do away with Windows too, but that's not now.
_E
-E
I have no idea how much money Elcomsoft makes, but I doubt it's a huge amount. This has to be hurting.
-E
The 'mtx' package in all its glory consists of 5,000 lines of code. This also limits the amount of 3rd party collaboration needed -- it just doesn't take a bazaar to write a 5,000 line program. Of those 5,000 lines, perhaps 500 lines were inherited from Leonard Zhubkoff (I re-wrote the remainder of the original 'mtx' pretty much from scratch when I split it into two parts, added a .h file, and changed over to use GNU Autoconf for configuring). The next biggest contributor is William Smith, who contributed the HP/UX port, which is approximately 150 lines of code. Those are pretty much the biggest chunks of the program written by other people. (Note: The 1100 lines of code in the 'contrib' directory are not included in any of this).
Yes, I receive patches. No, most of those patches are never applied. This is not malice. Usually the patches fix a particular problem with a particular loader by hacking around the problem. If a problem has a general solution, though, the patch goes into the garbage and I instead program the general solution. The last time this happened, a guy sent me a 5-line patch to make 'mtx' work with a particular optical jukebox. I looked at the problem, figured out a general solution for the problem for *all* jukeboxes that had that same general problem, and re-wrote the READ_ELEMENT_STATUS code for the third time, splitting it into three different subroutines and issuing separate SCSI requests for each element type rather than one big SCSI request. I ended up changing about 200 lines of code to solve the problem that this guy's 5-line patch "solved". The problem was that this guy's 5-line patch would have resulted in random core dumps on various architectures, though it worked on his particular machine with his particular loader, and his patch, while it solved the problem for that particular loader, did not solve the general problem (which was the problem of multi-drive loaders reporting "ghost drives"). My changes solved the problem -- but required an intimate knowledge of how the READ_ELEMENT_STATUS parser code worked, and how other loaders handled that same basic problem. I will not be modest here -- there was not another person on this planet who could have solved this problem within hours, as I did, and nobody did. I wrote the code, I knew how it worked, I could swiftly split up one big routine into three different routines and add a driver routine because I knew exactly what needed doing, no study required. Collaboration, in this case, was necessary in that I needed the guy who had the problem as a test bed for the changed code to make sure it actually solved the problem, but the patch was tossed because -- like most patches I recieve -- it simply patched around the problem, it didn't fix it.
I would count 'mtx' as a successful Open Source project. When I took over maintenance it supported DAT autoloaders with one drive and up to 8 slots. Today, it supports virtually every SCSI SMC-compliant device out there, including enormous optical jukeboxes with thousands of slots and dozens of drives. The participation of others was crucial for this -- but their participation was most valuable their suggestions, and for helping test whether my code actually worked with their loader, not for their programming contributions, which, with the exception of Mr. Smith, were negligible. I don't know how it could have been any other way, because I was the one who had the knowledge of the code and the knowledge of SCSI and the knowledge of all those other busted loaders out there, and someone who was just coming in from the outside with a particular problem with a particular loader simply does not have the knowledge, in the general case, to contribute a meaningful patch
-E
If you are going to use per-pupil numbers, you must use the local cost of living to adjust them if you wish to compare them. I would gladly go to work teaching in Iowa for $40,000/year -- that would put me in the top 10% of the population there. Teaching in the Bay Area for $40,000/year, on the other hand... what, you want me to take vows of poverty?
-E
However, it's still possible to directly compare public school and private school costs. Just don't include the religious (church-subsidized) schools. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, non-religious private schools actually spent *MORE* per-pupil in 1996 (the last year I have statistics for) than public schools did. Given that Catholic schools and non-religious private schools have similar student bodies and facilities, it's reasonable to expect that Catholic schools, once you add in the subsidies, have similar costs -- i.e., more expensive than the public schools.
In other words, Rush Limbaugh is a big fat liar. But you already knew that, right?
-E
A better example would perhaps be Arizona. Arizona ranks near the bottom of per-pupil spending, and has equivalent results -- near the bottom. Arizona living expenses are average for the U.S. -- less expensive than NYC or the Bay Area, more expensive than places like Iowa.
Money isn't everything. But saying that Iowa spends less per-capita than New York City is ridiculous. You can buy a 4 bedroom house for $50,000 in Iowa. The equivalent monthly payments in NYC would rent a closet, maybe.