Standardized tests tell you which students are learning, which teachers are doing well, which schools, which districts.
No, they tell you which ones are good at tests.
The only reason this matters is because students aren't paying for their school, taxpayers are. If students paid for school and didn't think they were learning what they wanted to learn, they'd go elsewhere... but with government schools they have little choice.
I liked the way that Firefox 12 would open a new page at precisely the point you don't want it to open at (typically, it seems, displaying the first button on the page) rather than the top. I was about to give up on it until I managed to find the about:config option to turn off retardo-mode.
Have they fixed that, or is adding a new home page more important than actually being useful for web browsing?
I remember reading about a US study during the Cold War which found that if three specific people in the military and government colluded together they could start an unauthorised nuclear war. Fortunately the government ensured that it couldn't 'work' by monitoring those three people to ensure they couldn't collude.
Or if you're going to drag up Linux, how sure are you that not a single signing key to any package on your system is compromised?
Unlike Windows, there are only a tiny number of such keys. You can't exploit them the same way these guys apparently did by creating a random key signed by another random key which happened to be flagged as a CA key, because it wouldn't be accepted when installing the package.
Yes, it's possible that someone has hacked into Red Hat and Ubuntu and stolen a signing key, but if that's the case then we have much bigger problems to worry about.
Google found in their data centers a bit error rate of roughly 300 per gigabyte per month. That's was in 2009, so who knows how that number has scaled in the last 3 years.
My home file server has 16GB of non-ECC RAM so I find that hard to believe; it gets rebooted every couple of months for kernel upgrades so if it was true I'd expect it to crash or send bad data from the disk cache more often than it's rebooted.
I saw an interesting study on a mailing list a year or two back where their tests showed that individual DIMMS either had very few errors or lots over their testing period; if you saw more than one or two errors on a DIMM you might as well toss it because you were going to get a lot more. If true and not just due to chance over the test period they used, that would imply that most errors aren't the result of an external source but some kind of manufacturing issue.
And MS demanding that only their key would ensure that every time ARM advanced in the enterprise, Windows would come with it.
Except ARM machines are easy to build and most of them currently run Linux. Just because Windows tablets won't boot Linux doesn't mean that companies making ARM products would want to pay a Microsoft Tax on a $20 piece of hardware.
This is not a troll, saying that MS is trying to eliminate Linux through secure boot is a troll....
Yes. I'm sure that Microsoft never even considered that requiring a Microsoft key to boot your PC (or having to jump through hoops to disable 'Windows Boot' rather than just install from a CD) would harm the competition.
Note that while Java may prevent common bugs like buffer overflows, they may simply cause it to throw an unexpected exception which is caught by random code which then causes the software to behave in an unexpected way. So it's an improvement, but not a magic solution to all your security issues.
And you can probably do all kinds of exciting stuff with random Java programs by throwing so much data at them that they run out of memory and explode in a hail of cascading exceptions.
It's a dangerous world of low cost ebooks out here
Nah, some of the expensive ebooks are worse; I've seen a number of people complain about e-books of recent high-priced novels where they've clearly OCR-ed the print book rather than use the actual digital text it was created from, because it's full of uncorrected OCR errors or 'corrections' to the OCR errors which are even further from what the text should say.
We tiny little people can't possibly change the environment. Natural. Completely. Get it right already.
The odd part is that Greenies claim that humans can radically change the environment when temperature measurements go up, but deny that humans can change the environment when you point out that the temperature rise measured by surface thermometers has typically been substantially higher in cities like Atlanta than rural areas around them.
I assumed that was what the earlier poster was referring to in his rant about 'the AGW'. They pick and choose based on whatever furthers their radical left goals, one minute humans are changing the environment in massive ways, the next humans are unable to change the environment in localised ways.
Maybe nature isn't meant to be in balance. Maybe God likes it this way. It's more interesting to watch.
No. Nature was perfectly balanced before EVIL HUMANS came along; just look at the 'Hockey Stick' temperature graph... long straight line for centuries until EVIL HUMANS started burning coal.
Large repositionable mirrors in space would do this.
NASA studied using mirrors in space to illuminate the jungle at night during the Vietnam War; they would have launched a cut-down LEM with a large folding mirror attached which would unfold when it was in orbit.
I thought that was cool. OK, it was also stupid and insanely expensive, but I'm sure plenty of soldiers would have preferred to spend their Vietnam War service sitting in orbit pointing a mirror at the jungle rather than being shot at down in said jungle.
Gimp 2.8 Finally Released Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
Totally irrelevant to this discussion, but the juxtaposition of those two titles in the 'you may like to read' list made so much sense that I assumed it was a link to an article about another Gimp redesign: "Gimp 2.8 finally released icons that don't make sense anymore".
I also failed to mention that Windows 7 supports HomeGroup. For example when I installed Windows 7 on my desktop it automatically opened my share of my documents from my laptop on the wifi network and even the PS 3 is accessible.
Yeah, making all your documents available to the entire network by default is a brilliant advance in security policy.
It's one-off fee for a commercial company. Get over it.
Have you actually read the article? Not only does it require everything from boot loader to kernel to drivers have to be signed, but Microsoft can revoke permission at any time.
Slashdot Mirror
Standardized tests tell you which students are learning, which teachers are doing well, which schools, which districts.
No, they tell you which ones are good at tests.
The only reason this matters is because students aren't paying for their school, taxpayers are. If students paid for school and didn't think they were learning what they wanted to learn, they'd go elsewhere... but with government schools they have little choice.
Home schooling is for parents who's religious views are so extreme that they cannot integrate with normal society.
Home schooling is for parents who don't want their kids to grow up as Marxists.
I liked the way that Firefox 12 would open a new page at precisely the point you don't want it to open at (typically, it seems, displaying the first button on the page) rather than the top. I was about to give up on it until I managed to find the about:config option to turn off retardo-mode.
Have they fixed that, or is adding a new home page more important than actually being useful for web browsing?
I remember reading about a US study during the Cold War which found that if three specific people in the military and government colluded together they could start an unauthorised nuclear war. Fortunately the government ensured that it couldn't 'work' by monitoring those three people to ensure they couldn't collude.
Or if you're going to drag up Linux, how sure are you that not a single signing key to any package on your system is compromised?
Unlike Windows, there are only a tiny number of such keys. You can't exploit them the same way these guys apparently did by creating a random key signed by another random key which happened to be flagged as a CA key, because it wouldn't be accepted when installing the package.
Yes, it's possible that someone has hacked into Red Hat and Ubuntu and stolen a signing key, but if that's the case then we have much bigger problems to worry about.
Google found in their data centers a bit error rate of roughly 300 per gigabyte per month. That's was in 2009, so who knows how that number has scaled in the last 3 years.
My home file server has 16GB of non-ECC RAM so I find that hard to believe; it gets rebooted every couple of months for kernel upgrades so if it was true I'd expect it to crash or send bad data from the disk cache more often than it's rebooted.
I saw an interesting study on a mailing list a year or two back where their tests showed that individual DIMMS either had very few errors or lots over their testing period; if you saw more than one or two errors on a DIMM you might as well toss it because you were going to get a lot more. If true and not just due to chance over the test period they used, that would imply that most errors aren't the result of an external source but some kind of manufacturing issue.
once apple releases a cheap macbook, watch out dell/hp/asus and others
Bzzt. You used the words 'Apple' and 'cheap' in the same sentence.
And MS demanding that only their key would ensure that every time ARM advanced in the enterprise, Windows would come with it.
Except ARM machines are easy to build and most of them currently run Linux. Just because Windows tablets won't boot Linux doesn't mean that companies making ARM products would want to pay a Microsoft Tax on a $20 piece of hardware.
The same way they train home users to install another OS?
Boot from CD and hit 'Install'?
Nope. Not going to work in the Glorious People's Secure Boot Dictatorship.
In fact, I presume you won't even be able to boot from CD without disabling 'Secure Boot' in the BIOS.
This is not a troll, saying that MS is trying to eliminate Linux through secure boot is a troll....
Yes. I'm sure that Microsoft never even considered that requiring a Microsoft key to boot your PC (or having to jump through hoops to disable 'Windows Boot' rather than just install from a CD) would harm the competition.
The equivalent thing would be outlawing the use of C++ for anything carrying confidential/secret information.
True. All future operating systems should be written in Ada instead of C/C++.
Note that while Java may prevent common bugs like buffer overflows, they may simply cause it to throw an unexpected exception which is caught by random code which then causes the software to behave in an unexpected way. So it's an improvement, but not a magic solution to all your security issues.
And you can probably do all kinds of exciting stuff with random Java programs by throwing so much data at them that they run out of memory and explode in a hail of cascading exceptions.
Nah, 90% of crimes will be committed with rocks and pointy sticks, because the law-abiding victims won't be able to shoot back any more.
Breaking news. Full story at eleven...
It's a dangerous world of low cost ebooks out here
Nah, some of the expensive ebooks are worse; I've seen a number of people complain about e-books of recent high-priced novels where they've clearly OCR-ed the print book rather than use the actual digital text it was created from, because it's full of uncorrected OCR errors or 'corrections' to the OCR errors which are even further from what the text should say.
Whereas losses from pilferage take (prospective) money out of their pocket
As do losses from people not buying your product because they don't want the hassle of dealing with shitty packaging.
We tiny little people can't possibly change the environment. Natural. Completely. Get it right already.
The odd part is that Greenies claim that humans can radically change the environment when temperature measurements go up, but deny that humans can change the environment when you point out that the temperature rise measured by surface thermometers has typically been substantially higher in cities like Atlanta than rural areas around them.
I assumed that was what the earlier poster was referring to in his rant about 'the AGW'. They pick and choose based on whatever furthers their radical left goals, one minute humans are changing the environment in massive ways, the next humans are unable to change the environment in localised ways.
Maybe nature isn't meant to be in balance. Maybe God likes it this way. It's more interesting to watch.
No. Nature was perfectly balanced before EVIL HUMANS came along; just look at the 'Hockey Stick' temperature graph... long straight line for centuries until EVIL HUMANS started burning coal.
Large repositionable mirrors in space would do this.
NASA studied using mirrors in space to illuminate the jungle at night during the Vietnam War; they would have launched a cut-down LEM with a large folding mirror attached which would unfold when it was in orbit.
I thought that was cool. OK, it was also stupid and insanely expensive, but I'm sure plenty of soldiers would have preferred to spend their Vietnam War service sitting in orbit pointing a mirror at the jungle rather than being shot at down in said jungle.
Gimp 2.8 Finally Released
Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
Totally irrelevant to this discussion, but the juxtaposition of those two titles in the 'you may like to read' list made so much sense that I assumed it was a link to an article about another Gimp redesign: "Gimp 2.8 finally released icons that don't make sense anymore".
Yeah, because we'll be so much better off if Saudi Arabia, Russia and China control the Internet.
The real question is, why haven't Americans driven the UN into the sea long ago?
Also, the OEMs are starting to push touchscreen desktops substantially.
Who the fsck wants to sit at a desktop holding their arm out to touch the screen all day?
I also failed to mention that Windows 7 supports HomeGroup. For example when I installed Windows 7 on my desktop it automatically opened my share of my documents from my laptop on the wifi network and even the PS 3 is accessible.
Yeah, making all your documents available to the entire network by default is a brilliant advance in security policy.
I wonder if the anti-MS bias at slashdot will ever die down.
After Windows 9 requires Secure Boot so we can't run Linux any more to get on the Internet and post here.
It's one-off fee for a commercial company. Get over it.
Have you actually read the article? Not only does it require everything from boot loader to kernel to drivers have to be signed, but Microsoft can revoke permission at any time.