I had the complete opposite experience. I grew up poor with my grandparents neither of which finished middle school. I had a handfull of great teachers who pointed me in the right direction. I think I've come a long way given where I came from and my public school education is one of the main reasons. I'm sure it would be very different if all the kids with money were in a private school and I wasn't because my parents couldn't afford to pay anything in addition to what the vouchers covered.
This private school... encouraged (even demanded) parent contact (the public school tried to avoid it, apparently on the theory that the educational elite know best and it was a waste of time to try to explain things to those not in the cabal).
My wife is a 2nd grade teacher and I can assure you that this isn't the case here which happens to be a nice part of CA (Burbank). Her biggest problem is parents that don't care or parents that are crazy as was one of her parents this year who refused to have her son test for learning disabilities eventhough it was obvious to everyone that something was wrong with him. He then went on to ruin many of my wife's lectures and prevented her from teaching the other students as well as she could have. These are some of the major problems and vouchers don't solve this. She just started teaching summer school and has a class of almost 40 2nd graders most of whom are behaviour problems. It's almost impossible to teach a class under such conditions! Vouchers won't fix this either.
Many of the educational problems of the masses today are, IMHO, largely the result of poorly performing public schools. This is certainly partially the fault of the teacher's unions who have opposed objective measurements of performance and opposed all attempts to pay/promote/fire teachers based on performance rather than seniority. Fortunately, there has been some action in this area recently and I'm hopeful that it will continue. Although the teacher's unions generally still oppose such measurements, fear of market forces and the exasperation by their employers (that would be the taxpayers) have tempered their rhetoric.
I agree with you about americans needing to expect more, but market forces and less job security for teachers is not what our education system needs. How would you measure the perfomance of a teacher? My wife is a teach so I know this subject well. Have you thought this through at all. I can't even imagine how a market system would work. What about the kids that live in the country where there is one school for the whole county. I grew up in the suburbs of VA and I can't even imagine how it would work there. I remember being at the bus stop with all the kids in my neighborhood. How would these kids get to school if they were all going to different schools many of which are half way across the county?
Also, there is probably a very easy way to tell whether market forces are good for eduction. Lets look at the math scores of the top scoring countries and see what kind of education system they have.
http://nces.ed.gov/timss/TIMSS03Tables.asp?Quest=3 &Figure=5
"There are many ingredients in the success of Singapore's education system. First and foremost is the efficiency, dedication and work of our education ministry in Singapore. They are the ones who produced the framework for our education system and our syllabi."
Doesn't sound like a market system to me. I'm sure the story is the same for almost all of those other countries like hungary, russia, australia, belgium, etc.
Really? Is that why japanese cars have far fewer defects?
Seriously, this type of attitude is counter productive. We americans aren't any smarter, better, or harder working than anyone else. Compare our high school students with those from most of the industrialized world and you'll realize that we aren't that bright in general. What we've benefited from is a great society that enables people, but there isn't any reason that other countries can't do the same and to make matters worse the Republicans are taking us in the opposite direction. We need to invest more money in education not less. Skilled jobs are going to India because they have a lot of highly educated people that will work for less than americans. There are a lot of countries with people that will work for less than Indians, but they aren't educated!
I wonder which consumers will think is better value, up till now apple could pull the "but our hardware is magically fast even though it looks slow" trick.
Your missing the most important point. Most people, including myself, buy apple because of the OS and the software. A Unix that is actually user friendly and just works along with the wonderful ilife apps. I'll take a slower version of this than a much faster version of windows any day.
I think you and everyone else have missed a major point. What happens if the devices our military depends on are not developed and made in america? Two things:
1. Our military won't be able to keep up with the technical advances of other countries because we no longer produce enough engineers and scientists. All the engineers will be overseas
2. Our national defense will depend on foriegn companies selling us equipment which they may choose not to do at some point in time.
You can be rich if you have any ideas for that that actually work.
I personally like salon.com's approach, but I don't think it would work for most sites.
"but really, what's the difference between a spam blog with an RSS feed that makes money with Google ads, and Google droping ads directly into a feed?"
The difference is that the spam feed isn't providing real content. It's usually a bunch of keyword filled auto generated content that isn't even english.
Buy ~keyword~ now. We have the largest selection of ~keyword~ on the internet. Click here to find the best deals on ~keyword~.
They take something like that and make a thousand pages/feeds.
"It just gets annoying after a while to see all the adds in your favorite RSS feed. Won't this just make people unsubscribe or use a RSS reader than filters out the ads?"
It just gets annoying after a while to devote your time to providing interesting content only to have users subvert your ability to get paid for your efforts. Won't this just make content providers close shop and stop providing interesting sites?
"They put out games for kids - damn fine games, I may add. They focus on pick-up-and-play fun factor more than they do graphics."
Funny, what you described sounds like games for adults to me. I get to play a couple hours a week and I can't remember all the details of long drawn out games. I love my GC because I can pick up and play Mario Cart, Mario Tennis, and Madden once every blue moon and feel right at home.
That sun contract sounds a lot more expensive than the hardware:) Seriously, it sounds like something that fits the needs of a very small subset of companies that have web sites. I can tell from the description that it won't work for us, but thanks for the info on it.
"As someone else pointed out, you really need to investigate On Demand solutions. Sun Microsystems will sell you a system with way more processors and memory than you need for a VERY low cost, but most of the extra hardware will be disabled. When you're expecting high volume (or even if it should suddenly happen upon you) you can call Sun and rent the extra hardware in a pinch."
This doesn't really make sense to me. I buy hardware that's disabled or someone comes out and installs extra hardware in a pinch? First, man-hours are far more expensive than anything else so having someone come out to install hardware is going to be more expensive than buying a dual xeon server that sits idle 95% of the time. I can go on, but it will get detailed and boring really fast. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding this, but on it's face it doesn't seem practical or cheaper.
"The first number is the system uptime in seconds, the second is the number of seconds it's been idle. The number above is from my laptop - 98% idle. "
This is very misleading. I manage a retail site and our server is idle most of the time, but we get the bulk of our traffic at christmas and during certain times of day. We need servers that can handle the peek load, but by your assertion we could run on a 200MHZ system. It would fail during our peak hours at christmas, but our idle percentage would be much lower. We would then go out of business because our sales would drop off sharply.
"Interesting warning for other OSS-corporate marriages."
What is the warning? That others can take open source code and do what they want with it as long as they give back their code? This is a complete non issue and here is why.
1. Apple still has to give their code which they are doing. Anyone can take their code and use it. It may be a pain, but that's life
2. the KDE guys can keep improving their version as if apple never used their code and apple will either keep their version compatible or they will have to do a lot of work to integrate future additions by the kde team.
Who cares if apple doesn't make it easy. We still have both code bases as open source code,and we have wider use of open source even if apple doesn't make it easy on the kde team. It would be nice if they did, but we are still better off than if apple didn't use open source code at all.
features and an intuitive easy to use interface are two very different things.
My grandmother (honestly) uses itunes, she could never figure out wmp and believe me I tried. Then I bought her a mac and things have been great since. She has no clue about files and folders, but she can use itunes and iphoto and she loves it.
"Why would they waste time trying to advertise to people who have made it perfectly clear that we don't want annoying intrusive advertising thrust upon us"
I can think of two reasons of the top of my head.
1. People actually click thru the ads!
2. Most people aren't willing to pay subscription fees for the sites they visit, and the sites have to "thrust" ads upon users to get by.
This sort of thing cuts both ways. Blog spammers are breaking aren't playing fair, and those that use ad blockers aren't playing fair.
The bottom line is that none of this is going to go away by appealing to peoples good nature. We either have to accept these sorts of things or deal with them technically.
There is more to getting work gone than processor speed. For example, Let's have a code off. I'll give you a computer twice as fast as mine, but you have to code in C and I'll code in php. Our task is to make a message board.
This is an extreme example, but it illustrates that productivity is more than processing power.
I thought you said you were using urllib2 earlier, not urllib? Anyway, it depends on which version your using. For older versions of python you can use
http://www.nongnu.org/bothans/pydoc/common.timeout socket.html
You've already figured out how to do it for newer versions:)
"every few hours urllib2 locks up whilst trying to get a page from a particular site."
I use urllib2 very heavily and haven't had any problems with it. Then again I open a new thread for each use of urllib2 so maybe we're talking apples and oranges.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not think analogy means, what you think it means
I think you and everyone else have missed a major point. What happens if the devices our military depends on are not developed and made in america? Two things:
1. Our military won't be able to keep up with the technical advances of other countries because we no longer produce enough engineers and scientists. All the engineers will be overseas
2. Our national defense will depend on foriegn companies selling us equipment which they may choose not to do at some point in time.
You can be rich if you have any ideas for that that actually work. I personally like salon.com's approach, but I don't think it would work for most sites.
"but really, what's the difference between a spam blog with an RSS feed that makes money with Google ads, and Google droping ads directly into a feed?" The difference is that the spam feed isn't providing real content. It's usually a bunch of keyword filled auto generated content that isn't even english. Buy ~keyword~ now. We have the largest selection of ~keyword~ on the internet. Click here to find the best deals on ~keyword~. They take something like that and make a thousand pages/feeds.
"It just gets annoying after a while to see all the adds in your favorite RSS feed. Won't this just make people unsubscribe or use a RSS reader than filters out the ads?"
It just gets annoying after a while to devote your time to providing interesting content only to have users subvert your ability to get paid for your efforts. Won't this just make content providers close shop and stop providing interesting sites?
"They put out games for kids - damn fine games, I may add. They focus on pick-up-and-play fun factor more than they do graphics." Funny, what you described sounds like games for adults to me. I get to play a couple hours a week and I can't remember all the details of long drawn out games. I love my GC because I can pick up and play Mario Cart, Mario Tennis, and Madden once every blue moon and feel right at home.
That sun contract sounds a lot more expensive than the hardware :) Seriously, it sounds like something that fits the needs of a very small subset of companies that have web sites. I can tell from the description that it won't work for us, but thanks for the info on it.
"As someone else pointed out, you really need to investigate On Demand solutions. Sun Microsystems will sell you a system with way more processors and memory than you need for a VERY low cost, but most of the extra hardware will be disabled. When you're expecting high volume (or even if it should suddenly happen upon you) you can call Sun and rent the extra hardware in a pinch."
This doesn't really make sense to me. I buy hardware that's disabled or someone comes out and installs extra hardware in a pinch? First, man-hours are far more expensive than anything else so having someone come out to install hardware is going to be more expensive than buying a dual xeon server that sits idle 95% of the time. I can go on, but it will get detailed and boring really fast. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding this, but on it's face it doesn't seem practical or cheaper.
This is very misleading. I manage a retail site and our server is idle most of the time, but we get the bulk of our traffic at christmas and during certain times of day. We need servers that can handle the peek load, but by your assertion we could run on a 200MHZ system. It would fail during our peak hours at christmas, but our idle percentage would be much lower. We would then go out of business because our sales would drop off sharply.
"Interesting warning for other OSS-corporate marriages."
What is the warning? That others can take open source code and do what they want with it as long as they give back their code? This is a complete non issue and here is why.
1. Apple still has to give their code which they are doing. Anyone can take their code and use it. It may be a pain, but that's life
2. the KDE guys can keep improving their version as if apple never used their code and apple will either keep their version compatible or they will have to do a lot of work to integrate future additions by the kde team.
Who cares if apple doesn't make it easy. We still have both code bases as open source code,and we have wider use of open source even if apple doesn't make it easy on the kde team. It would be nice if they did, but we are still better off than if apple didn't use open source code at all.
features and an intuitive easy to use interface are two very different things.
My grandmother (honestly) uses itunes, she could never figure out wmp and believe me I tried. Then I bought her a mac and things have been great since. She has no clue about files and folders, but she can use itunes and iphoto and she loves it.
I agree. It just depends on which community you find yourself in. Ubuntu has a very friendly community at http://ubuntuforums.org/
"This got a Funny 4 rating?! I can't imagine why, since that's exactly how I've been treated." That IS why :)
Maybe more people will want to get away from proprietary software if they actually have to pay for it.
"Why would they waste time trying to advertise to people who have made it perfectly clear that we don't want annoying intrusive advertising thrust upon us"
I can think of two reasons of the top of my head.
1. People actually click thru the ads!
2. Most people aren't willing to pay subscription fees for the sites they visit, and the sites have to "thrust" ads upon users to get by.
This sort of thing cuts both ways. Blog spammers are breaking aren't playing fair, and those that use ad blockers aren't playing fair.
The bottom line is that none of this is going to go away by appealing to peoples good nature. We either have to accept these sorts of things or deal with them technically.
There is more to getting work gone than processor speed. For example, Let's have a code off. I'll give you a computer twice as fast as mine, but you have to code in C and I'll code in php. Our task is to make a message board.
This is an extreme example, but it illustrates that productivity is more than processing power.
Are you implying that 1 gig of ram IS NOT adequate for most people?
I thought you said you were using urllib2 earlier, not urllib? Anyway, it depends on which version your using. For older versions of python you can use http://www.nongnu.org/bothans/pydoc/common.timeout socket.html
You've already figured out how to do it for newer versions :)
Are you sure it's a problem with urllib2 and not the site. Does it throw an exception or just stop?
"every few hours urllib2 locks up whilst trying to get a page from a particular site."
I use urllib2 very heavily and haven't had any problems with it. Then again I open a new thread for each use of urllib2 so maybe we're talking apples and oranges.